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That Ginger, Anna

That Ginger, Anna

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Part 1: Why the Jews and Perché Venezia?

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in School and Work

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academics, bronx, fate, God, grad school, graduate school, historian, history, history student, jewish, jewish history, jews, judaica, judaism, MA, NYU, religion, sephardim, six degrees, student, texas, Thesis, UNT, venezia, venice, writing

So, as usual, I didn’t get to follow the schedule I’d planned for starting this new series because life and that paper chaseee. But here we are now. Ok, this first post will mostly be a background about why this Catholic, Army-brat from Georgia became interested in Judaica studies (didn’t even know that was a thing until 2011) and how a seminar paper from 2012 became a thesis chapter in 2013 and has impacted my life more than I could have ever fathomed. This initial post is more about me than about Jews in Venice (if that’s all you’re here for, just wait for part two-there will be no personal stuff in that one), but I will link to my original paper and the L.A. Times article about the same topic from last year. Part 2 will be an updated summary of my paper/thesis chapter with some new material and commentary.


I am going to start by saying I knew NOTHING about Judaism. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I knew Hitler killed millions of “the Jews” in the Holocaust, that Jews didn’t believe in Jesus, and that they didn’t eat pork, but that was the extent of it. I know about Christianity because that’s the religion my parents are and therefore how I was raised (mom’s Baptist non-denominational and my dad is a non-practicing Catholic). I know about Islam because I had several Muslim friends (see also: hung out with an Imam’s son in the back of his coffee shop after school for a few weeks my Junior year) in Tulsa and I became more curious about that religion when my dad was deployed to Iraq. I’ve learned about Christianity in Sunday School since I was 3 years old and I learned about Islam through independent study, friends, and a couple of university classes. But guess what? In all my travels and all the moves, I had not ever met a Jewish person-to my knowledge.

Circa 2006 or 2007, I went to Alabama with my mom and we had lunch with her uncle. He knew I was interested in history and gave me a jump drive with our family tree on it. He was an amateur genealogist and had traced my mother’s, father’s, mother’s family tree. I never looked at the jump drive, but he passed away in the Summer of 2011 and I thought I’d better check it out. I opened up the document and to my surprise, he traced the family back to the 15th century in Bassano del Grappa, Italy! After some Googling, I saw that research had been done by other people who thought the family were exiled Jews from Spain or Portugal. I obviously thought it was cool, but didn’t really dig any further. When I started graduate school in 2011, I took a class about Venetian History and learned about the ghettos and a little bit about the Jewish population there. A new student arrived the following Fall and we became friends-it turned out she was Jewish. It just so happens that I signed up for a History of the Reformation class with her and the professor was Jewish too (hold on to your shorts, this will get trippy in a little bit). We had to come up with a paper topic and since I always tried to piggy-back my research paper’s off one another, I thought I would expand upon research I’d already done about Jews in Venice.

**Grad School pro-tip: I highly suggest finding a broad topic you like before you start graduate school and using that to guide all of your seminar papers. It turns out my broad topics were Italian Politics and Judaism. I went to two universities and took 25+ classes and was able to spider-web my papers and expand upon a few core topics each semester. (Obviously, I took unrelated courses like Carribbean History and Russian Cinema for which I wasn’t able to research anything related to these topics, but you get what I mean.) If I ever got nervous about using my own prior work, I’d just cite myself and link to my paper on Google Docs, but as far as I know there is no academic dishonesty in this approach and it will cut down your workload tremendously because you’ll be familiar with a group of sources and have already researched a topic that you can just expand or reframe in your next class.**

As a result, I wrote a seminar paper entitled: Jewish Life in Early Modern Venice: Migration, Segregation, and the Economic Necessity of Jews in Venice. I worked really hard on this paper and was proud of it. (SN: This paper contains the least amount of passive voice I could possibly use-so if you have issues reading things written in passive voice you best skidaddle on out of here now…also, this was my first real seminar paper, so excuse the errors and also realize I am NOT AN EXPERT of Judaica-sorry in advance). After some issues with my thesis committee and topic, in 2013, I decided to build upon this paper and some research I’d done about Venice in another course. This paper became a chapter in my thesis (I wrote more about it during my trip to Italy in 2014) and I got into the Ph.D. program at UNT shortly afterward. I left UNT, I had this chunck of research/writing, and a tangential connection to some family history. So, that’s the end of it, right? Nope.

In 2014, I went to Italy and got to visit all the places I’d talked about in my thesis. From the place the first Venetian settlers came from, to the town where my family came from, all the way to the Jewish ghetto itself! Later that year when I got to New York, I quickly found a job in Riverdale, an affluent-and largely Jewish-suburb in the Bronx. I began working for a family as a companion to a lady with Alzheimer’s. I soon found out that her daughter-in-law was from Fort Worth, Texas. The following year, upon meeting her in-laws, I asked them if they knew the Jewish professor who was on my thesis committee (not just because he was Jewish-I’m not that redneck-but because I knew he was an active member of the Jewish community in North Texas) and helped guide my research. It turns out my new bosses’ in-laws were very well aquainted with that professor I took the class with way back in 2012. Then, early this year, I logged into Facebook and had several notifications. 3 or 4 friends that knew about my seminar paper and thesis had linked me to the L.A. Times artilce about the history of Jews in Venice! I found out shortly afterward that I wasn’t accepted into a Ph.D. program, so I really thought that was the end of all this history stuff, but it turns out I wasn’t quiteee done.

As part of my job, I go to a Jewish Senior Center multiple times a week and earlier this year I met a member of the senior center who is an Afghani-Sephardic Jew from Israel. We became close friends, and in the past 6 months my research about Judaism has increased ten-fold (peep my IG if you’d like to see my interactions with the Jewish community in the Bronx). While I’ve branched out beyond Venice, I am still finding new sources which connect to my thesis!

So, a family tree given to me in Alabama in 2007 and viewed in 2011, led to a seminar paper in Denton, Texas in 2012, and a thesis chapter in 2013. An application to a Ph.D. program using this chapter as a writing sample brought me to New York City in 2014, where I found a job with a connection to two Jewish families in Fort Worth, Texas and the Bronx, New York. This new job led me to a Jewish Senior Center and a new friend from Israel, who just so happens to be an expert in the field of Judaica. Here I am, 4 years after writing that first paper and just last week I found yet another connection between Venice and “the Jews”…

*Next up: Let’s talk about the modern day divides within Judaism and the history of Jews in Venice/their importance to the Venetian economy!

*Probably next weekend…

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Italia in 40: Day 32…A Castle, Some Ruins, and Prayer!

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

academic, assisi, backpacking, budget travel, catholic, catholicism, college travel, europe, european, female travel, historian, history, italia, Italia in 40, italiain40, italian, italiano, Italy, photography, saint francis, solo travel, student travel, Travel, travel advice, travel photography, travel tips, traveler, traveling

Today was a perfect day in Assisi!

Assisi is my favorite place in Italy. Since the first day I came here I have always felt like this is where I’m supposed to be. My soul just feels at home here. Also, if you believe in God at all, I highly recommend coming here for a little spiritual retreat at least once in your life. It’ll shift your consciousness in crazy ways, at least it did for me…even as a teenager.

I always go back to certain experiences in my memory whenever I am discouraged with life and need motivation to keep going or I create daydreams of experiences I hope I will have one day. I wrote a blog a while back about my daydreams, but there are a few experiences in my past that keep me pushing forward on bad days; my first visit to Assisi and the clarity it brought, is one of them. Other’s include swimming with the Honu on the North Shore when I was a kid, exploring the woods in Georgia when I was little, and other fun things I did as a child, before life got so complex. But Assisi will always be special to me because it really helped me mature spiritually. Before coming here the first time, I never really had a place in my heart for spirituality and especially religion. My relatives are all Christian, but after about the age of 7, due to some things I witnessed in churches and saw Christians doing, I was really skeptical about religion and very pessimistic about the existence of God, until coming to Assisi that first time. I went down into the tomb of St. Francis and just knew immediately that God existed. It’s weird, I know, but that’s the main reason I love it here.

Since then, I’ve dreamed of winning the lottery and building a villa in the valley below or retiring here and living in a little studio apartment near the San Rufino or the basilica.  Anyway, enough of that mess, let’s talk about today!

I got up pretty early, but didn’t leave my room until 10:30, when I decided to walk up to Rocco Maggiore. It was a spur of the moment decision, but I just started walking and going up any incline I saw that was leading to the top of the hill. Some weird looking young boy tried to talk to me in Italian and followed me for like half a mile up the hill leading to the city center, but thank God I ran into my conversation partner from yesterday and he stopped to say hi and remind me again about the concert tomorrow, so the weird boy kept walking.

In the center I got a water, coffee, and a cookie. Then I just started walking. I walked up a bunch of steps and ended up on some dirt and rock nature trail. I didn’t know if it was leading in the right direction or where I was going to end up, but thankfully it took me right up to Rocco Maggiore. It’s a medieval castle that is AWESOME! I bought an all-inclusive ticket to the Roman Forum museum down in the city-center and into Rocco Maggiore. I walked around the inside of the castle and went up a few of the towers. I took lots of pictures and GoPro footage (again, will upload when I have good internet). It was SO HOT OUTSIDE! I was up at the castle for over two hours. I had never been up to the castle before, but I highly recommend going if you are up for a little hike and some beautiful panoramas!

I had to pee really bad and couldn’t find a bathroom, so I went down nature trail and almost got caught popping a squat, so I ran down the hill…:P

I made it back to the city center and decided to go into the Roman Forum museum. I’ve been there on my first visit to Assisi, but the last two times I’ve been here it’s been closed. I found out today why it’s been closed: major renovations. It’s really well laid out and really nice. The ticket for Rocco Maggiore, the Roman museum, and another attraction I didn’t visit was only 8 Euros!

After the Roman museum, I decided to walk toward the basilica, but it was after 1 and everywhere was closing for lunch, so I stopped and got a bite to eat. I stopped at a cafe on the main road to the basilica and it wasn’t very good. The food was meh, the service was bad, and the prices were high. I got a small bowl of plain salad, 3 pieces of bruschette (one just had olive oil on it, the other had canned tomatoes, and the other had truffles), and half a liter of wine (screw-off cap) and it was 17 Euros. I sat at the restaurant for an hour and a half or so and it was kind of fun. At first, two Irish ladies sat next to me and they were hilarious. I don’t like complaining at restaurants when the service or food is bad, I just go on and pay for what I bought and just don’t eat. But these ladies were going off the chain. They got up and went to the waitress to order because she wouldn’t come over to our section and they didn’t leave a tip because the cover charge was 4 Euros. Their accents were so funny and they were so spunky.

After they left, a Chilean couple sat down and I spoke Spanish with them and took a picture of them because they were taking pictures of each-other and I felt bad they had no one to take a picture of them together. They were really funny and sweet. Around 2:30 I walked down the basilica and went in to the upper church. I really wish you could take pictures inside, but there was a sign forbidding it (I usually ignore them, but I didn’t want to disobey the rules here). On my way into the lower part of the church, where the tomb is, I saw a bookshop and went in. It is the best place in Assisi to get souvenirs. The regular stores around town charge crazy prices, but I got like 20 things (postcards, crosses, medals, and prayer cards) for 11 Euros!

After buying my souvenirs I went down into the temple and left a donation and dedicated 10 candles to my friends, family, and departed loved ones and then I recited the rosary and prayed a bit. I walked around the tomb and then went back upstairs.

After the basilica I went back to my room and napped and tried to cool off. After my nap I walked around for a bit and searched for a restaurant. I stopped at a restaurant with a GORGEOUS view and got grilled sausages, with Brussels sprouts and rosemary potatoes. This restaurant was great. I got mineral water, Prosecco, a side of potatoes, and my sausage and Brussels sprouts main course, with the awesome view for 22 Euros! Obviously proving that the cafe I went to for lunch was a rip off! The menu wasn’t very large, but I definitely recommend this place in every way!

After dinner, I walked back toward the basilica because I storm was rolling in and the sun was setting, so I knew it would be beautiful. Unfortunately, I left my main camera in my room to charge, but I had my Sony video camera and my iPhone. I got some great panoramas and it was SO beautiful. You could see the rain and lightening on one side of the church and the beautiful sunset on the other side. I would have paid a million dollars to have a DSLR tonight!

Once I was done taking pictures I walked back toward my hotel and got a beer and a gelato and went back to my room. I repacked, showered, and uploaded my pictures, so I am ready for Rome.

I can’t believe I am on the last leg of my journey! The first 7 days flew, the middle 5 days dragged by, but it has FLOWN since then! I’m scared of all of the things coming my way when I get home, so I want to enjoy this last week I have! I am going to hangout with my French friend again and I get to watch Italy play their first match of the World Cup on Saturday night, so I am very excited for the coming days.

Let’s finish this off with a bang!

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