Oral History and Jewish Life

Abstract

Teaching a class titled Oral History and Life at the University of California at Davis in 1998 became a challenge and a singularly exhilarating experience. By the end of the quarter, students were to know major themes in twentieth-century history, to learn the ethical standards of oral history practitioners, to be able to evaluate oral history testimony, and to develop a sense of when and when not to use oral history methodologies in their research. They would gain many of these skills through planning, researching, conducting, transcribing, editing, and cataloging oral history interviews. Because I had presumed that many students taking a course on Jewish life would be or have a strong interest in culture, the original assignment was to interview a family member or an older adult whose experience would be interpreted in the context of the history studied in the class. Although the class was offered as part of the studies program, it was also listed as a humanities class. Therefore, some of the students registered for the class to fulfill a general education requirement and were not sure of its content. The students were primarily immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Latvia, including the Philippines, Korea, Israel, India, and Afghanistan. This class makeup was unusual for Davis, but advantageous for the course. Due to the unexpected religious and ethnic variety of the students, I modified the assignment of interviewing someone Jewish, instead asking the students to interview members of their own families, regardless of their ethnicity. As preparation for their projects, I required my students to develop bibliographies useful for understanding the individuals they would interview. Thus there was no need to change the reading assignments. But the scope of the class discussions changed. While centering on American life, discussions included comparisons with the experiences of people of other nationalities and with the immigrant experience in general. Instead of a research paper, I required each student to complete two one-hour interviews. For those interviews, students wrote proposals, bibliographies, and outlines. They conducted interviews, transcribed portions of them, and prepared fifteenminute oral presentations that were videotaped. Each week students submitted twopage typed journal entries, including answers to study questions based on readings and paragraphs describing their progress on their oral history projects. Students also