Stu Levitan marks the Jewish High Holy Days with an encore presentation of his conversation from April 2020 with Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, History instructor at Madison College and Honorary Scholar at the George L. Mosse / Laurence A Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which last year issued his new book Wisconsin The New Home of the Jew: 150 years of Jewish life at the UW-Madison. It’s available both in paperback of about 150 pages and a pdf download from the CJS website, cjs.wisc.edu.

Jon is the co-editor, with Jonathan Rees, of The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture, which includes some of the scholars discussed in this new book. Jon has published several articles on the Jewish history of the Midwest, and he is a frequent guest on Wisconsin Public Radio. He had the advantage of attending two of the three best schools in the Big Ten, getting his bachelor’s at Michigan in 1990, then his masters here in 92, doctorate in 99. And of particular interest to music lovers, from 1997 to 2002, Jon played drums for Madison’s most renowned klezmer band, Yid Vicious