Podd: New Books in Jewish Studies

Ewa Herbst, "Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

22 juni 2025 | 83 min

Nicholas de Lange, "Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism" (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)

22 juni 2025 | 65 min

Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah" (Yale UP, 2024)

15 juni 2025 | 70 min

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. The man most recognized for the movement’s success is the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah.

While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendencies. So it is not surprising that Schneerson’s messianic fervor made him one of the most controversial rabbinic leaders of the twentieth century. How did he go from being an ordinary rabbi’s son in the Russian Empire to achieving status as a mystical sage? How did he revitalize a centuries-old Hasidic movement, construct an outreach empire of unprecedented scope, and earn the admiration and condemnation of political, communal, and religious leaders in America and abroad?

In Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024), Glinter presents a thoughtful biography of the spiritual leader that inspired the Lubavitch Hasidic community and its global outreach activities.

Interviewee: Ezra Glinter is a writer, editor, translator, and biographer. For five years he worked as the deputy culture editor of the Forward newspaper, where he edited Have I Got a Story for You, an anthology of Yiddish fiction in translation. He is currently the senior staff writer and editor at the Yiddish Book Center.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Dave Margoshes, "A Simple Carpenter" (Radiant Press, 2024)

6 juni 2025 | 55 min

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Dave Margoshes’ novel, A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024)—which recently won a Saskatchewan Book Award and the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our modern political climate.

Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter follows the epic journey of a ship’s carpenter stranded on a small Mediterranean island and visited by a frightening mysterious creature. He’s lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later in Beirut he’s hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for a group named Black September. On a quest to find his true identity he travels on foot across the hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange and magical communities evoking biblical times along the way.

More about Dave Margoshes:

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area poet and fiction writer. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism and creative writing.
He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he’s been nominated for the Journey Prize several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. He also won the Poetry Prize in 2010 for Dimensions of an Orchard. His collection of linked short stories, A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon. CA’s Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001.

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Semmy Stalhammer, "Codename Barber: My Father’s Story" (Albert Bonniers Publishers, 2007)

6 juni 2025 | 87 min

Elisabeth Åsbrink "And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War" (Other Press, 2020)

4 juni 2025 | 66 min

Tobias Brinkmann, "Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2924)

3 juni 2025 | 94 min

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restrictions that were imposed after 1914, especially in the United States, prevented most from reaching safe havens, and an unknown but substantial number of Jews perished during the Holocaust-as they had been displaced in Eastern Europe years before they were deported to ghettos and killing sites. Even after the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors were stranded in permanent transit for many years.

Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe tells and contextualizes the stories of these Jewish migrants and refugees before and after the First World War. It explains how immigration laws in countries such as the United States influenced migration routes around the world. Using memoirs, letters, and accounts by investigative journalists and Jewish aid workers, Tobias Brinkmann sheds light on the experiences of individual migrants, some of whom laid the foundation for migration and refugee studies as a field of scholarship, even coining terms such as "displaced person," and contributing to its legal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. The stories of these migrants and refugees were used to propose a new future for the United States, reimagining it as a pluralistic society-one comprised of immigrants.

Tobias Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

https://huji.academia.edu/GeraldineGudefin

*

Mentioned in the podcast:

Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1899).
Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mein Lebn (New York: Forverts, 1926-1931).
Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Semion Goldin, The Russian Army and the Jewish Population, 1914-17: Libel, Persecution, Reaction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Bernard Horwich, My First Eighty Years (Chicago: Argus Books, 1939).
John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Eugene Kulischer, Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post- War Prospects (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1943).
Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
Joel Perlmann, America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford: Littman, 2001).
Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1948).
Polly Zavadivker, A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
1921 cartoons in YIVO Library collection: “Nowhere Can One Set a Foot Down” and “If the statue of liberty were a living person.”

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Yonatan Y. Brafman, "Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity" (Oxford UP, 2024)

2 juni 2025 | 65 min

Adi Nester, "Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity" (Cornell UP, 2025)

30 maj 2025 | 72 min

Krista N. Dalton, "How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2025)

28 maj 2025 | 55 min

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings of rabbis in Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries CE, Dalton illuminates the significance of social relationships in the production of rabbinic expertise. She traces the social interactions—everyday instances of mutual exchange, from dinner parties to tithes and patronages—that fostered the perception of rabbis as experts.

Dalton shows how the knowledge derived from the rabbis’ technical skills was validated and recognized by others. Rabbis socialized and noshed with neighbors and offered advice and legal favors to friends. In exchange for their expert judgments, they received invitations, donations, appointments, and recognition. She argues that their status as Torah experts did not arise by virtue of being scholars but from their ability to persuade others that their mobilization of Jewish cultural resources was beneficial. Dalton describes the relational processes that made rabbinic expertise possible as well as the accompanying tensions; social interactions shaped the rabbis’ domain of knowledge while also imposing expectations of reciprocity that had to be managed. Dalton’s authoritative analysis demonstrates that a focus on friendship and exchange provides a fuller understanding of how rabbis claimed and defended their distinct expertise.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Krista Dalton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College and an editor-in-chief at Ancient Jew Review

Michael Motia teaches in the classics and religious studies department at UMass Boston

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Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024)

24 maj 2025 | 75 min

Yitzhak Conforti, "Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

23 maj 2025 | 56 min

What many people don’t realize is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception there were rigorous debates about the nature and direction of the movement? Thinkers had argued about some of the fundamental questions around Israel. Where would a future Jewish state be located? What language would they speak? Should Israel come about through a slow evolution or a radical revolution? In his book, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Academic Studies Press, 2024), Yithak Conforti situates us in these debates, zeroing in on the leaders of what has become known as “cultural Zionism.” These group of thinkers stood across the aisle from more politically minded voices like Theodor Herzl. As Prof Yizhak Conforti explains, their approach was quite different, highlighting a more Jewish, more ethnic, more culturally centered Zionist vision.

Zionism and Jewish Culture examines the history of Zionism from a new perspective, arguing that Zionism was not only a political project, but also a major cultural force in modern Jewish life. In exploring these topics, this book enables a deeper understanding of the forces that continue to shape Zionism and Israel today.

Prof. Yitzhak Conforti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in modern Jewish history, Jewish nationalism, and Zionist historiography. In addition to Zionism and Jewish Culture, se is the author of several influential works, including Past Tense: Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory and Shaping a Nation: The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882–1948.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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David Kraemer, "Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora" (Oxford UP, 2025)

22 maj 2025 | 63 min

Derek J. Penslar, "Zionism: An Emotional State" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

21 maj 2025 | 62 min

Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi: "The Kabbalistic Tree of Life" and "The Anointed"

20 maj 2025 | 24 min

Yosie Levine, "Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate" (Littman Library, 2024)

19 maj 2025 | 42 min

My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Littman Library, 2024), illuminated the dynamic interplay between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions-a theme that resonates deeply with our mission at the Unity Through Diversity Institute.

From the outset, Rabbi Levine’s scholarship made clear that Hakham Tsevi’s life was shaped by both geography and intellectual inheritance. The map at the beginning of his book, as he notes, is more than a visual aid; it is a testament to the diverse worlds Hakham Tsevi traversed.

What struck me most was Hakham Tsevi’s dual heritage. Raised in the Ashkenazi tradition, his formative years were marked by the customs and halakhic frameworks of Central and Eastern Europe. However, his sojourn in the Ottoman Empire brought him into close contact with the Sephardi world. This was not a mere footnote in his biography; it fundamentally altered his worldview and rabbinic outlook. The mere fact that he is called Hakham, a term of Rabbinic authority used by Sephardi Jews, yet insisted on only taking posts in Ashkenazi institutions, shows a menagerie of influences and appreciation for the diverse Jewish influences within halakhic practice.

Rabbi Levine and I discussed how, despite his Ashkenazi roots, and adherence to his Ashkenazi traditions, Hakham Tsevi’s training among Sephardim left an indelible mark. This influence became evident in his encouragement for scholars to prioritize accessible texts and to remain wary of the potential misuse of mystical works-a stance that echoed the concerns of Sephardi rabbis as books became more widely available. And the Sephardic influence may also be seen in his approach to education – much in line with the Sephardic philosophy, he recommended a TaNaKh first and then mishna focused curriculum with Talmud coming only after true comprehension and Kabbalah only for those who are truly gifted and fully fluent in all the other texts.

“Hakham Tsevi broke new ground. He adopted a decidedly oppositional orientation towards minhag and freely attacked long-standing Ashkenazi traditions. He imported into his halakhic decisions practices from the Sephardi milieu, and advocated for a Sephardi educational curriculum.” (Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine, p. 131)

Hakham Tsevi’s life demonstrates that Jewish identity is not static; it is forged in dialogue, sometimes in tension, but always in pursuit of a richer, more inclusive heritage. As we continue our work at the Unity Through Diversity Institute, Hakham Tsevi’s example inspires us to embrace complexity, to learn from one another, and to honor the multiple strands that make up the fabric of Jewish life.

“Before his tombstone was destroyed by the Nazis, it was adorned with the image of a gazelle, a tsevi. Moving swiftly and confidently from one field to the next, Hakham Tsevi was attacked often by adversaries who thought themselves wiser or more capable. Perhaps some of them were. But those adversaries never stopped him from speaking his mind, rendering his legal decisions, or publishing his rulings. In fact, they often compelled him to act or react…Students of halakhah remember him by the answers he generated; students of history, by the questions.” (Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine, conclusion)

I am grateful to Rabbi Levine for shedding light on this remarkable figure and hope we find this passion to challenge the norm and raise the difficult questions in more leaders.

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Marc Katz, "Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

18 maj 2025 | 51 min

Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)

16 maj 2025 | 45 min

Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000). Doing most of his work in the middle of the 20th century, Schindler was either part of or directly responsible for the changes in Reform (and even American) Judaism that we see today.

In his biography of Rabbi Schindler, Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (CCAR Press), Dr. Michael Meyer paints a picture of an extraordinarily influential leader in the history of Reform Judaism. From 1973 to 1996, he served as president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today's Union for Reform Judaism), where his charisma and vision raised the Reform Movement to unprecedented influence. Never afraid to be controversial, he argued for recognizing patrilineal descent, institutionalized outreach to interfaith families and non-Jews, and championed LGBTQ rights and racial equality. He was a tireless advocate for Israel while maintaining diaspora Jews' right to speak out independently on the Jewish state.

In this conversation, historian Michael A. Meyer brings Rabbi Schindler to life. His book, which he discusses with us, is based on extensive archival research and interviews and paints a definitive portrait of Schindler's life.

Michael Meyer is the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he taught since 1967. A leading scholar of modern Jewish history, Meyer has authored several award-winning books, including The Origins of the Modern Jew, Response to Modernity, and recent biographies of Rabbis Leo Baeck and Alexander Schindler. He served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute, and held visiting positions at Hebrew University, Ben Gurion University, and others. Honored internationally, he received the Moses Mendelssohn Award and the Order of Merit from the German Federal Republic.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)

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Joanna Rubin Dranger, "Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir" (Ten Speed Graphic, 2025)

15 maj 2025 | 34 min

Marc Shapiro, "Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook" (Littman Library, 2025)

14 maj 2025 | 50 min

Victoria Khiterer, "Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration" (Purdue UP, 2025)

11 maj 2025 | 90 min

Paul R. Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovskiĭ-Shtern, "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

10 maj 2025 | 56 min

Katerina Kralova, "Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-46" (Brandeis UP, 2025)

9 maj 2025 | 84 min

Chris Webb and Artur Hojan, "The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance" (Ibidem Press, 2019)

8 maj 2025 | 54 min

Nechama Birnbaum, "The Redhead of Auschwitz: A True Story" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2021)

7 maj 2025 | 54 min

Lucy Adlington, "The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive" (HarperCollins, 2021)

5 maj 2025 | 72 min

Hasia R. Diner, "Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

4 maj 2025 | 74 min

Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America (St. Martin's Press, 2024) tells the extraordinary story of how Irish and Jewish immigrants worked together to secure legitimacy in America.
Popular belief holds that the various ethnic groups that emigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century regarded one another with open hostility, fiercely competing for limited resources and even coming to blows in the crowded neighborhoods of major cities. One of the most enduring stereotypes is that of rabidly anti-Semitic Irish Catholics, like Father Charles Coughlin of Boston and the sensationalized Gangs of New York trope of Irish street thugs attacking defenseless Jewish immigrants. In Opening Doors, Hasia R. Diner, one of the world's preeminent historians of immigration, tells a very different story; far from confrontational, the prevailing relationships between Jewish and Irish Americans were overwhelmingly cooperative, and the two groups were dependent upon one another to secure stable and upwardly mobile lives in their new home. The Irish had emigrated to American cities en masse a generation before the first major wave of Jewish immigrants arrived, and had already entrenched themselves in positions of influence in urban governments, public education, and the labor movement. Jewish newcomers recognized the value of aligning themselves with another group of religious outsiders who were able to stand up and demand rights and respect despite widespread discrimination from the Protestant establishment, and the Irish realized that they could protect their political influence by mentoring their new neighbors in the intricacies of American life.

Opening Doors draws from a deep well of historical sources to show how Irish and Jewish Americans became steadfast allies in classrooms, picket lines, and political machines, and ultimately helped one another become key power players in shaping America's future. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia today, this informative and accessible work offers an inspiring look at a time when two very different groups were able to find common ground and work together to overcome bigotry, gain representation, and move the country in a more inclusive direction.

Hasia R. Diner is a professor emeritus of American Jewish History and former chair of the Irish Studies program at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on Jewish and Irish histories in the U.S., including the National Jewish Book Award winning We Remember with Reverence and Love, which also earned the Saul Veiner Prize for most outstanding book in American Jewish history, and the James Beard finalist Hungering for America. Diner has also held Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and served as Director of the Goren Center for American Jewish History.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)

3 maj 2025 | 29 min

Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner, "Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts" (Eerdmans, 2025)

1 maj 2025 | 72 min

The institution of slavery permeated the ancient world, such that the realities of slavery and its long shadows pervade the New Testament and other early Christian texts. Yet enslavement remains an under-taught aspect of the context of the New Testament and early Christianity, leaving pastors, laypersons, and neophyte college students alike to fill knowledge gaps about enslaved persons, enslavers, living and laboring conditions, and much more with partial information, assumptions, or a range of highly technical and specialized monographs.

Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts (Eerdmans, 2025), co-edited by Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner, takes on these issues, introducing readers to the textures, complexities, and material realities of slavery in the Greco-Roman world. International scholars with a range of expertise, from New Testament and early Christian studies to classics, theology, ethics, and more, contribute to a tapestry of introductory themes, topics, and interpretive frameworks with a wealth of literary, inscriptional, pictorial, and theoretical evidence from the material culture of Roman antiquity in this significant volume. Dr. Cobb and Dr. Shaner joined the New Books Network to initiate important conversations that they hope will continue in religious studies classrooms, schools of theology and divinity, and local church small group settings.

Christy Cobb (Ph.D., Drew University, 2016) is Associate Professor of Christianity at the University of Denver. She is the author of Slavery, Gender, Truth and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and has also co-edited a volume entitled Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lexington Books, 2022). Dr. Cobb is also a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and her research and teaching interests include slavery, gender, sexuality, Acts, and Apocryphal Acts. In her recreational time, Christy enjoys reading novels, crafts, and spending time with her nine-year-old son in Denver.

Katherine A. Shaner (Th.D., Harvard University Divinity School, 2012) is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She is the author of Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018) as well as numerous articles on slavery in the New Testament. Dr. Shaner is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and regularly preaches and teaches in churches around the United States. In her free time, Katherine enjoys hiking in the mountains, reading historical fiction, cooking dinner for friends and spending time with snuggly dogs.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Monika Amsler, "The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

30 april 2025 | 67 min

Asa Simon Mittman, "Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England" (Penn State UP, 2024)

25 april 2025 | 66 min

From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2024) by Dr. Asa Simon Mittman brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace.

In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Simon Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arguments in the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and actions rampant in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Dr. Mittman shows how English world maps of the period successfully Othered Jewish people by means of four primary strategies: conflating Jews with other groups; spreading libels about Jewish bodies, beliefs, and practices; associating Jews with Satan; and, most importantly, cartographically “mislocating” Jews in time and space. On maps, Jews were banished to locations and historical moments with no actual connection to Jewish populations or histories.

Medieval Christian anti-Semitism is the foundation upon which modern anti-Semitism rests, and the medieval mapping of Jews was crucial to that foundation. Dr. Mittman’s thinking offers essential insights for any scholar interested in the interface of cartography, politics, and religion in premodern Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jerome Gellman, "The Problem of God in Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

24 april 2025 | 32 min

Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019)

23 april 2025 | 70 min

Ulf Zander, "Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy" (Lund UP, 2024)

14 april 2025 | 71 min

Nora Gold, "18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages" (Cherry Orchard, 2023)

13 april 2025 | 49 min

Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann, "Oberbrechen: a German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past" (Oxford UP, 2024)

12 april 2025 | 61 min

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly.

Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) .

Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024).

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Haggadah Roundup

11 april 2025 | 109 min

Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard, "Spanish National Identity, Colonial Power, and the Portrayal of Muslims and Jews During the Rif War (1909-27)" (Boydell & Brewer, 2021)

11 april 2025 | 49 min

Enrico Fink, ed., "Shirat Hayam: The Song of the Sea" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)

10 april 2025 | 70 min

Curated by Enrico Fink, Shirat Hayam: The Song of the Sea (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) inaugurates the Erna Finci Viterbi Chàzanut Roundtable, a workshop and program series on Italian Jewish music and liturgy established by Centro Primo Levi in memory of a dear friend and board member whose love for tradition and dedication to learning have profoundly contributed to shape the center’s principles.

This project aims at facilitating new recordings of Italian and Mediterranean cantorial music and circulating the existing ones.

Publications, recordings and essays collected for this program are available through the Online Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music (www.jewishitalianmusic.org) designed to provide tools to those interested in learning, practicing or simply enjoying this art, including scholars, musicians, cantors and bar/bat-mitzvà students wishing to include some of this beautiful music in their liturgical repertoire.

The Thesaurus was created by Centro Leo Levi in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi, and the generous contribution of the Viterbi family of San Diego. It is being developed in collaboration with the Jewish Music Research Center of the University of Jerusalem and in partnership with the National Library of Israel, CDEC, and the Fondazione Beni Culturali Ebraici Italiani.

Sharing and participating were among Erna’s most cherished values and she regarded them as an indispensable foundation of human relations and endeavors.

For centuries, partaking in the communal prayer through the knowledge of its musical canons and variations has been an essential component of Jewish life. The repertoires that flourished in small communities throughout the Mediterranean reflect trade, travels and exchanges and resulted in a tapestry of sounds that, still preserved within local communities, can become an inspiration outside of their native environment.

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Andrew J. Viterbi, "Reflections of an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur" (Centro Primo Levi, 2016)

9 april 2025 | 60 min

Karen A. Frenkel, "Family Treasures: Lost & Found" (Post Hill Press, 2025)

8 april 2025 | 59 min

Orit Rozin, "Emotions of Conflict, Israel 1949-1967" (Oxford UP, 2024)

7 april 2025 | 70 min

"Queer Jews, Queer Muslims" with Adi Saleem and Shanon Shah

6 april 2025 | 69 min

Eli Rubin, "Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2025)

5 april 2025 | 77 min

In Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford University Press, 2025), Eli Rubin provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ṣimṣum ultimately morphed into religious and social schism. These debates confronted the meaning of being and forged the animating ethos of Chabad, a dynamic movement in modern Judaism. Chabad's distinctive character and self-image, Rubin shows, emerged from its spirited defense of Hasidism's interpretation of ṣimṣum as an act of love leading to rapturous reunion. This interpretation ignited a literal conflagration, complete with book burnings, denunciations, investigations, and arrests. Chabad's subsequent preoccupation with ṣimṣum was equally significant for questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession, as for existential questions of being and meaning.

Unfolding the story of Chabad from the early modern period to the twentieth century, this book provides fresh portraits of the successive leaders of the movement. Innovatively integrating history, philosophy, and literature, Rubin shows how Kabbalistic ideas are crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.

Interviewee: Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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My First Tanakh Stories Set (4vs.): Avraham, Miriam, Eliyahu, Ruth

4 april 2025 | 43 min

Dariel U. González García, "Dos miradas: Israel and Judaism in Puerto Rico" (2024)

1 april 2025 | 73 min

“Dos miradas: Israel y el judaísmo en Puerto Rico” by Dariel U. González García (אוריאל בן אברהם), Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayagüez, was published in Perspectivas sobre cuestiones globales in 2024. The text examines the historical roots of the Puerto Rican Jewish community, from its beginnings during Spanish colonization in the 15th century, with emphasis on the arrival of Sephardic converts to the island. The author examines the diplomatic relations between the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the State of Israel. The article includes interviews with two community leaders of the Puerto Rican Jewish community: Shula Feldkran, an Israeli and former president of Temple Beth Shalom; and Rabbi Hernán D. Rustein, the first permanent rabbi of Latin American origin at Temple Beth Shalom. González García (אוריאל בן אברהם) is a Jew of Sephardic heritage, and his areas of interest are Middle Eastern politics, Zionism and the origins of the State of Israel and Jewish history.

This interview includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Catedrático de Humanidades, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Dariel U. González García (אוריאל בן אברהם) and Coordinador de Cultura Judía en Puerto Rico at the UPR-M, Joanna Cifredo de Fellman (יוחנה סיפרדו פלמן) UPR-M, and Rabino Hernán D. Rustein (הרב הרנן רוסטיין). They discuss Judaism, Israel, and the Puerto Rican Jewish community. This podcast and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes are sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.

This is the second episode about “Dos miradas: Israel y el judaísmo en Puerto Rico”; the first, in Spanish, is available on the New Books Network en español.

Link to the article mentioned in this episode:

“Dos miradas: Israel y el judaísmo en Puerto Rico,” Perspectivas sobre cuestiones globales, 2024.

For more information about the Reform Jewish community of Puerto Rico, write to: info@tbspr.org

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Jeremy Brown, "The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19" (Oxford UP, 2023)

31 mars 2025 | 63 min

Yaron Ayalon, "Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy" (Brill, 2024)

30 mars 2025 | 44 min

Hannan Hever, "Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

29 mars 2025 | 56 min

Mikhail Goldis, "Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

28 mars 2025 | 48 min

Lucy Adlington, "Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust" (HarperCollins, 2025)

27 mars 2025 | 67 min

Joanne Miyang Cho, et al., "German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930-1950" (Routledge, 2025)

26 mars 2025 | 67 min

Thomas P. Bernstein, "Holocaust: German History and Our Half-Jewish Family" (Cherry Orchard, 2024)

24 mars 2025 | 87 min

"T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism" (T&T Clark, 2019)

21 mars 2025 | 31 min

Ofra Amihay, "The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel" (Syracuse UP, 2022)

20 mars 2025 | 96 min

Kobi Kabalek, "Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

19 mars 2025 | 58 min

In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do.

Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were "forgotten" after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German politics from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of "majority" and "collective" were articulated and reformulated.

Kobi Kabalek is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Penn State University, since 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, with a dissertation on “The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany” (2013). In 2014-2017 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of the ERC project “Experience, Judgment, and Representation of WWII in an Age of Globalization,” and examined conflicting perspectives concerning the war in Mandatory Palestine and their impact on the postwar historiography of Israel and Zionism. Former editor of The Journal for Holocaust Research and assistant editor of History & Memory. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, and memory in film, literature, auto/biography, oral narratives, art, etc., in German, Israeli, and global Holocaust history. He currently explores marginalized and extreme phenomena in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture – with special attention to the role of fantasy, imagination, and horror – and their impact on our understanding and representation of the Holocaust.

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Laurel Leff, "Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-And-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe" (Yale UP, 2019)

18 mars 2025 | 79 min

Simon Rabinovitch, "Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History" (Yale UP, 2024)

17 mars 2025 | 82 min

It is a common assumption that in Israel, Jews have sovereignty, and in most other places where Jews live today, they have religious freedom instead. As Simon Rabinovitch shows in this original work, the situation is much more complicated. Jews today possess different kinds of legal rights in states around the world; some stem from religious freedom protections, and others evolved from a longer history of Jewish autonomy.

By comparing conflicts between Jewish collective and individual rights in courts and laws across the globe, from the French Revolution to today, this book provides a nuanced legal history of Jewish sovereignty and religious freedom. Rabinovitch weaves key themes in Jewish legal history with the individual stories of litigants, exploring ideas about citizenship and belonging; who is a Jew; what makes a Jewish family; and how to define Jewish space. He uses recent court cases to explore problems of conflicting rights and then situates each case in a wider historical context. This unique comparative history creates a global picture of modern legal development in which Jews continue to use the law to carve out surprising forms of sovereignty.

Simon Rabinovitch is the Stotsky Associate Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University. He teaches and writes on a range of topics in European, Jewish, Russian, and legal history.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in the podcast:

• Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (2014)
• Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016)
• David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008)
• David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (2019)
• Lawrence Rosen, The Rights of Groups: Understanding Community in the Eyes of the Law (2024)
• Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (2020)
• Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (2022)
• David Biale, Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986)

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Ariel Evan Mayse, "Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

16 mars 2025 | 53 min

Moshe Tzvi Wieder, "Siddur from Its Sources" (Wieder Press, 2023)

11 mars 2025 | 57 min

Ken Frieden, "Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction" (Syracuse UP, 2016)

11 mars 2025 | 94 min

Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

8 mars 2025 | 81 min

Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)

6 mars 2025 | 47 min

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulnerability may heighten the allures of long-distance ethnonationalism.

The three explore various questions. Does the successful rise of Hindu ethnonationalism in the UK stem from a perceived contrast between benign Hinduism and dangerous Islam? Does the need for popular ratification through electoral democracy limit the scope of long-distance ethnonationalism? Is there a limit to how effectively Zionists and Hindutvites in the US and UK can wield claims to wounded religious minority sentiment while benefiting from from the hollowing out of democratic institutions? And finally, the three ask if the ominously successful assimilation of Zionism into American right-wing politics may also start working for Hindutva.

Mentioned in the episode:

Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger
Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands
Recall This Book with Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane
Ben Lorber on masculinist “Bronze-Age” Zionism

Recallable Books:

Lori singles out The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, (1979) by Rosemary Sayigh, anthropologist and oral historian. It explores the ways Palestinian nationalism and organized resistance to their dispossession and oppression took hold in the refugee camps of Lebanon.

Ajantha’s choice is Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, published in 2020, a readable, poignant, and edgy account of US empire, Islam, and race and the challenges of being an South Asian American Muslim. She also recalls the film Mississippi Masala from 1991, a compelling take on race and class dynamics in the US Indian diaspora.

John proposes Paul Breines’ Tough Jews and Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola–to which Ajantha adds Hanif Kureshi’s Buddha of Suburbia.

Listen and Read Here.

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Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

5 mars 2025 | 81 min

Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920" (Edwin Mellen, 2015)

1 mars 2025 | 76 min

Irina Rebrova, "Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus" (de Gruyter, 2020)

27 februari 2025 | 56 min

Bernard McGinn, "Modern Mystics: An Introduction" (Herder & Herder, 2023)

25 februari 2025 | 105 min

Blanche Bendahan, "Mazaltob: A Novel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

24 februari 2025 | 68 min

Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love. Bendahan’s nuanced and moving novel is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and quotidian customs constraining North African Jewish women on the cusp of emancipation and decolonization.

Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre—that of the feminist Sephardi novel. A historical introduction, a literary analysis, and annotations elucidate historical and cultural terms for readers, supplementing the author’s original notes.

Blanche Bendahan was born in Oran, Algeria on November 26, 1893, to a Jewish family of Moroccan-Spanish origin. Bendahan published her first collection of poetry, La voile sur l’eau, in 1926 and then her first novel, Mazaltob, in 1930.

Yaëlle Azagury is a writer, literary scholar, and critic. She was Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Barnard College, and Lecturer in Discipline in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. She is a native of Tangier, Morocco.

Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. Her current project is titled Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters in Muslim Lands. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education.

Azagury and Malino were finalists of the 74th National Jewish Book Awards in the category of Sephardic Culture.

Mentioned in the podcast:

• Blanche Bendahan,“Visages de Tétouan,” Les Cahiers de L’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paix et Droit), no. 093 (November 1955): 5.

• Susan Gilson Miller, “Gender and the Poetics and Emancipation: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Northern Morocco (1890-1912).” In Franco-Arab Encounters, edited by L. Carl Brown and Matthew Gordon (1996)

• Susan Gilson Miller, “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghribi Jew.” In

French Mediterraneans, edited by P. Lorcin and T. Shepard (2016)

• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927)

• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (1994)

• Female teachers of the Alliance israélite universelle

• Jewish figures in the literature of The Tharaud Brothers

• Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU)

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Malka Z. Simkovich, "Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity" (Eisenbrauns, 2024)

23 februari 2025 | 50 min

Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)

22 februari 2025 | 91 min

Amit Levy, "A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

21 februari 2025 | 71 min

A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on rich archival documentation in German, Arabic, English, and Hebrew, it traces the migration of Orientalist knowledge from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. The book examines how research – and researchers – were transformed as their encounter with the Orient shifted from a textual-philological exercise to a direct, physical engagement, marked by contradictions and tensions against the backdrop of the intensifying Jewish-Arab conflict.

Among its key themes, the book reveals how prominent Orientalist scholars extended their work beyond study rooms and libraries, engaging in efforts to foster Jewish-Arab understanding or collaborating with diplomatic and security institutions.

By shedding new light on the development of academic research in Mandatory Palestine and the early years of Israel, the book offers a compelling case study of the intricate relationship between "pure" scholarship and the political, social, and cultural challenges of the time. It also provides a fresh perspective on the roots of the Jewish-Arab conflict and the influential role of knowledge in shaping it.

Amit Levy is a Spinoza postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Israel Studies, School of Regional and Historical Studies, University of Haifa. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and migration and their impact on cross-cultural encounters. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Open University of Israel. His book A New Orient received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

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Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

21 februari 2025 | 43 min

Stephanie M. Pridgeon, "Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

19 februari 2025 | 57 min

Jay Prosser, "Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns" (Black Spring Press, 2024)

14 februari 2025 | 57 min

A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities. Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Mentioned in the podcast:

• Diana Saltoon, My Sister Meda: A Memoir of Old Singapore (2023)

• The Jews of Singapore Museum

Recent literature on the Sassoon family includes:

• Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai (2021)

• Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (2022)

• Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons (2023)

Jay Prosser is a reader in humanities at the University of Leeds in England, where he has taught since 1999.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Saulius Suziedelis, "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

14 februari 2025 | 70 min

Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

9 februari 2025 | 41 min

Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

6 februari 2025 | 57 min

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.

Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all.

Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life.

Mentioned in the Episode:

119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori
Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents.
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.
The Beinart Notebook podcast

Listen and Read Here.

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Angela Roskop Erisman, "The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

4 februari 2025 | 16 min

Elio Zarmati, "Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)

3 februari 2025 | 80 min

Shmuel Goldin, "Unlocking the Haggada: The Complete Haggada With In-Depth Commentary" (OU Press, 2018)

3 februari 2025 | 20 min

"We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto" (JewishGen, 2018)

2 februari 2025 | 124 min

Ewa Stańczyk, "Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland" (U Press of Mississippi, 2024)

1 februari 2025 | 59 min

Elizabeth Campbell, "Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

29 januari 2025 | 59 min

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century.

The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Elizabeth Campbell deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Bernd U. Schipper, "The Hermeneutics of Torah: Proverbs 2, Deuteronomy, and the Composition of Proverbs 1–9" (SBL Press, 2021)

28 januari 2025 | 88 min

Adam Chalom and Jodi Kornfeld, "Contemporary Humanistic Judaism" (Jewish Publication Society, 2025)

27 januari 2025 | 67 min

In their edited volume, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices (Jewish Publication Society, 2025), Rabbis Adam Chalom and Jodi Kornfeld collect their movement’s most important texts for the first time and answer the oft-raised question, “How can you be Jewish and celebrate Judaism if you don’t believe in God?”

Part 1 (“Beliefs and Ethics”) examines core positive beliefs—in human agency, social progress, ethics without supernatural authority, sources of natural transcendence, and Humanistic Jews’ own authority to remake their traditional Jewish inheritance on their own terms “beyond God.” Part 2 (“Identity”) discusses how Humanistic Judaism empowers individuals to self-define as Jews, respects people’s decisions to marry whom they love, and navigates the Israel-Diaspora relationship. Part 3 (“Culture”) describes how the many worlds of Jewish cultural experience—art, music, food, language, heirlooms—ground Jewishness and enable endless exploration. Part 4 (“Jewish Life”) applies humanist philosophy to lived Jewish experience: reimagined creative education (where students choose passages meaningful to them for their bar, bat, or b mitzvah [gender-neutral] celebrations), liturgy, life cycle, and holiday celebrations (where Hanukkah emphasizes the religious freedom to believe as one chooses).

Interviewees: Adam Chalom is dean for North America of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism and rabbi of Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation in suburban Chicago. Jodi Kornfeld is rabbi of Beth Chaverim Humanistic Jewish Community in suburban Chicago and past president of the Association of Humanistic Rabbis.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel by Nachum Sarna

26 januari 2025 | 36 min

In this episode we delve into one of the most profound and enduring works of sacred poetry: the Book of Psalms. Emotional and spiritual, joyful and despairing, triumphant and trembling with terror, the psalms have given voice to humanity's deepest yearnings for millennia. These timeless prayers and hymns have offered solace, inspiration, and a path to connection with the Divine, both individually and collectively.

Traditionally attributed to King David, the psalms were sung by the Jewish priests in the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. But what is it about these ancient verses that still resonate with readers and worshippers today—Jews, Christians, and people of many faiths or none at all? How do these sacred words help the human heart and mind reach toward the Transcendent? And what explains their unparalleled staying power over thousands of years?

To guide us through this journey, we are honored to welcome Dr. Shlomo Dov Rosen, a truly remarkable and multifaceted scholar. Dr. Rosen is a philosopher, poet, and congregational rabbi whose expertise bridges disciplines and traditions. With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he brings a unique perspective to the psalms, informed by his deep engagement with Jewish law, theology, and even the literary world of Milton. As someone who has dedicated his life to both the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of faith, Dr. Rosen is uniquely equipped to help us explore the profound meanings of these ancient prayers.

In today’s conversation, we touch on the historical origins of the psalms, their universal and interfaith appeal, and how they speak to the human experience of war, illness, gratitude, jay and awe in the face of nature—and beyond nature. We’ll also discuss why certain psalms, like the beloved 23rd Psalm, hold such enduring power, even for those who might not consider themselves religious.

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Leon Saltiel, "The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943" (Routledge, 2020)

26 januari 2025 | 56 min

Adam Jortner, "A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2024)

25 januari 2025 | 64 min

Anthony McElligott, "The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

21 januari 2025 | 85 min

Rafael Rachel Neis, "When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species" (U California Press, 2023)

20 januari 2025 | 97 min

Shmuel Goldin, "Unlocking the Torah Text" (Gefen Books, 2014)

18 januari 2025 | 29 min

Mark Celinscak, "Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp" (U Toronto Press, 2015)

16 januari 2025 | 77 min

Alec Goldstein, "Maimonides on the Book of Exodus" (Kodesh Press, 2019)

16 januari 2025 | 37 min

Yitzchak Etshalom, "Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric" (Maggid, 2024)

14 januari 2025 | 24 min

Yehudah Cohn, trans., "Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)

14 januari 2025 | 72 min

Nitzan Lebovic, "Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time" (Cornell UP, 2025)

13 januari 2025 | 102 min

Chaya T. Halberstam, "Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

11 januari 2025 | 72 min

Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

9 januari 2025 | 57 min

In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial realities of the Treblinka death camp and what it means to be a witness of the Holocaust.

Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.

Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany

9 januari 2025 | 59 min

Our book is: Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) by Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham, which is an inspiring new narrative of the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .” Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.

Our guest is: Dr Rebecca Brenner Graham who is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and an MA in public history from American University, and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Time, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019)

7 januari 2025 | 62 min

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover.

Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with particular vigor.

What happened after the Bolshevik victory is the subject of Elissa Bemporad's new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the National Jewish Book Award (Modern Jewish Thought and Experience). Bemporad probes the underbelly of the "Soviet myth"— that the USSR had eradicated the pogroms, banished the notion of a blood libel to the scrapheap of other opiates for the people, and vanquished antisemitism as part of the regime's broad anti-religious campaign — and discovers that both pogroms and the blood libel had a robust afterlife in the USSR.

As she traces changing attitudes towards Jews in the USSR, Bemporad also examines the uneasy and often ambivalent but mutually dependent, and ever-shifting relationship between the regime and the Jewish population as the Soviet century unfolds. Legacy of Blood looks at the re-emergence of overt antisemitism in the occupied territories of the USSR during World War II and the troubled return of the Jews to mainstream society after the war. The result is a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and eminently readable book that adds much to both Jewish and Russian historical scholarship.

Elissa Bemporad is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History, Queens College of CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, vol I (NYU Press).

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Catherine Hezser, "Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

6 januari 2025 | 59 min

Based on an understanding of scholasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon, undertaken by rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholars in late antiquity, this book examines the development of Palestinian rabbinic compilations from social-historical and literary-historical perspectives. Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi (Bloomsbury, 2024) focuses on the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi in the context of late antique scholarly practice aimed at preserving past knowledge for future generations.

This book provides insight into how rabbinic scholarship in the Land of Israel participated in the wider intellectual practices of Roman-Byzantine times. Beginning with the social, educational, and legal contexts that generated rabbinic knowledge. Catherine Hezser goes on to investigate the oral and written transmission of rabbinic traditions to eventually examine the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi with a comparative and redaction-historical approach.

Integrating Palestinian rabbinic education and scholarship into the context of late antique Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Christian scholarly practices, Catherine Hezser demonstrates how rabbinic compilatory techniques resembled but also differed from.those of Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian scholars. The book highlights how rabbinic compilations are idiosyncratic and create a distinct rabbinic identity. Overall, Hezser argues that rabbinic scholarship was an integral part of late antique intellectual life in the Near Middle East and should be recognized as an Eastern equivalent to Western, paideia-based forms of scholarship in the Roman-Byzantine period and beyond.

Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at SOAS University of London, UK.

Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston.

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Olga Borovaya, "The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

5 januari 2025 | 78 min

Jonathan Sacks, "The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Genesis" (Koren, 2024)

4 januari 2025 | 54 min

The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life

3 januari 2025 | 70 min

Avi Shlaim is a celebrated "New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel's relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an "impersonal autobiography."

He speaks today to John and his Brandeis colleague Yuval Evri, the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies. Yuval’s 2020 The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew explores how fluidity in such categories as the "Arab-Jew" becomes a source of resistance to exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages.

The three quickly agree that the crucial category for understanding Avi's latest work is that of the Arab Jew: "I am a problem for Zionists, an ontological impossibility....[as] a living breathing standing Arab Jew. A problem for them but not for me." Coexistence for him is not remote, but something that the Iraqi Jewish community experienced and touched on a daily basis.

In describing the factors that sped migration from Iraq to Israel in its early years, Shlaim lays bare some evidence for Mossad involvement in three for the Baghdad bombs that hastened the flight from Baghdad. That bombing forms part of the “Cruel Zionism” that Avi sees having gravely damaged the possibilities of Middle Eastern religious coexistence.

He also discusses the 1954 Lavon affair, and more generally reflects on the way that Zionism ("an Ashkenazi thing") conscripted Arab Jews into its political formation (This is a topic also discussed extensively in RTB"s conversation with Natasha Roth-Richardson and Lori Allen, in Violent Majorities). True, there is a much-discussed 1941 Baghdadi pogrom, The Farhud. It stands alone in the area and by Shlaim's account was largely a product of British colonialism in Iraq, with its divisive elevation of Christians and Jews over Muslims.

Yuval asks Avi to discuss the power (or permission) to narrate stories told from below. Avi's tales of his own mother's resourcefulness and his father’s struggles betoken the range of poignant response to what for so many Arab Jews was not aliyah (ascent) but a yerida, a descent into marginality, unemployment, and cultural exclusion.

To Avi, a single state of Israel/Palestine seems the best hope to ward off the worst that may come from the accelerated ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, which may lead to a second Nakba.

Mentioned in the podcast

Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988)
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1988)
The New Historians of Israel/Palestine.
Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998)
Alliance Israelite Universelle
Salo Baron anatomizes the "lachrymose version of Jewish history"; e.g. in his 1928 “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?”
Noam Chomsky called settler colonialism the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism.

Recallable Books

Avi credits the influential work of Ella Shohat on the idea of the Arab Jew and "cruel Zionism." One pathbreaking article was her 1988 "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims." but he recommends On the Arab Jew. In her work the hyphen unites rather than divides Arab and Jew.
Yehoudah Shinhav, The Arab Jews (2006).
Sami Michael
Shimon Ballas, Outcast (1991).
Michael Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951) and the rest of his New York trilogy.

Listen and Read here.

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Polly Zavadivker, "A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I" (Oxford UP, 2024)

3 januari 2025 | 83 min

Robert D. Miller II, "Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021)

31 december 2024 | 26 min

David Dejong, "A Prophet Like Moses (Deut 18:15, 18): The Origin, History, and Influence of the Mosaic Prophetic Succession" (Brill, 2022)

27 december 2024 | 20 min

Franck Salameh, "Lebanon’s Jewish Community: Fragments of Lives Arrested" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

27 december 2024 | 59 min

Diana Dumitru, "The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

26 december 2024 | 113 min

Jordan D. Rosenblum, "Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig" (NYU Press, 2024)

24 december 2024 | 65 min

Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for more than three thousand years and is rooted in biblical law. Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. Horses, rabbits, squirrels, and even vultures, while also not kosher, do not inspire the same level of revulsion for Jews as the pig. The pig has become an iconic symbol for people to signal their Jewishness, non-Jewishness, or rebellion from Judaism. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests Jews are meant to embrace this level of pig-phobia.

In Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (NYU Press, 2024), Jordan D. Rosenblum historicizes the emergence of the pig as a key symbol of Jewish identity, from the Roman persecution of ancient rabbis, to the Spanish Inquisition, when so-called Marranos (“Pigs”) converted to Catholicism, to Shakespeare’s writings, to modern memoirs of those leaving Orthodox Judaism. The pig appears in debates about Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century England and in vaccine conspiracies; in World War II rallying cries, when many American Jewish soldiers were “eating ham for Uncle Sam;” in conversations about pig sandwiches reportedly consumed by Karl Marx; and in recent deliberations about the kosher status of Impossible Pork.

All told, there is a rich and varied story about the associations of Jews and pigs over time, both emerging from within Judaism and imposed on Jews by others. Expansive yet accessible, Forbidden offers a captivating look into Jewish history and identity through the lens of the pig.

Interviewee: Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Andre Villeneuve, "Divine Marriage from Eden to the End of Days: Communion with God as Nuptial Mystery in the Story of Salvation" (Wipf and Stock, 2021)

22 december 2024 | 19 min

Hartley Lachter, "Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

21 december 2024 | 45 min

Christian Bailey, "German Jews in Love: A History" (Stanford UP, 2022)

20 december 2024 | 73 min

Ariel Evan Mayse, "Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

19 december 2024 | 76 min

Yaacov Yadgar, "To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism" (NYU Press, 2024)

16 december 2024 | 62 min

Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

15 december 2024 | 59 min

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.

Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.

Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Adin Steinsaltz, "The Steinsaltz Nevi'im" (Koren, 2019)

15 december 2024 | 16 min

Emanuela Trevisan Semi, "Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers" (Centro Primo Levi, 2018)

14 december 2024 | 98 min

Angela Kim Harkins, "Reading with an "I" to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot Through the Lens of Visionary Traditions" (de Gruyter, 2018)

13 december 2024 | 64 min

Beth Kaplan, "Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin" (Syracuse UP, 2007)

12 december 2024 | 69 min

Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee, "The Illustrated Cairo Genizah" (Gorgias Press, 2024)

11 december 2024 | 64 min

Starting nearly a thousand years ago at the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo, worn-out books and scrolls were put in the genizah, a storage area for sacred texts.

In The Illustrated Cairo Genizah: A Visual Tour of Cairo Genizah Manuscripts at Cambridge Univertity Library (Gorgias Press, 2024), Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee tell the story of the genizah and show the journey of discovery through more than 125 years of research, showcasing over 300 stunning full-colour images, revealing forgotten stories of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities over a millennium of world history.

In the nineteenth century, Scottish sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith brought manuscript pages back to England where Solomon Schechter recognized the lost Hebrew book of Ben Sira, also known as Ecclesiasticus or Sirach. Schechter then traveled to Cairo and toured the genizah, an attic chamber he described as a "windowless and doorless room of fair dimensions. The entrance is ... through a big, shapeless hole reached by a ladder."

Over the millenia, hundreds and thousands of documents were buried in this attic crypt, vividly described by Schechter: "It is a battlefield of books, and the literary production of many centuries had their share in the battle ... some of the belligerents have perished outright, and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space".

In addition to images of the book of Ben Sira, the collection includes fragments of the oldest known Latin edition of St Augustine's sermons, Origen's Hexapla, and a 5th or 6th century copy of Aquila's translation of Kings, approximately 60 manuscripts written by Moses Maimonides, and a medieval copy of the 'Damascus Document' which was confirmed as an ancient text by the discovery of another copy among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumram in 1947.

See visual examples of the collection online.

Learn more about the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit.

Rebecca Brenner Graham, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany" (Citadel Press, 2025)

10 december 2024 | 46 min

Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

9 december 2024 | 60 min

A. J. Berkovitz, "A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

9 december 2024 | 71 min

Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, "Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research" (de Gruyter, 2019)

4 december 2024 | 68 min

Krzysztof Bielawski, "The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

1 december 2024 | 63 min

Elliot R. Wolfson, "Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod" (Stanford UP, 2024)

30 november 2024 | 46 min

Zsuzsanna Szanto, "The Jews of Ptolemaic Egypt: The History of a Diaspora Community in Light of the Papyri (De Gruyter, 2024)

29 november 2024 | 46 min

Elliot R. Wolfson, "The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope" (Stanford UP, 2023)

27 november 2024 | 53 min

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, "Prayers of a Heretic: Poems" (Plain View Press, 2013)

26 november 2024 | 62 min

Nina Valbousquet, "Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah" (La Découverte, 2024)

26 november 2024 | 64 min

The exceptional opening of the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in 2020 did not end the controversies surrounding the silence of the pope in the face of Nazi atrocities. But, beyond the controversies, what do these new sources reveal? What do they contribute to our understanding of the Shoah, the Second World War and religious power? Do they allow us to grasp more finely the deep ambivalences of the Vatican, between charity and prejudice, in the face of anti-Jewish persecution?

Based on three years of examining these considerable funds in Rome, Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah (La Découverte, 2024) probes the motivations and dilemmas of the people involved in this story, their voices but also their silences. Going beyond a classic approach focused on the pope and diplomacy, this work sheds light on the political, humanitarian, religious and cultural issues of the Holy See's choices. The book raises this question in the long duration of relations between the Church and the Jews in order to evaluate the weight of a centuries-old culture of hostility in the Vatican's responses to anti-Semitic persecutions, before and during the war, but also after the Shoah. Has this unprecedented level of violence against a minority shaken the old bedrock of Christian anti-Judaism?

Finally, by making the voices of those on the ground and the persecuted heard, in particular those of mixed Judeo-Christian families, this book questions more broadly the resilience of religion in the face of genocide and the capacity of our civil societies to respond to mass violence.

This book was originally published in French as Les âmes tièdes: Le Vatican face à la Shoah (La Découverte, 2024)

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Phillip Lieberman, "The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

23 november 2024 | 89 min

Writing on the Wall: A Conversation with William Kolbrener

23 november 2024 | 35 min

"Writing on the Wall" is a global platform founded by Professor William Kolbrener and novelist Ronit Eitan in response to the traumatic events of October 7th and the alarming rise in global antisemitism.

The co-founders, despite their differing perspectives on many issues, share a steadfast belief: the fight against antisemitism can begin by uniting diverse voices through poetry and art.

In a world where some wield literature, art, and scholarship as tools of intimidation and exclusion, efforts to silence Israelis and their supporters grow—alongside the grim reality of Hamas holding Israelis and Americans hostage.

Yet, there are those who embrace the transformative power of writing to challenge antisemitism and foster collective healing.

As Executive Director of Writing on the Wall, a nonprofit initiative based at Bar-Ilan University, Professor Kolbrener spearheads creative and community-driven responses to combat hate and division.

How should we confront the intellectual boycotts and the subtler but equally harmful efforts to marginalize Israeli academics? In today’s episode, William Kolbrener shares his approach, offering a powerful example of resistance through creativity and inclusion.

William Kolbrener is a Full Professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research explores the intersections of literature, theology, and politics, focusing on figures such as John Milton, Mary Astell, and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.

He is the author of several influential books that integrate literary studies, Jewish thought, and philosophy:

Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge University Press, 1996): A key contribution to Renaissance studies, focusing on critical interpretations of John Milton.
Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism, and Love (Continuum, 2011): A collection of essays blending Jewish tradition with contemporary thought.
The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016): An exploration of Soloveitchik’s philosophical legacy in the modern age.

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Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

19 november 2024 | 61 min

Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, "In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

17 november 2024 | 65 min

Hannah Pollin-Galay, "Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

15 november 2024 | 60 min

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harboured profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyse these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.

Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analysing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Dr. Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Gil Student, "Articles of Faith" (Kodesh Press, 2024)

14 november 2024 | 30 min

Sara Glass, "Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir" (Atria, 2024)

13 november 2024 | 63 min

Maksim Goldenshteyn, "So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

13 november 2024 | 91 min

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany's Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust.

In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family's wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and his fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered.

Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn's account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length book to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the "Death Noose." Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize its prisoners.

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Janusz Korczak, "How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)

12 november 2024 | 89 min

Jay Rovner, "In Every Generation: Studies in the Evolution and Formation of the Passover Haggadah" (Gorgias Press, 2024)

10 november 2024 | 36 min

Naomi S. S. Jacobs, "Delicious Prose: Reading the Tale of Tobit with Food and Drink: A Commentary" (Brill, 2018)

8 november 2024 | 61 min

Karine Rashkovsky, "An Improbable Life: My Father's Escape from Soviet Russia" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2024)

5 november 2024 | 42 min

Joanne Rosenthal, "Sex: Jewish Positions" (Hirmer Verlag, 2024)

4 november 2024 | 43 min

Avi Shlaim, "Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew" (Oneworld, 2024)

3 november 2024 | 62 min

Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin" (U Regina Press, 2024)

2 november 2024 | 33 min

Vicente Dobroruka, "Second Temple Pseudepigraphy: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Apocalyptic Texts and Related Jewish Literature" (de Gruyter, 2014)

25 oktober 2024 | 81 min

Dominick Hernández, "The Prosperity of the Wicked: A Theological Challenge in the Book of Job and in Ancient Near Eastern Literature" (Gorgias Press, 2022)

24 oktober 2024 | 23 min

Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History, Volume 2" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

22 oktober 2024 | 54 min

Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews" (Cherry Orchard, 2024)

20 oktober 2024 | 47 min

Shared Paths: Exploring Jewish and Muslim Experiences in America

17 oktober 2024 | 42 min

Rachel O'Sullivan, "Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

16 oktober 2024 | 63 min

Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O'Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, 'civilising missions' and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany's rule in Poland.

The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study's analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O'Sullivan explores Nazi Germany's dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of 'undesirable' population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies - and the tactics used to implement them - to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

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Peter Joshua Atkins, "The Animalising Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4: Reading Across the Human-Animal Boundary" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

16 oktober 2024 | 45 min

Simcha Gross, "Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 oktober 2024 | 74 min

Ora Horn Prouser et al., "Under One Tent: Circus, Judaism, and Bible" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023)

14 oktober 2024 | 64 min

Aliza Arzt, "Turning the Pages: Conversations Through Time with Rabbi Isador Signer" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024)

13 oktober 2024 | 76 min

Judaism is About Love: A Discussion with Shai Held

11 oktober 2024 | 35 min

Tikva Hecht, "Tashlikh" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024)

10 oktober 2024 | 48 min

Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau, "Christie Pits" (Dirty Water Comics, 2019)

7 oktober 2024 | 48 min

Anat Geva, "The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s" (Texas A&M UP, 2023)

4 oktober 2024 | 54 min

Robert Rozett, "Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War" (Yad Vashem, 2014)

4 oktober 2024 | 63 min

Shalva Weil, "The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity" (Routledge, 2021)

2 oktober 2024 | 44 min

Naomi Seidman, "In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages" (Stanford UP, 2024)

2 oktober 2024 | 74 min

Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

30 september 2024 | 58 min

Estelle Tarica, "Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America" (SUNY Press, 2022)

29 september 2024 | 66 min

Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

27 september 2024 | 89 min

Zeev Levin, "Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939" (Brill, 2015)

26 september 2024 | 84 min

Francesco Lotoro, "The Lost Music of the Holocaust: Bringing the Music of the Camps to the Ears of the World at Last" (Headline, 2024)

24 september 2024 | 92 min

Hannan Hever, "Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility" (Brill, 2019)

22 september 2024 | 82 min

Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, "Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism" (Melville House, 2024)

21 september 2024 | 70 min

Tom Navon, "Radical Assimilation in the Face of the Holocaust: Otto Heller (1897–1945)" (SUNY Press, 2024)

21 september 2024 | 64 min

William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)

18 september 2024 | 132 min

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zionist movement. In 1932, a recommendation letter from the jurist and later Nazi party member Carl Schmitt enabled Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Strauss continued his work in France and England before settling in the United States in 1937, teaching at the New School and other colleges, and then becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago in 1949. It is in America that Strauss wrote his most famous works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing, On Tyranny, Natural Right and History, The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, and many other works. His work typically takes the form of interpretations of ancient authors, especially Plato.

Over the years, Strauss attracted many dedicated students, who became known as “Straussians,” spreading his influence not only within academia but eventually into the American government. Straussians would attain such prominence and eventually cause such controversy, that, decades after Strauss’ death, the field of political science was gripped by what would become known as “the Strauss wars.” Strauss wrote in a difficult, densely layered and evasive style that has led to long-lasting disputes about whether his apparent endorsement of liberal democracy was genuine, or whether his work contains an esoteric teaching about human hierarchies, one that might justify illiberal and anti-democratic Machiavellian coups. Heightening the urgency of figuring out what Strauss truly stood for is the widespread view that Straussians who worked in the State Department and Defense Department and who came to be called “Neoconservatives” were instrumental in launching the Iraq war in 2003, and are otherwise associated with hawkish, not to say hubristic and imperial U.S. foreign policy.

But, leaving the neocons aside; Leo Strauss, Jewish Nazi? Could such a charge possibly be fair? Who is the real Leo Strauss? These are the questions that bring us to this author and this book. William Henry Furness Altman is a retired public high school teacher and author of many articles and books on figures including Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and indeed, Leo Strauss.

The book we are discussing today is entitled The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2010). William Altman’s first published book is an extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted work substantiating his charge that Leo Strauss, the revered and influential Jewish emigre, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, did indeed harbor a lifelong commitment to the principles of Nazi ideology and that such indeed is Strauss’ secret teaching.

Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. His studies focus on ancient religion, philosophy, political theory, critical theory, and history. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com.

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Seth J. Frantzman, "The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza" (Wicked Son, 2024)

18 september 2024 | 39 min

Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold, "Teaching Israel: Studies of Pedagogy from the Field" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

15 september 2024 | 42 min

Aviad Moreno, "Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community" (Indiana UP, 2024)

14 september 2024 | 62 min

Katharine J. Dell, "The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth" (Baylor UP, 2023)

13 september 2024 | 16 min

Marilynne Robinson, "Reading Genesis" (FSG, 2024)

12 september 2024 | 33 min

Geoffrey D. Claussen, "Modern Musar: Contested Virtues in Jewish Thought" (Jewish Publication Society, 2022)

11 september 2024 | 38 min

Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

8 september 2024 | 54 min

Jeremy Salamon, "Second Generation: 100 Hungarian and Jewish Classics Reimagined for the Modern Table" (Harvest Publications, 2024)

6 september 2024 | 49 min

Naomi Leite, "Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging" (U California Press, 2017)

6 september 2024 | 91 min

Oren Kroll-Zeldin, "Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine" (NYU Press, 2024)

6 september 2024 | 67 min

Dan Stone, "Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2023)

5 september 2024 | 69 min

Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

4 september 2024 | 41 min

Ronnie Grinberg, "Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals" (Princeton UP, 2024)

30 augusti 2024 | 56 min

Notes from the Field: A Personal View of the War on Gaza

28 augusti 2024 | 45 min

Lori Gemeiner-Bihler, "Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945" (SUNY Press, 2019)

27 augusti 2024 | 69 min

Jay Garfinkel, "Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness" (Illuminated Press, 2024)

27 augusti 2024 | 27 min

Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

24 augusti 2024 | 60 min

Laurien Vastenhout, "Between Community and Collaboration: 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

23 augusti 2024 | 88 min

Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (Liveright/Norton, 2018)

21 augusti 2024 | 54 min

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews.

In an introduction that sets the context of Russian-Jewish life at the opening of the 20th century, and five essay like chapters that follow, Professor Zipperstein uses different types of sources, marshaled from archives across the world in concert with well known accounts, to weave together a study of the ways in which the pogrom has been received and imagined from a myriad of different perspectives. A poetic memorialization by the man that would become the “national poet” of Israel, Haim Nachman Bialik, based on his eyewitness account, a journalistic investigation by Michael Davitt in Within the Pale: The True Story of the Anti-Semitic Persecutions in Russia culled from newspaper reports published around the world, as well as previously unknown connections to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to American radical politics. We read of an provincial event that captured the imagination of an international community, Jew and non-Jew alike, and provided them with a peephole into the lives of Russian Jewry. In many ways, this reception was paradoxical: by some, Jews were perceived as victims of popular violence, while others saw them as masterminds of a media-driven conspiracy.

In an age where much of our relationship with world events is shaped by often times contradictory media perspectives, Pogrom speaks to the ways in which this operates and its unwitting consequences. Here, Kishinev does not represent a pristine memory of a single story but rather exposes many of the historical trends of the 20th century and helps us further understand the relationships between media and power, between violence and empathy, and the ways in which we come to understand the unfolding narratives around us.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, if both Descartes and my mother are correct then I am not.

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Diana V. Edelman and Philippe Guillaume, "The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in Five Minutes" (Equinox, 2024)

21 augusti 2024 | 74 min

The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in 5 Minutes (Equinox Books, 2024), co-edited by Philippe Guillaume and Diana V. Edelman, is a digestible, concise, reader-friendly introduction to biblical scholarship for undergraduate students and lay readers alike. Written without technical language or jargon by diverse specialists in Hebrew Bible, its 83 chapters welcome readers into a range of topics, including the enduring questions of date, authorship, and source criticism for biblical books in addition to timely contributions of interest to 21st-century audiences, such as the Hebrew scriptures and archaeology, ecology, abortion, and sexual orientation/LGBTQIA issues. Meanwhile, although not a book-by-book or verse-by-verse commentary on the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament, their volume introduces familiar prophets and figures from the scriptural collection in novel and enlightening ways. Dr. Edelman and Dr. Guillaume joined the New Books Network to discuss the development of this primer on the Hebrew Scriptures and to preview its wide-ranging contents.

Diana V. Edelman (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1986) is Professor Emerita in Hebrew Bible at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published widely on many aspects of the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context and has cultivated specialties in the Bible and cultural memory, southern Levantine history and archaeology, identity formation reflected in the Hebrew Bible, and emerging forms of Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Among her recent scholarly contributions are chapters on “Deuteronomy as the Instructions of Moses and Yhwh vs. a Framed Legal Code” (in Deuteronomy in the Making: Studies in the Production of Debarim; de Gruyter, 2021) and “The Text-Dating Conundrum: Viewing the Hebrew Bible from an Achaemenid Framework” (in Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls: Periods of the Formation of the Bible; Mohr Siebeck, 2020), and she is also the author of The Origins of the ‘Second’ Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (Routledge, 2005). In her recreational time, Diana is an avid amateur photographer and world traveler.

Philippe Guillaume (Th.D., University of Geneva, 2002) is Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Berne. His research interests span the Hebrew Scriptures and include the use of prophetic scrolls in divination and rhetorical questions posed by these texts, both internally and in their historical reception. Philippe is author of Waiting for Josiah: The Judges (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18 (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2009), The Economy of Deuteronomy’s Core (Equinox, 2022) and numerous journal articles and chapter-length contributions on texts, aspects, and economic issues within the Hebrew Scriptures, including “Debunking the Latest Scenario on the Rise of the Pork Taboo” (Études et Travaux, 2018), “Wonder Woman’s Field in Proverbs 31: Taken, Not Bought!” (Ugarit-Forschungen, 2016), Naboth’s vineyard (SBL/Bible Odyssey), and “The Hidden Benefits of Patronage: Debt” (in Anthropology and the Bible; Gorgias Press, 2010).

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Susanne Barth, "From Schmelt Camp to 'Little Auschwitz': Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust" (Purdue UP, 2024)

19 augusti 2024 | 64 min

Laura S. Lieber, "Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry" (Oxford UP, 2023)

19 augusti 2024 | 65 min

Staging the Sacred: Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford UP, 2023) examines the importance of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Laura Lieber proposes an account of hymnody as a performative and theatrical genre, combining religious and theatrical studies to examine how performers creatively engaged their audiences, utilized different modes of performance, and created complex characters through their speeches.

To truly consider performance and engage with these poems fully, Lieber urges readers to imagine the world beyond the page. While poetry and hymnody from Late Antiquity are usually presented in textual form, Lieber moves away from studying the text on its own, engaging instead with how these poems would have been performed and acted. The specific literary techniques associated with oratory and acting in Late Antiquity, such as apostrophe and vivid imagery, help craft a more accurate idea of liturgical presentations. Lieber suggests ways that these ancient poets could have used their physical spaces of performance by borrowing from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime.

A highly interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across religion, theatre, literature, and beyond, Staging the Sacred proposes a novel interpretation of Late Antique hymnody and poetry as a performative genre, akin to oratory, theatre, and other modes of public performance, placing these works in their wider societal context.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Laura S. Lieber is the inaugural chair and Professor of the Transregional History of Religion at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

Michael Motia in a Lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Shaul Magid, "Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical" (Princeton UP, 2021)

15 augusti 2024 | 64 min

Rabbi Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990.

In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton UP, 2021), Shaul Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenges he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.

Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Studies of World Religions at Harvard. His recent books include Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (Academic Studies Press, 2019), The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary to the New Testament (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021); and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press, 2023). His present book project is Zionism as Anti-Messianism: The Political Theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion and is the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue.

Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-German Occultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition.

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Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, "Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making" (SUNY Press, 2020)

12 augusti 2024 | 71 min

Kirsten Fermaglich, "A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America" (NYU Press, 2018)

11 augusti 2024 | 62 min

Cordelia Heß, "The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden" (de Gruyter, 2021)

10 augusti 2024 | 84 min

Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici, "Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another" (U California Press, 2024)

9 augusti 2024 | 35 min

Eyal Regev, "The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred" (Yale UP, 2019)

7 augusti 2024 | 37 min

Kenneth Atkinson, "A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond" (T&T Clark, 2019)

7 augusti 2024 | 77 min

Jessica Roda, "For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age" (NYU Press, 2024)

6 augusti 2024 | 68 min

Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency.

For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.

Interviewee: Jessica Roda is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Alexandra Popoff, "Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success" (Yale UP, 2024)

6 augusti 2024 | 60 min

Shai Held, "Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life" (FSG, 2024)

5 augusti 2024 | 57 min

Janine P. Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

4 augusti 2024 | 56 min

Yoram Meital, "Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

4 augusti 2024 | 64 min

Cairo's synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present.

Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo's synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo's synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo's Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues reveals the local Jewish community's customs, cultural preferences, socioeconomic gaps, and class divisions.

Sacred Places Tell Tales narrates not only the past but also the unprecedented transformations that have occurred in recent years in Egypt. While only a handful of Jews live in Egypt, the preservation of Jewish heritage, first and foremost synagogues and cemeteries, enjoy a growing interest in public discourse and popular culture. This new desire to preserve Jewish heritage is inseparable from the ongoing public debate about Egyptian society, its characteristics, and its identity, past and present. By contextualizing Jewish heritage preservation in a longer Egyptian and Jewish history, Meital opens a window into one of the most significant political discussions dividing Egyptian society today.

If you'd like to see the Ben Ezra Synagogue, you can on YouTube.

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David M. K. Sheinin and David S. Koffman, "Promised Lands North and South: Jewish Canada and Jewish Argentina in Conversation" (Brill, 2024)

3 augusti 2024 | 66 min

A. J. Berkovitz, "A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

2 augusti 2024 | 53 min

Shaul Magid on the Jewish Radicalism of Meir Kahane (JP, Eugene Sheppard)

1 augusti 2024 | 55 min

For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism.

Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2024) on Jewish Defense League Founder and the surprising American origins of Jewish radicalism not of the left but of the right.

The conversation starts with Magid recounting a call from celebrated leftist radical Arthur Waskow to make the case that all American Jewish radicalism is of the left. Magid sees it differently: Although the radically right Meir Kahane went on to fame and influence in Israel, both through his party Kach (meaning Thus!) and through successor parties that heightened ultra-nationalism, he loved baseball, and grew up thinking about how to strengthen Jewish identity within a late 1960's America defined by "race wars and culture wars of 1967/68. " Long before his semi-successsful transplantation to Israel, he was the founder of the Jewish Defense League, which absorbed black nationalism (he even wrote a piece called "The Jewish Panthers") and tried to flip it into a model for mobilized Jewish ethnic sectarianism.

John asks Shaul about Kahane's claim not to hate Arabs but to love Jews--Shaul believes he actually hated both. Kahane's misunderstanding of the Israeli Black Panthers (a group of Jewish radicals from Middle Eastern and North African origins, inspired by the American Black Panther revolutionary movement) is symptomatic of his failure to grasp the complexity of political currents in Israel. Golda Meir was able to adapt to Israeli political currents when she emigrated from America; Kahane not so much.

Nonetheless, by the late 1970's a home-grown neo-Kahanism waxes in Israel, with a majoritarian arrogance unlike Kahane's perennially minoritarian view. He may not have fully broken through to the mainstream, but when he was assassinated in 1990 his funeral (at the time when his party Kach was still banned, when a solution to Jewish-Arab coexistence still seemed within reach) was still the largest any Israeli had ever had.

Does liberalism, and liberal Zionism in the 1990s succeed? Magid says it had its moment in the 1990s--it tepidly opposed settlers, endorsed Oslo. But the reality of the 2020's has no space for that liberal two-statism. What we have now, which is distinct from Kahane's older (right) radicalism is outright Jewish conservatism, driven by the potent impact of Orthodoxy.

About October 7, Kahane would have said "I told you so." Kahane’s recurrent refrain was that, no matter what naïve liberals might hope, Palestinian nationalism would not be bartered away for the goods of electricity or a washing machine. And yet Magid sees this current moment as an unexpected boon in some ways for the Jewish radical left. The journal Jewish Currents and Jewish Voices for Peace have found a new argument for turning away from liberal Zionism to a new form of unapologetic diasporism.

Listen to and Read the episode here.

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Adara Goldberg, "Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955" (U Manitoba Press, 2015)

31 juli 2024 | 84 min

Ewa K. Bacon, "Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz" (Purdue UP, 2017)

29 juli 2024 | 84 min

Laura Yares, "Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America" (NYU Press, 2023)

28 juli 2024 | 71 min

The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was too feminized, saccharine, and dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2023), Laura Yares shows this was not the reality.

Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of these precursors to Hebrew School. Yares provides an in-depth portrait of a massively understudied movement that acted as a vital means by which American Jews explored and reconciled their religious and national identities.

Interviewee: Laura Yares is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Miriam Eve Mora, "Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century" (Wayne State UP, 2024)

27 juli 2024 | 72 min

Gilad Sharvit, "Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought" (Brandeis UP, 2022)

27 juli 2024 | 63 min

Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought (Brandeis UP, 2022) proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of “dynamic repetition” in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought.

Gilad Sharvit is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. A scholar of modern Jewish thought, Sharvit's interests lie in Jewish philosophy, German-Jewish literature and culture, German and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory. He completed his PhD studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Philosophy Department and later accepted a Diller Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies at University of California, Berkeley (2014-16) and was a Townsend Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at University of California, Berkeley (2016-17). In 2017-18, Professor Sharvit was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Koebner Minerva Center for German History (Hebrew University) and at Tel Aviv University (Minerva Center for German History and School of Philosophy).

Professor Sharvit is the author of Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom (Magnes Press) (in Hebrew) and co-editor and contributing author of the volumes Freud and Monotheism: The Violent Origins of Religion with Karen Feldman (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature with Willi Goetschel (De Gruyter, 2020).

Amir Engel is a professor at the German Department of the Hebrew University and currently also a visiting professor for the history and present of Jewish-Christian relations at the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature and cultural studies at the Hebrew University and earned his doctorate in German Studies at Stanford University, California. He then taught and researched at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on religion, politics, literature, and the relationships between these three areas. His main topics include German-Jewish Romanticism and German-Jewish literature and culture in the post-war period. His first book, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography, was published in 2017, and he is currently finalizing his second book manuscript, tentatively titled The Politics of Spirituality: German, Jews and Christian 1900 - 1942

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Jonathan Branfman, "Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy" (NYU Press, 2024)

26 juli 2024 | 59 min

Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024), Jonathan Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, “man-baby” film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron.

Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star’s success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity―stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable. In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world.

Jonathan Branfman is the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Travis B. Williams, "History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

24 juli 2024 | 80 min

Hannan Hever, "Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s" (Stanford UP, 2016)

23 juli 2024 | 108 min

Frances Tanzer, "Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

20 juli 2024 | 68 min

In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna. Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna's history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution--the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s.

As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined "Jewish" culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism--instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction. In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust--a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

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Yaakov Beasley, "Joel, Obadiah, and Micah: Facing the Storm" (Maggid, 2024)

17 juli 2024 | 40 min

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Abrahamic Vernacular" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

16 juli 2024 | 49 min

Yosefa Raz, "The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

16 juli 2024 | 76 min

Jonathan Marc Gribetz, "Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy" (Princeton UP, 2024)

15 juli 2024 | 28 min

David Joseph, "Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust" (Amberley, 2023)

12 juli 2024 | 74 min

Rachel Z. Feldman, "Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

9 juli 2024 | 65 min

Robert E. Jones, "Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition" (Brill, 2023)

8 juli 2024 | 52 min

Jonathan Judaken, "Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

7 juli 2024 | 76 min

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today?

Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Lance J. Sussman, "Portrait of an American Rabbi: In His Own Words" (Xlibris US, 2023)

2 juli 2024 | 47 min

Travis B. Williams et al., "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture" (Brill, 2023)

1 juli 2024 | 88 min

Jihye Lee, "A Jewish Apocalyptic Framework of Eschatology in the Epistle to the Hebrews" (T&T Clark, 2021)

29 juni 2024 | 38 min

In contrast to scholarly belief that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews envisions the transcendent, heavenly world as the eschatological inheritance of God's people, Jihye Lee argues that a version of an Urzeit-Endzeit eschatological framework - as observed in some Jewish apocalyptic texts - provides a plausible background against which the arguments of Hebrews are most comprehensively explained. Instead of transcendence to the heavenly world that will come after the destruction of the shakable creation, Lee suggests the possibility of a more dualistic new world.

By first defining Urzeit-Endzeit eschatology, Lee is then able to explore its place in both pre and post 70 CE Second Temple Judaism. In examining Enoch, the Qumran Texts, Jubilees, the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch and finally the Book of Revelation, Lee compares a multitude of eschatological visions and the different depictions of the transformation of the world, judgement and the new world to come. Bringing these texts together to analyse the issue of God's Rest in Hebrews, and the nature of the Unshakable Kingdom, Lee concludes that Hebrews envisions the kingdom as consisting of both the revealed heavenly world and the renewed creation as the eschatological venue of God's dwelling place with his people.

Jihye Lee is Assistant Professor in New Testament at Sudo International University in Seoul, South Korea. She also serves as Education Pastor at Amen Baptist Church, which is also located in Seoul. In addition to writing A Jewish Apocalyptic Framework of Eschatology in the Epistle to the Hebrews: Protology and Eschatology as Background (T&T Clark, 2021), she has published additional studies of Hebrews in the journal Novum Testamentum.

Information about the Novum Testamentum article that is mentioned in the podcast may be found here.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn, "The Shochet (vol. 1): A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

28 juni 2024 | 64 min

Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press.

Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

19 juni 2024 | 95 min

Anat Kidron and Shuli Linder Yarkony, "The Jewish Community of Acre in Mandatory Palestine: The Story of a Forgotten Community" (de Gruyter, 2024)

18 juni 2024 | 69 min

Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

15 juni 2024 | 73 min

Peter Bergamin, "The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology” (I. B. Tauris, 2019)

10 juni 2024 | 38 min

Joseph A. Skloot, "First Impressions: Sefer Hasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

8 juni 2024 | 56 min

Asaf Elia-Shalev, "Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth" (U California Press, 2024)

7 juni 2024 | 63 min

Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish City Or Inferno of Russian Israel?: A History of the Jews in Kiev Before February 1917" (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

5 juni 2024 | 73 min

Glenn Dynner, "The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024)

5 juni 2024 | 74 min

Thomas Sparr, "German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City" (Haus Publishers, 2021)

4 juni 2024 | 26 min

Benjamin Balint, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy" (Norton, 2019)

3 juni 2024 | 41 min

Joshua Paul Smith, "Luke Was Not a Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts Within Judaism" (Brill, 2024)

3 juni 2024 | 103 min

One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of early Christianity reverent to Israel’s scriptures.

In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith addresses the consensus for the supposedly Gentile Luke and concludes that no solid New Testament or patristic evidence exists to substantiate such a claim. Moreover, Smith suggests by means of a cognitive linguistic analysis of insider and outsider terms in Luke and Acts, as well as their author’s attitudes toward the Torah and intricate knowledge of Jewish festival celebrations, that these books were more likely to have been written by an individual enculturated in “a Jewish setting … among the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora” (p. 233). Smith joined the New Books Network to discuss this revision of his Ph.D. thesis, our ability to know an ancient author through their textual remains, and why it would be inappropriate to interpret Luke’s full-throated embrace of the Gentile mission as an indicator of his non-Jewish identity.

Joshua Paul Smith (Ph.D., University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology, 2021) teaches presently at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include literary and cognitive approaches to New Testament texts, as well as early Jewish and Christian identity formation. He is currently working on a short book on Acts for a general audience, and conducting research for an article that applies social network analysis to named characters in Luke and Acts. Additionally, he serves as Managing Editor for Reviews of the Enoch Seminar, publishing book reviews on a wide range of topics related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic origins.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Thea Gomelauri, "The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry" (Taylor Institution Library, 2023)

1 juni 2024 | 68 min

Daniel Matt et al., "The Zohar: Pritzker Edition" (Stanford UP, 2004-2017)

29 maj 2024 | 65 min

Nathan Lovell, "The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: 1 and 2 Kings as a Work of Political Historiography" (T&T Clark, 2022)

29 maj 2024 | 21 min

Judy Batalion, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos" (William Morrow, 2021)

27 maj 2024 | 44 min

Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick, taught children, and hid families.

Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown.

As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, and Band of Brothers, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos (William Morrow, 2021) at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time. Judy Batalion--the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors--takes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Joining Renia are other women who served as couriers, armed fighters, intelligence agents, and saboteurs, all who put their lives in mortal danger to carry out their missions. Batalion follows these women through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few--like Renia, who orchestrated her own audacious escape from a brutal Nazi jail--into the late 20th century and beyond.

Powerful and inspiring, featuring twenty black-and-white photographs, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.

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Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024)

27 maj 2024 | 66 min

Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023)

26 maj 2024 | 70 min

In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, and against the backdrop of the Bernie Sander's campaigns in the United States, Mahalel revisits the radical period of the 1890s and recasts Peretz as an "organic intellectual" (Antonio Gramsci) of the Eastern European Jewish working class complementing the political work of the incipient socialist, diaspora nationalist movement of the Jewish Labor Bund. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz in Yiddish and Hebrew and following a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, this study traces Peretz's radicalism from its inception through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history. It shows how this writer-cum-activist became instrumental in the realm of culture in the rise of ethno-class-consciousness among the Eastern European Jewish working class at the turn century.

Adi Mahalel received his doctoral degree in Hebrew and Yiddish Studies at Columbia University and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Yiddish Studies. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as AJS REVIEW, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Israel Studies Review, and Kesher: Journal of Media and Communications History in Israel and the Jewish World. Mahalel was a culture columnist at the Yiddish Forward.

Miriam Chorley-Schulz is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon and the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. She holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and was the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of Jewish Studies and the Centre of Transnational and Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto.

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Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, "European Mennonites and the Holocaust" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

25 maj 2024 | 68 min

Yehonatan Eybeshitz, "Pearls of Wisdom from Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz: Torah Giant, Preacher & Kabbalist" (Gerber's Miracle Publishers, 2021)

24 maj 2024 | 31 min

Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz was one of the greatest rabbis of the eighteenth century. Even as a child, he was renowned as one of the rare geniuses of his time. Among the most revered Torah scholars of the last 300 years, Rabbi Eybeshitz was also a prolific writer, preacher, and Kabbalah master. His innumerable writings cover all areas of Jewish Learning, including the Talmud, Jewish Law, Homiletics, and Kabbalah.

Carefully chosen selections of Rabbi Eybeshitz's writings have now been translated into English by the illustrious scholar Rabbi Yacov Barber, making Rabbi Eybeshitz's extraordinary ideas and insight accessible to a wider audience. In Pearls of Wisdom, you will discover Rabbi Yehonatan's thoughts on the weekly Torah portion and the Jewish holidays, as well as his insights into the Messianic Era; in Sparks of Wisdom, Rabbi Yacov Barber provides an alphabetically organized treasury of Rabbi Eybeshitz’s practical guidance on many questions regarding Jewish teachings, laws, and code; and in Gates of Wisdom, Rabbi Yacov Barber has pulled together endearing and fascinating stories from the life of Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz.

Join us as we speak with Rav Yacov Barber about the great 18th century rabbi, Yehonatan Eybeshitz, and please visit https://eybeshitz.com/

Rabbi Yacov Barber is an internationally acclaimed motivational speaker and author, and a much sought-after communicator on ethics and spiritual and personal growth. He can be contacted at his personal website.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Arjen F. Bakker, "The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls" (Brill, 2023)

23 maj 2024 | 69 min

Mirjam Rajner, "Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945" (Brill, 2019)

22 maj 2024 | 121 min

Nicholas Underwood, "Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

21 maj 2024 | 64 min

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French.

Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to disseminate Yiddish language and culture throughout a wider community in France. Understanding their efforts as profoundly modern, even avant-garde, these cultural and political actors forged and expressed a Jewish diaspora nationalism they regarded as compatible with French republicanism. France was a space of multicultural possibility that seemed the perfect place to build the future.

Taking the reader through the work of various figures and groups, Underwood follows the solidarity, performances, and pluralism of the Yiddish community in interwar Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Attentive to the devastating experiences that awaited so many French and European Jews after 1939, the book remains focused on the present of the interwar period throughout, emphasizing the community's hopes for an inclusive French society respectful of forms of religious, racial, cultural, and linguistic difference.

Drawing on a wealth of archival materials the author pursued in sites in multiple countries, the book includes some very real and moving stories. Apart from the historical actors Underwood sought out directly and through family members, the lives and experiences of so many actors, singers, musicians, and engaged community members spring off many of the book's pages. It's a compelling book that will be of great interest to scholars across subfields and disciplines, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

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Wally V. Cirafesi, "John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel" (Brill, 2021)

21 maj 2024 | 22 min

Assaf Tamari, "God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah" (Magnes Press, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 41 min

Daniel R. Schwartz, "Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies" (de Gruyter, 2024)

19 maj 2024 | 74 min

Chaim Miller, "Turning Judaism Outward: A Biography of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe" (Kol Menachem, 2014)

18 maj 2024 | 21 min

Frédéric Bonnesoeur et al., "New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust" (de Gruyter, 2023)

17 maj 2024 | 70 min

Y. Tzvi Langermann, "Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew" (Brill, 2023)

11 maj 2024 | 32 min

Jason F. Moraff, "Reading the Way, Paul, and 'the Jews' in Acts Within Judaism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

8 maj 2024 | 27 min

David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

8 maj 2024 | 36 min

"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV" (Indiana UP, 2022)

6 maj 2024 | 89 min

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps for Tunisian Jews, brothels in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, and prisons and penal camps for Wehrmacht personnel. Most of these sites have not been described in detail in the existing historical literature, and a substantial number of them have never been documented at all. The volume also includes an introduction to the German prisoner of war camp system and its evolution, introductions to each of the various types of camps operated by the Wehrmacht, and entries devoted to each individual camp, representing the most comprehensive documentation to date of the Wehrmacht camp system.

Within the entries, the volume draws upon German military documents, eyewitness and survivor testimony, and postwar investigations to describe the experiences of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners held captive by the Wehrmacht. Of particular note is the detailed documentation of the Wehrmacht's crimes against Soviet prisoners of war, which have largely been neglected in the English-language literature up to this point, despite the fact that more than three million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity. The volume also provides substantial coverage of the diverse range of conditions encountered by other Allied prisoners of war, illustrating both the substantial privations faced by all prisoners of war and the stark contrast between the Germans' treatment of Soviet prisoners and those of other nationalities. The volume also details the significant involvement of the Wehrmacht in crimes against the civilian populations of occupied Europe and North Africa. As a result, this volume not only brings to light many detention sites whose existence has been little known, but also advances the decades-old process of dismantling the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht," according to which the German military had nothing to do with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime's other crimes.

Dallas Michelbacher and Alexandra Lohse are applied research scholars at USHMM.

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Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)

5 maj 2024 | 62 min

Prit Buttar, "Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust" (Amberley, 2023)

5 maj 2024 | 90 min

On the History and Evolution of Zionism

22 april 2024 | 92 min

Steven Nadler, "Spinoza: A Life" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

22 april 2024 | 35 min

Chris Webb, "The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance" (Ibidem Verlag, 2017)

22 april 2024 | 65 min

John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

22 april 2024 | 58 min

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise.

In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in mediaeval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians.

Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumours circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Dr. Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Robert Rozett and Iael Nidam-Orvieto, "After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation" (Yad Vashem, 2016)

21 april 2024 | 56 min

Stuart Halpern and Jacob Kupietzky, "The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada" (Maggid, 2024)

19 april 2024 | 18 min

Debby Koren, "Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

18 april 2024 | 49 min

Kerry Wallach, "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit" (Penn State UP, 2024)

16 april 2024 | 60 min

Steven Ujifusa, "The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I" (HarperCollins, 2023)

15 april 2024 | 80 min

Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg.

This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more--including Ujifusa's great grandparents. That is their legacy.

Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York's Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I (HarperCollins, 2023) is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa's story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war--and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time.

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Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

13 april 2024 | 73 min

Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, "Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture" (Syracuse UP, 2018)

12 april 2024 | 107 min

Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

8 april 2024 | 61 min

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm.

In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.

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Gustavo Guzmán, "Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen" (Brill, 2022)

7 april 2024 | 106 min

Michael LeFebvre, "Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

6 april 2024 | 17 min

Sandra Fox, "The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America" (Stanford UP, 2023)

6 april 2024 | 49 min

Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

2 april 2024 | 54 min

In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months.

Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012; paperback 2023) closely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity--and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions--during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony.

The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.

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Chiara Renzo, "Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity" (Routledge, 2023)

24 mars 2024 | 37 min

Jehanne Dubrow, "Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)

24 mars 2024 | 24 min

Kira Sirote, "Haftorah Unrolled: Weekly Insights from the Prophets" (2018)

22 mars 2024 | 52 min

Shoshanna Lockshin and Efrayim Unterman, "The Devash Megillat Esther" (Hadar Press, 2024)

21 mars 2024 | 38 min

Yaacov Nir, "Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949)" (Cambridge Scholars, 2024)

19 mars 2024 | 64 min

Rachel Blumenthal, "Right to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964" (Lexington, 2021)

18 mars 2024 | 39 min

Rachel Gordan, "Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American" (Oxford UP, 2024)

18 mars 2024 | 64 min

Dan Stone, "The Holocaust: An Unfinished History" (Mariner Books, 2023)

18 mars 2024 | 70 min

Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)

17 mars 2024 | 71 min

Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

17 mars 2024 | 74 min

Robin Baker, "Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges" (Brill, 2016)

16 mars 2024 | 26 min

Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2023)

14 mars 2024 | 48 min

Sarah A. Cramsey, "Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946" (Indiana UP, 2023)

9 mars 2024 | 56 min

In Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana UP, 2023), Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish and non-Jewish decision makers exiled from wartime east central Europe and the powerbrokers surrounding them?

Usually, the creation of the State of Israel is cast as a story that begins with Herzl and is brought to fulfillment by the Holocaust. To reframe this trajectory, Cramsey draws on a vast array of historical sources to examine what she calls a "transnational conversation" carried out by a small but influential coterie of Allied statesmen, diplomats in international organizations, and Jewish leaders who decided that the overall disentangling of populations in postwar east central Europe demanded the simultaneous intellectual and logistical embrace of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a territorial nationalist project.

Uprooting the Diaspora slows down the chronology between 1936 and 1946 to show how individuals once invested in multi-ethnic visions of diasporic Jewishness within east central Europe came to define Jewishness primarily in ethnic terms. This revolution in thinking about Jewish belonging combined with a sweeping change in international norms related to population transfers and accelerated, deliberate postwar work on the ground in the region to further uproot Czechoslovak and Polish Jews from their prewar homes.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)

7 mars 2024 | 48 min

Leona Toker, "Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading" (Indiana UP, 2019)

6 mars 2024 | 91 min

Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Jewish Annotated New Testament" (Oxford UP, 2017)

4 mars 2024 | 71 min

Roman Dziarski, "How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family" (Academic Studies, 2024)

3 mars 2024 | 80 min

Yaniv Feller, "The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

3 mars 2024 | 63 min

Maxine Lowy, "Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

27 februari 2024 | 115 min

Marcia Bricker Halperin, "Kibbitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow's Cafeteria" (Cornell UP, 2023)

25 februari 2024 | 32 min

Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, "The Holocaust in Croatia" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

25 februari 2024 | 95 min

Till Van Rahden, "Multiplicity: Jewish History and the Ambivalences of Universalism" (Hamburger Editionen, 2022)

24 februari 2024 | 53 min

Bojan Aleksov, "Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945" (Brill, 2023)

24 februari 2024 | 85 min

Raanan Rein, "Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)

23 februari 2024 | 76 min

Safwat Marzouk, "Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015)

21 februari 2024 | 94 min

Mara Josi, "Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature" (Legenda, 2023)

20 februari 2024 | 67 min

Daphna Sharfman, "Jerusalem in the Second World War" (Routledge, 2024)

18 februari 2024 | 92 min

Jewish War Ethics, Ancient to Contemporary: A Conversation with Rabbi Shlomo Brody

14 februari 2024 | 55 min

Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019)

12 februari 2024 | 51 min

George Eisen, "A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust" (Purdue UP, 2022)

10 februari 2024 | 90 min

More on "Cleanliness" (nekiyut)

8 februari 2024 | 36 min

Dallas Michelbacher, "Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940-1944" (Indiana UP, 2020)

6 februari 2024 | 67 min

Serhiy Bilenky, "Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

5 februari 2024 | 51 min

Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023)

2 februari 2024 | 47 min

Anton Weiss-Wendt, "On the Margins: Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia" (CEU Press, 2017)

29 januari 2024 | 103 min

Hillel Goldberg, "Across the Expanse of Jewish Thought: From the Holocaust to Halakhah and Beyond" (Ktav, 2022)

27 januari 2024 | 41 min

John J. Michalczyk et al.. "Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

27 januari 2024 | 116 min

On Zionism and the Left: A Discussion with Author and Cultural Critic Susie Linfield

22 januari 2024 | 66 min

Chaim Miller, "Torah, the Five Books of Moses (with Complete Haftarah Cycle)" (Kol Menachem, 2011)

19 januari 2024 | 21 min

Yitzhak Teutsch, "The Cyprus Detention Camps: The Essential Research Guide" (Cambridge Scholars, 2019)

18 januari 2024 | 109 min

On Henry Einspruch's 1941 Yiddish Translation of the Christian Bible

17 januari 2024 | 59 min

Geoffrey Levin, "Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978" (Yale UP, 2023)

16 januari 2024 | 69 min

Adin Stinsaltz, "The Steinsaltz Humash, 2nd Edition (Hebrew and English Edition)" (Koren, 2019)

16 januari 2024 | 21 min

Uri Kaufman, "Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)

15 januari 2024 | 58 min

Aviva Ben-Ur and Wim Klooster eds., "Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World" (Cornell UP, 2024)

13 januari 2024 | 45 min

Jacob L. Wright, "Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

13 januari 2024 | 56 min

More on "Decisiveness" (harizut)

12 januari 2024 | 38 min

Yair Furstenberg, "Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism: From the Temple to the Mishnah" (Indiana UP, 2023)

10 januari 2024 | 38 min

James Robson, "Word and Spirit in Ezekiel" (T&T Clark, 2006)

9 januari 2024 | 18 min

Ayelet Brinn, "A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press" (NYU Press, 2023)

9 januari 2024 | 33 min

A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Ayelet Brinn offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers.

Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies.

In A Revolution in Type, Dr. Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ofer Ashkenazi, "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (U Michigan Press, 2020)

9 januari 2024 | 64 min

Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (U Michigan Press, 2020) studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers' contemplations of "Heimat"-- a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity -- it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. The book shows how these filmmakers devised the landscapes of the German "Homeland" as Jews, namely as acculturated "outsiders within." Through appropriation of generic Heimat imagery, the films discussed in the book integrate criticism of national chauvinism into German mainstream culture from the end of World War One to the early decades of the Cold War. Consequently, the Jewish filmmakers discussed in this book anticipated the anti-Heimatfilm of the ensuing decades and functioned as an uncredited inspiration for the critical New German Cinema.

Ofer Ashkenazi is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He published monographs and articles on various topics in modern German and German-Jewish history, including Weimar visual culture, the German antiwar movement, and the German memory of Nazism and the Holocaust. His current project considers photographs that were taken by Jews to document their daily life in Nazi Germany.

Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-German Occultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition.

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Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)

8 januari 2024 | 62 min

Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an astonishing 230 hours of interview footage shot in various locations. Commissioned originally by the State of Israel to make a film about the catastrophe, Lanzmann collected these testimonies over a period of several years before beginning the epic task of editing the film. He saved the outtakes as a vital repository of accounts of those who had lived through the Shoah. The footage has since been acquired, preserved, and digitized as an archive by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The chapters of Cazenave’s book explore the film’s conceptualization and production, reframing the final film in terms of all that it left out, to think about what was included in relationship to those stories and scenes excluded for different reasons. Over years from an initial dissertation project to this volume, Cazenave pursued the story of the film and its outtakes through archival research, detective work, and close technical, aesthetic and theoretical consideration. The resulting analysis takes author and reader from consideration of the film/archive in relationship to Holocaust trials (and especially the Eichmann trial of 1961), to issues of gender and the feminine, to the question of rescue and refugees, as well as debates about representation, witnessing, and testimony. The book is a wonderful and complex study that will be of great interest to readers in Holocaust and cinema studies. The magnum opus of a French filmmaker working with a largely French crew, and produced with funding provided in part by the French government, the film also illuminates, in its own ways (including its silences) the difficult French past and politics of Holocaust history and memory.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Bryan Mark Rigg, "The Rabbi Saved by Hitler's Soldiers: Rebbe Joseph Isaac Schneersohn and His Astonishing Rescue" (UP of Kansas, 2016)

7 januari 2024 | 55 min

A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism

4 januari 2024 | 48 min

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.

The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements.

Mentioned in the episode

Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege.
Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.)
Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland.
RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism.
The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque.
Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism.
Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing.
Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation.
Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation.
Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism.
Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization.

Recallable Books

Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism.
Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110)
Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings.
Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India.

Read transcript here.

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The Trait of "Decisiveness" (harizut)

4 januari 2024 | 34 min

Jelena Subotić, "Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism" (Cornell UP, 2019)

1 januari 2024 | 50 min

In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.

Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007).

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Scott D. Seligman, "Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

28 december 2023 | 43 min

Naming The Need For "Order"

27 december 2023 | 30 min

David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)

21 december 2023 | 57 min

"Order" and the Big Reveal

20 december 2023 | 24 min

Yaron Eliav, "A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean" (Princeton UP, 2023)

17 december 2023 | 80 min

Simone Gigliotti, "Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced" (Indiana UP, 2023)

16 december 2023 | 48 min

Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2

14 december 2023 | 50 min

More on Joseph and "Order": On Genesis 41:1-44:17

13 december 2023 | 43 min

Julia Watts Belser, "Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole" (Beacon Press, 2023)

12 december 2023 | 80 min

Martin C. Dean, "Investigating Babyn Yar: Shadows from the Valley of Death" (Lexington Books, 2023)

11 december 2023 | 36 min

Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend" (NYU Press, 2023)

9 december 2023 | 40 min

For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. From the 1940s through the 1990s, he was as iconic a sports figure in town as the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, or the Jets’ Joe Namath. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today’s most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. To this very day, many fans who grew up listening to his coverage of Knicks basketball and Giants football games, among the myriad of events that Glickman covered, recall fondly, and can still recite, his descriptions of actions in arenas and stadiums. In Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend (NYU Press, 2023), Jeffrey S. Gurock showcases the life of this important contributor to American popular culture.

In addition to the stories of how he became a master of American sports airwaves, Marty Glickman has also been remembered as a Jewish athlete who, a decade before he sat in front of a microphone, was cynically barred from running in a signature track event in the 1936 Olympics by anti-Semitic American Olympic officials. This lively biography details this traumatic event and explores not only how he coped for decades with that painful rejection but also examines how he dealt with other anti-Semitic and cultural obstacles that threatened to stymie his career. Glickman’s story underscores the complexities that faced his generation of American Jews as these children of immigrants emerged from their ethnic cocoons and strove to succeed in America amid challenges to their professional and social advancement. Marty Glickman is a story of adversity and triumph, of sports and minority group struggles, told within the context of the prejudicial barriers that were common to thousands, if not millions, of fellow Jews of his generation as they aimed to make it in America.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Raquel Ukeles et al., "101 Treasures from the National Library of Israel" (Scala Arts, 2022)

9 december 2023 | 40 min

Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah et al., "Life & Legacy: A Window into Jewish Life Across the Islamic World" (U Groningen Press, 2023)

8 december 2023 | 50 min

"Order" in Joseph's Extraordinary Dreams

7 december 2023 | 33 min

Guy Miron, "Space and Time Under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

6 december 2023 | 47 min

Joshua Skarf, "ArchitecTorah: Architectural Ideas in Judaism and the Weekly Torah Portion" (Urim, 2023)

2 december 2023 | 46 min

J. Christopher Edwards, "Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus" (Fortress Press, 2023)

2 december 2023 | 74 min

Loving Acts Through Patience: On the VaYishlach

30 november 2023 | 40 min

On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen

30 november 2023 | 61 min

Ian Probstein, trans., "Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

29 november 2023 | 64 min

Roslyn Weiss, "Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings" (Library of the Jewish People, 2023)

27 november 2023 | 72 min

Today I talked to Roslyn Weiss, editor of Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings (Library of the Jewish People, 2023).

Hasdai Crescas spent his life in public service - as a rabbi and community leader in desperate times in 14th-century Spain. Despite having limited time for writing, he produced several important works, which Collected Writings presents in their entirety. The first of these, Epistle to the Jews of Avignon, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish riots in Aragon in 1391, chronicling the unimaginable horrors the Jewish communities endured - mass conversions, suicides, deaths, and the loss of great Torah scholars - as well as his own personal tragedy, the murder of his only son, "a lamb without blemish."

To counter Christian efforts to convert Jews, Crescas composed two polemical works, only one of which has survived, The Refutation of the Christian Principles. Written in 1397-8, it offers reasoned arguments to challenge ten principles of Christianity. A great halakhist, Crescas penned many responsa, some of which are known because they were quoted by later halakhists. But only one extant work contains halakhic material - the Passover Sermon, dealing (in part) with the laws of Passover. Because of the urgent communal demands on his time, Crescas was unable to complete Lamp of the Lord, the two-volume work which was to be his response to Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and Guide of the Perplexed. His magisterial work, Light of the Lord, a work of intellectual rigor and deep religious sensibility, was his answer only to the Guide. In this brilliant work, completed in 1410, just before his death, Crescas rejects the purely intellectual Aristotelian God in favor of Judaism's God of love. It is a work suffused with love for God, the Torah, the rabbinic tradition, and the Jewish people.

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Dan Senor and Saul Singer, "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 26 min

How has a small nation of 9 million people, forced to fight for its existence and security since its founding and riven by ethnic, religious, and economic divides, proven resistant to so many of the societal ills plaguing other wealthy democracies?

Why do Israelis have among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest rates of “deaths of despair” from suicide and substance abuse? Why is Israel’s population young and growing while all other wealthy democracies are aging and shrinking? How can it be that Israel, according to a United Nations ranking, is the fourth happiest nation in the world? Why do Israelis tend to look to the future with hope, optimism, and purpose while the rest of the West struggles with an epidemic of loneliness, teen depression, and social decline?

The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (Simon and Schuster, 2023), already on the New York Times’ bestseller list, was written by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the writers behind the international bestseller Start-Up Nation. They have long been students of the global innovation race. But as they spent time with Israel’s entrepreneurs and political leaders, soldiers and students, scientists and activists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Tel Aviv techies, and Israeli Arabs, they realized that they had missed what really sets Israel apart.

Moving from military commanders integrating at-risk youth and people who are neurodiverse into national service, to high performing companies making space for working parents, from dreamers and innovators launching a duct-taped spacecraft to the moon, to bringing better health solutions to people around the world, The Genius of Israel tells the story of a diverse people and society built around the values of service, solidarity, and belonging.

Widely admired for having the world’s highest density of high-tech start-ups, Israel’s greatest innovation may not be a technology at all, but Israeli society itself. Understanding how a country facing so many challenges can be among the happiest provides surprising insights into how we can confront the crisis of community, human connectedness, and purpose in modern life.

Bold, timely, and insightful, Senor and Singer’s latest work shines an important light on the impressive innovative distinctions of Israeli society—and what other communities and countries can learn.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Katerina Lagos, "The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-1941" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 82 min

Donating Books to Children: A Chat with Alex Zabolotsky of PJ Library

25 november 2023 | 45 min

Jacob, Leah, Rachel and the "Middah" of Patience

23 november 2023 | 26 min

Israel, Hamas, and American Jews in a Time of War

22 november 2023 | 37 min

Providence and Power: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on Jewish Statesmanship from King David to David Ben Gurion

21 november 2023 | 54 min

For thousands of years, the Jewish people lacked a political state; yet, what can we say about the Jewish tradition of statesmanship? What makes it distinctive, and what can we learn from it? In Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship (Encounter Books, 2023) , Rabbi Meir Soloveichik investigates ten Jews, from King David all the way to the foundation of Israel, what we can learn from their examples, and how history can provide hope amidst recent events in Israel.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik is director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He received his PhD in Religion at Princeton in 2010. Among the world's preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured across the United States and Europe on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. He has a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, and many other outlets. He is the host of the podcast Bible 365, and you can also listen to him via the Meir Soloveichik podcast.

Sources and examples referenced in the interview:

Rembrandt's David in Prayer, 1652.
John Trumbull's George Washington Resigning His Commission and Declaration of Independence (1826).
George Washington's Letter to the Jews of Savannah (1790).
Dan Senor and Saul Singer's recent book The Genius of Israel.
A secular Israeli broadcaster borrows a kippah and performs a blessing.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Nechama Price, "Tribal Blueprints: Twelve Brothers and the Destiny of Israel" (Maggid, 2020)

20 november 2023 | 54 min

Maxim D. Shrayer, "I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah" (Academic Studies Press, 2013)

19 november 2023 | 61 min

Mira Balberg, "Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture" (U California Press, 2023)

16 november 2023 | 44 min

Building Wells of Patience

15 november 2023 | 42 min

Steven B. Bowman, "Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

15 november 2023 | 93 min

Today I talked to Steven B. Bowman about his book Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel (Wayne State UP, 2022).

Sepher Yosippon was written in Hebrew by a medieval historian noted by modern scholars for its eloquent style. This is the first known chronicle of Jewish history and legend from Adam to the destruction of the Second Temple, this is the first known text since the canonical histories written by Flavius Josephus in Greek and later translated by Christian scholars into Latin.

Sepher Yosippon has been cited and referred to by scholars, poets, and authors as the authentic source for ancient Israel for over a millennium, until overshadowed by the twentieth-century Hebrew translations of Josephus. It is based on Pseudo Hegesippus's fourth-century anti-Jewish summary of Josephus's Jewish War. However, the anonymous author [a.k.a. Joseph ben Gurion Hacohen] also consulted with the Latin versions of Josephus's works available to him. At the same time, he included a wealth of Second Temple literature as well as Roman and Christian sources. This book contains Steven Bowman's translation of the complete text of David Flusser's standard Hebrew edition of Sepher Yosippon, which includes the later medieval interpolations referring to Jesus. The present English edition also contains the translator's introduction as well as a preface by the fifteenth-century publisher of the book.

The anonymous author of this text remains unique for his approach to history, his use of sources, and his almost secular attitude, which challenges the modern picture of medieval Jews living in a religious age. In his influential novel, A Guest for the Night, the Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon emphasized the importance of Sepher Yosippon as a valuable reading to understand human nature. Bowman's translation of Flusser's notes, as well as his own scholarship, offers a well-wrought story for scholars and students interested in Jewish legend and history in the medieval period, Jewish studies, medieval literature, and folklore studies.

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Dalia Kandiyoti, "The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture" (Stanford UP, 2020)

14 november 2023 | 81 min

Walter A. Maier III, "1 Kings 12-22: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia, 2019)

12 november 2023 | 17 min

Walter A. Maier III, "1 Kings 1-11: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia, 2018)

11 november 2023 | 15 min

The Flow of Patience

9 november 2023 | 39 min

Megan Nutzman, "Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

5 november 2023 | 53 min

Austin Surls, "Making Sense of the Divine Name in the Book of Exodus: From Etymology to Literary Onomastics" (Eisenbrauns, 2017)

5 november 2023 | 26 min

Carson Bay, "Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

4 november 2023 | 63 min

Equanimity in Dark Times

2 november 2023 | 51 min

Marat Grinberg, "The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

29 oktober 2023 | 75 min

Linda Kinstler, "Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

26 oktober 2023 | 44 min

Equanimity and Abraham

26 oktober 2023 | 43 min

Equanimity and Noaḥ

24 oktober 2023 | 41 min

Yanki Tauber, "The Book of Genesis with Commentary and Insights from 500 Sages and Mystics" (Open Book Press, 2022)

24 oktober 2023 | 56 min

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF)'s Ethical Code

24 oktober 2023 | 52 min

In the past week, the entire world has been focusing on the murderous attack by the Hamas organization against the State of Israel and Israel's response to these actions. Hamas has killed 1,300 civilians and soldiers, including children, the elderly, and women. Furthermore, the methods used by Hamas in their killings have displayed an unprecedented level of cruelty, including acts of desecration of the living and the dead, sexual violence, and harming children. Additionally, they have abducted 199 civilians and soldiers. Hamas proudly boasted about these actions, publishing videos on their Telegram channel, exposing the world to their brutality.

Israel's response was swift, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launching airstrikes of an intensity not seen before, and there is also the possibility of a ground incursion into Gaza. The IDF takes pride in being a moral army, and to ensure this, several philosophers and theologians have written the IDF's ethical code, which every soldier and officer carries in their pocket. Due to the criticism and intense debates surrounding the conduct of the moral army, I have invited Professor Noam Zohar, who was part of the advisory committee for writing the code, especially focusing on the 'Purity of Arms' section. Together, we will embark on a journey to discuss questions of ethics and warfare in the Israeli military context.

