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How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history?\xa0A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture\xa0(Oxford UP, 2021) argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one\xa0way of transmitting Jewish history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an authentic Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources of\xa0Jewish life. It was a time to gather, a feverish era of collecting-and conflict-in which archive-making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity, and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony.\nJason Lustig explores how archives became battlegrounds over control of Jewish culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the cusp of the digital era. He excavates a tradition of monumental collecting, represented by repositories like the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the German Jews'\xa0central archive formed in Berlin in 1903, alongside the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, both opened in 1947, which all showcase the continual struggle over owning the Jewish past. Lustig presents archive-making as\xa0an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' long diasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was\xa0about the past.\nJason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he\u2019s also an affiliate of the History department. His first book,\xa0A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture,\xa0published by Oxford University Press in December 2021, traces the twentieth-century struggle over who might \u201cown\u201d Jewish history, especially after the Nazi looting of Jewish archives. Dr. Lustig is also the host and creator of the\xa0Jewish History Matters Podcast. He received his Ph.D. at the UCLA Department of History, and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. Contact:\xa0jlustig@austin.utexas.edu.\nSteven Seegel\xa0is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies