Crisis and Transgender Jewish History

• In Event: Crises, Methods, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on how scholarly practices can be transformed by the challenges of researching and writing about something that is directly touched by crises unfolding now. At times, one despairs. Yet at present we are better supported by our disciplines than we were, say, fifteen years ago, to turn to non-traditional methods, and that can be helpful.

I am a historian of Jewish trans and intersex people living in Berlin, 1918-45. Among them are Karl M. Baer, Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel. The two crises that made this work seem utterly different to me, and much more urgent, are the October 7 attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza, on the one hand, and on the other, a crisis that is perhaps less familiar because the mainstream media has not always reported on it: the wave of anti-transgender legislation in the US, UK, and elsewhere, that began around 2022 and is only getting worse.

The two crises made it hard to work. They also drove me to explore other methods and modes of scholarship. The October 7th attacks and the war made what would have otherwise been a minor part of the work – Zionism – much more central. Baer was a very involved, centrist Zionist. Charlaque and Ebel were leftist socialists but not Zionists. What is perhaps more interesting is how the anti-transgender movement inspired me to change my methodologies. It did not lead me to break all the rules for historians. I keep to most of them, such as the rules about finding good, solid archival evidence. Some rules I broke are about speed, and where I publish. For example, when JK Rowling tweeted something outrageous and transphobic about trans people (implicitly about Charlaque) and the Nazis, people tweeted back links to my research, and I had to write something for publication that week, though I had only a few days in which to do so before I had a major surgery. Another rule I broke is about the historians’ injunction against “presentism.” A third is to re-think how we relate to fiction-writing techniques in our work.

Author

• Laurie Marhoefer, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington