Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time?

In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo explores these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and "conversos" (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, explaining how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents, in a conversation that spans medieval medicine, forbidden breastfeeding, decoy hams, official guides to Jewishness, and the expulsion of Jews in 1492.

We generally connect Germany with anti-Semitism, but in the early twentieth century, Germany was actually considered one of the best places in the world to be Jewish. How and why did the progressive Weimar Republic give way to the genocidal Nazi regime... and could it happen here?

In this episode, guest Laurie Marhoefer explains the rise of the Nazi party in one of the one progressive places in the world, detailing the swift and dramatic shift in government, efforts to resist, and troubling echoes of these events in the present day.

The United States was the country where Jews came to finally be free from anti-Semitism... or was it? Historians of the modern era tend to think of the U.S. as an exceptional place for Jews — a place where Jewish people have been able to exist in relative freedom from violence and prejudice.

But is this common understanding of the United States as "the exception" accurate? In this episode, guest Susan A. Glenn discusses the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., touching on the Second Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford, the "mother of all conspiracy theories," the secret rehabilitation of Nazi war criminals, and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the U.S. in the present day.

In this five-part inaugural season of "Jewish Questions," the Stroum Center's podcast series, hosts Laurie Marhoefer and Noam Pianko delve into the causes and consequences of anti-Semitism across history with faculty experts from the University of Washington.