How do historians build their career, what motivates them and how they deal with professional and personal challenges? What shapes their professional path? Dr Michael Green from the Faculty of Philosophy and History welcomes you to his podcast, where he will be inviting interesting guests to explore their stories.
Dr. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld has finished her at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has been an active researcher. While never holding a permanent position in the academia, she became one of the most prominent and respected names in the field of Jewish studies, and in particular of the Sephardic Jews in the Dutch Republic. In this episode, the conversation revolves the topics of combining family life and academic research, writing history as an independent scholar, and motivations to do so. One of her biggest achievements was her book Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews of Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2012), which won the National Jewish Book Award (US) for 2012 in the category of Sephardi Culture. Read also her article “Masters Maids and Mistresses. Aspects of Domestic Life among the Portuguese Jews in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic”, in Sina Rauschenbach (ed.) Sefardische Perspektiven/Sephardic Perspectives (Leipzig, 2020), 11-40.
