In Spring 2022, Dr. Mark Goldberg (Associate Professor of History, University of Houston) decided to try something new with his undergraduate history course. As a way of enriching his students’ engagement with Jewish Latinx culture, Goldberg partnered with Holocaust Museum Houston to guide his class through the recording and archiving of six interviews with members of this community. A year later on November 28, 2023, Goldberg sat down with one of his undergrads, Miranda Ruzinsky, to reflect on the intellectual and personal impact of their participation in the Sephardic Latinx Oral History Project. Their conversation demonstrates how revelatory an experience practicing public history can be for undergraduates - from learning how to actively listen when conducting an oral history to being part of building an archive of a hidden community to collectively presenting these living stories to a public audience.
To access the Sephardic Latinx Oral History Project: https://hmh.org/education/sephardic-latinx-oral-history-project/
To read more about student engagement in this project: https://www.uh.edu/provost/university/qep/sephardic-latinx-oral-history-project/
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/UH-students-worked-in-revolutionary-project-17131856.php
The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph