Northeastern University Professor Simon Rabinovitch and his students in JWSS/HIST 2430 Digital Histories of Ethnic Boston have created a new website https://dhjewsofboston.northeastern.edu/ as their semester-long project. The students in this inaugural class created two interactive maps which are now available for viewing and for research. Shifting Neighborhoods: How Boston’s Jewish Communities Moved, 1850-2000 creates a pictorial record of the movement of Boston’s Jewish community by tracking synagogue addresses in Boston, its suburbs, and elsewhere in Massachusetts, over a century and a half. Mapping Shared Spaces: A Visual History of Boston’s Black and Jewish Communities examines the geographic interrelationship of Boston’s Black and Jewish communities via the shared use and reuse of religious and communal buildings.
This site provides an accessible, visual, and interactive resource for exploring Boston’s Jewish history, with the intention that students in future classes will continue to research additional areas of Jewish Boston and add their own digital history stories to the website over time.