Professor Noam Zohar is a distinguished scholar celebrated for his pivotal role in advising the development of the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) new ethical code, with a particular focus on the critical concept of 'Purity of Arms.' He serves as a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and is a member of the Military Ethics Research Team. At Bar-Ilan University, he holds the position of Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy, chairs the General Philosophy department, and directs the graduate program in bioethics. His research and teaching encompass a wide array of fields, including rabbinics, philosophy of halakhah, moral and political philosophy, and applied ethics, with a specific emphasis on bioethics and moral considerations in warfare.

Professor Zohar's notable publications include Quality of Life in Jewish Bioethics (Lexington Books, 2006) and Alternatives in Jewish Bioethics (State University of New York Press, 1997). He is also the co-editor of the four-volume work The Jewish Political Tradition, alongside Shalom Hartman Institute fellow Menachem Lorberbaum and Michael Walzer.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Sebastian Huebel, "Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

23 oktober 2023 | 96 min

Equanimity and Bereshit

23 oktober 2023 | 44 min

Matthew Thiessen, "A Jewish Paul: The Messiah's Herald to the Gentiles" (Baker Academic, 2023)

22 oktober 2023 | 66 min

Excavating and interpreting Paul’s thought, belief, ideas, and mission from his authentic letters and those otherwise attributed to him remains an ongoing effort in scholarship, with several competing perspectives vying for prominence. Matthew Thiessen advances an important reading of Paul within first-century Judaism, which he conceives not as a monolith of theological positions but rather as a spectrum of ideas that comfortably included Paul’s new belief in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and Paul’s own call as appointed envoy to deliver that good news to non-Jewish Gentiles.

On this episode, Matthew joined the New Books Network to discuss the recent publication of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Baker Academic, 2023), a concise and accessible introductory study of this Diasporic Jew that yet embraces the “weird” in Paul’s thinking, including his advance of pneumatic “gene therapy” rather than “cosmetic surgery” for non-Jews who wished to partake in God’s promises to Abraham. According to Thiessen, Paul must be understood first in his own historical context, complete with the philosophical and scientific presuppositions common to the first century CE, before being imported into our theological present—a method that has potential to overcome the devastating effects of centuries of Christian supersessionism but also compels us to tackle the uncomfortable apocalyptic origins of the earliest Jesus movement.

Matthew Thiessen (Ph.D., Duke University, 2010) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the rise of Christianity, particularly as it relates to early Judaism, and especially on contextualizing Paul’s letters within first-century Judaism. Atop numerous journal articles and chapter-length contributions, he has authored several books to that effect, including Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jesus and the Forces of Death (Baker Academic, 2020), and Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Melissa Weininger, "Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century" (Wayne State UP, 2023)

21 oktober 2023 | 62 min

Stefan C. Ionescu, "Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

20 oktober 2023 | 161 min

The Unquiet Legacy of Jewish Radical Meir Kahane

19 oktober 2023 | 46 min

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, "Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering" (Academic Studies Press, 2018)

7 oktober 2023 | 63 min

Seth L. Sanders, "From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylonia" (Mohr Siebeck, 2017)

6 oktober 2023 | 86 min

Ronna Detrick, "Rewriting Eve: Claiming Women's Sacred Stories As Our Own" (She Writes Press, 2023)

3 oktober 2023 | 54 min

Adolph L. Harstad, "Deuteronomy: Concordia Commentary" (Concordia Publishing House, 2022)

2 oktober 2023 | 16 min

Martina Mampieri, "Living Under the Evil Pope: The Hebrew Chronicle of Pope Paul IV by Benjamin Neḥemiah Ben Elnathan from Civitanova Marche (Brill, 2020)

30 september 2023 | 85 min

Rachel Elior, "The Unknown History of Jewish Women Through the Ages: On Learning and Illiteracy, On Slavery and Liberty" (de Gruyter, 2023)

29 september 2023 | 102 min

Hammertime and Hanukkah (with Matthew and Leeanne Thomas)

28 september 2023 | 65 min

Ruth Schwertfeger, "A Nazi Camp Near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

22 september 2023 | 62 min

Within the vast network of Nazi camps, Stutthof may be the least known beyond Poland. This book is the first scholarly publication in English to break the silence of Stutthof, where 120,000 people were interned and at least 65,000 perished. A Nazi Camp Near Danzigoffers an overview of Stutthof's history. It also explores Danzig's significance in promoting the cult of German nationalism which led to Stutthof's establishment and which shaped its subsequent development in 1942 into a Concentration Camp, with the full resources of the Nazi Reich.

A Nazi Camp Near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof (Bloomsbury, 2022) shows how Danzig/Gdansk, generally identified as the city where the Second World War started, became under Albert Forster, Hitler's hand-picked Gauleiter, 'the vanguard of Germandom in the east' and with its disputed history, the poster city for the Third Reich. It reflects on the fact that Danzig was close enough to supply Stutthof with both prisoners - initially local Poles and Jews - as well as local men for its SS workforce. Throughout the study, Ruth Schwertfeger draws on the stories of Danziger and Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass to consider the darker realities of German nationalism that even Grass's vibrant depictions and wit cannot mask. Schwertfeger demonstrates how German nationalism became more lethal for all prisoners, especially after the summer of 1944 when thousands of Jewish woman died in the Stutthof camp system or perished in the 'death marches' after January 1945. Schwertfeger uses archival and literary sources, as well as memoirs, to allow the voices of the victims to speak. Their testimonies are juxtaposed with the justifications of perpetrators. The book successfully argues that, in the end, Stutthof was no less lethal than other camps of the Third Reich, even if it was, and remains, less well-known.

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Katarzyna Person and Johannes-Dieter Steinert, "Przemysłowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

21 september 2023 | 89 min

Anthony Gad Bigio, "A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic" (Hamilton Books, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 53 min

Nathan Bills, "A Theology of Justice in Exodus" (Eisenbrauns, 2020)

16 september 2023 | 18 min

Arnold Lustiger, "Before Hashem You Shall Be Purified: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the Days of Awe" (Ohr Publishing, 2022)

15 september 2023 | 53 min

Avigdor Hameiri, "Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

15 september 2023 | 82 min

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, "Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: Achaemenid Court Culture in the Hebrew Bible" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)

14 september 2023 | 37 min

Matisyahu Shulman, "Reimagining Repentance: Experiencing the High Holidays Through the Lens of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" (Kodesh, 2023)

14 september 2023 | 56 min

Alma Rachel Heckman, "The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging" (Stanford UP, 2020)

13 september 2023 | 62 min

Norman Ravvin, "Who Gets In: An Immigration Story" (U Regina Press, 2023)

13 september 2023 | 99 min

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 september 2023 | 33 min

Jonathan Sandler, "The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy's Adventures in the United States and Europe" (2022)

8 september 2023 | 58 min

Jonathan Sandler’s The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy’s Adventures in the United States and Europe, is an adaptation of his grandfather’s 1994 war memoir. His grandfather, Bernard Sandler, was a British citizen of Latvian Jewish descent who served in the American Army. The book is illustrated by Brian Bicknell. The English GI sheds light into the experience of average people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Jonathan Sandler’s treatment of Bernard Sandler’s memoir engages issues of diaspora, bravery, and fear. This graphic memoir also makes an important contribution to our understanding the complexity of Jewish identity.

Jonathan Sandler studied Politics and History at Leicester University and has spent much of his career in the software industry, leading and managing complex projects. Jonathan, a keen sketcher, has always been passionate about World War Two history and graphic novels. In 2020, he combined these dual interests and commenced work on The English GI, which was published in 2022. Since then, Jonathan has maintained his passion for graphic novels and history by curating a blog on his website “Graphic Memoir”, spotlighting authors and books in the genre. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and three children, who are active members of North West London's Jewish Community.

Brian Bicknell is a commercial artist and illustrator whose work with Comics, Graphic Novels, Television, and Film, as a Co-Writer, Illustrator, and Storyboard/Concept Artist has appeared in the United States, and internationally. Brian founded his own illustration company, Bicknell Designs, in 2008. Brian was classically trained in Illustration, and Graphic Design in Boston MA., and cannot remember a time when he was not drawing or sketching.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Valerie Hébert ed., "Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

7 september 2023 | 56 min

Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), edited by Valerie Hébert, compiles essays on the meaning of twelve photographs of a terrible atrocity. In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Sķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at -- so why should we?

Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question. While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Sķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting. With a foreword by Edward Anders, who narrowly escaped the December 1941 shooting, Framing the Holocaust represents an original approach to an iconic series of Holocaust photographs. This book contributes to compelling debates in the emerging field of visual history, including the challenges and responsibilities of using photographs to teach about atrocity.

Link Mentioned in the Episode: Digitized Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv archive (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Tomaz Jardim, "Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the 'Bitch of Buchenwald'" (Harvard UP, 2023)

6 september 2023 | 56 min

Nancy L. Segal, "The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)

5 september 2023 | 59 min

Andrew Hesketh, "Escape to Gwrych Castle: A Jewish Refugee Story" (U of Wales Press, 2023)

4 september 2023 | 37 min

Heike Bauer et al., "Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders" (Syracuse UP, 2022)

2 september 2023 | 56 min

Romina Yalonetzky, "Gente Como Uno: Class, Belonging, and Transnationalism in Jewish Life in Lima" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

2 september 2023 | 108 min

H. Norman Strickman, "The Secret of the Torah: A Translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra's Sefer Yesod Mora" (Kodesh Press, 2021)

30 augusti 2023 | 61 min

Pothiti Hantzaroula, "Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greece: Memory, Testimony and Subjectivity" (Routledge, 2020)

29 augusti 2023 | 95 min

On “Henry Kissinger and His World” with author Barry Gewen

29 augusti 2023 | 61 min

Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman, "Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens" (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

29 augusti 2023 | 52 min

Wolf Gruner, "Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany" (Yale UP, 2023)

29 augusti 2023 | 86 min

Ari Finkelstein, "The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch" (U California Press, 2018)

26 augusti 2023 | 72 min

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

21 augusti 2023 | 40 min

Jason Weiner, "Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility" (Georgetown UP, 2022)

16 augusti 2023 | 48 min

The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. Jason Weiner's book Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility (Georgetown UP, 2022) is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics.

But this book is not only about applying classical Jewish values to bioethical dilemmas. It seeks to develop an approach that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations and social responsibilities. Jewish values focus on requirements, obligations, and commandments, and has thus sometimes been called an "Ethics of Responsibility," by advancing new relevant approaches that can encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing compassionate care to all, based on these inspiring and timeless values.

Each chapter of this book explores questions such as: "Are we expected to risk our lives on behalf of others?" "When we can only help a limited number of people, how do we prioritize?" "What are the obligations and expectations of a society or government?" "Are issues of cultural sensitivity relevant in how we discharge our obligations to others?" "What should we do when obligations for others violate our own moral principles or commitments?" "Are there limits to how far one can be expected to go for others?" These and other issues are addressed in this book, as it attempts to describe a meaningful and compassionate Jewish bioethic of responsibility for our times.

Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org.

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Yehuda Halper, "Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa" (Brill, 2021)

15 augusti 2023 | 60 min

Gadi Sagiv, "Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

13 augusti 2023 | 32 min

Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, "Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

12 augusti 2023 | 48 min

Esra Özyürek, "Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany" (Stanford UP, 2023)

10 augusti 2023 | 43 min

Stanley E. Porter and Alan E. Kurschner eds., "The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism" (Pickwick, 2023)

8 augusti 2023 | 22 min

Mike Rothschild, "Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories" (Melville House, 2023)

6 augusti 2023 | 49 min

Jack Cohen and Yosef Lynn, "Nurture Their Nature: The Torah’s Essential Guidance for Parents and Teachers" (Mosaica Press, 2021)

4 augusti 2023 | 65 min

Joshua Cohen’s "The Netanyahus" (JP, Eugene Sheppard)

3 augusti 2023 | 48 min

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?

Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.

With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion…

Mentioned in this episode:

Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."
Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."
Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.
Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.
"Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")
Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.
Leon Feuchtwanger
"There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.")
Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real"
Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

Read transcript here

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James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, "Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict" (Zero Books, 2023)

2 augusti 2023 | 99 min

Alongside their collective acumen in traditional historical-critical and social-scientific approaches to the New Testament, James Crossley and Robert J. Myles bring a worthwhile dose of historical materialist criticism to historical Jesus scholarship in Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Zero Books/John Hunt Publishing, 2023). And while the Jesus they reconstruct from the various sources available for analysis may not evolve him into a Marxist or a modern socialist, Crossley and Myles regard the evidence for deprivation among the Judean/Galilean peasantry too significant to ignore, such that “revolutionary millenarianism” takes hold among these lower classes who yearned for a great reversal of material conditions and fortunes under a soon-to-be-revealed theocratic reign installing the “Jesus party” (that they occasionally, in a nod to the traditions of Marxist scholarship, refer to as a politburo) atop the forthcoming kingdom of God. This pair of scholars joined the New Books Network recently to discuss their “historical materialist Jesus” and their fresh contributions—from Jesus’s “mission to the rich” to his “preferential option for death”—to the ongoing quest to sift reliable historical data about the earliest Jesus movement from the outwardly theological gospels that remain our best sources for his life.

James Crossley (Ph.D., University of Nottingham, 2002) is Professor of Religion, Politics and Culture at MF Oslo and the Academic Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM). He has published widely on Christian origins and religion in English political history, including Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants’ Revolt in English Political History, 1381–2020 (Equinox, 2022).

Robert J. Myles (Ph.D., University of Auckland, 2013) is Senior Lecturer in New Testament at the University of Divinity in Australia. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, he is currently Executive Editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Among his publications are The Homeless Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014) and the edited volume Class Struggle in the New Testament (Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019).

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Yonatan Adler, "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal" (Yale UP, 2022)

29 juli 2023 | 84 min

In The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale University Press, 2022), Yonatan Adler pursues the societal adoption of recognizable Jewish practices by Judeans in antiquity with the ultimate aim of establishing a particular terminus ante quem (temporal limit before which) these practices must have become widespread. Sifting through both textual and archaeological evidence for the aversion to graven images/figural artwork, dietary restrictions, synagogue worship, circumcision, the Sabbath as a day of rest, Judean festivals, and more, Adler’s “social history” demonstrates that such observances can be conclusively dated at various points within the second century BCE—but not on any meaningful scale before this crucial time of the Maccabean revolt and Israel’s brief period of Hasmonean self-rule. Adler joined the New Books Network to discuss his potentially paradigm-shifting findings, which contrast strongly with claims from the Hebrew Bible and much of biblical scholarship that, on the basis of “intellectual history,” prefer to locate Jewish origins in the postexilic Persian Achaemenid period (ca. 539–332 BCE) if not significantly earlier than this.

Yonatan Adler (Ph.D., Bar-Ilan University, 2011) is Associate Professor in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel, where he also heads its Institute of Archaeology. Adler specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. Previously, his research has focused on ritual purity observance evidenced in the archaeological remains of chalk vessels and immersion pools, and he has also published extensively on ancient tefillin (phylacteries) from Qumran and elsewhere in the Judean Desert. Dr. Adler has directed excavations at several sites throughout Israel, and from 2019 to 2020 he held the appointment of Horace W. Goldsmith Visiting Associate Professor in Judaic Studies at Yale University.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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Lea Taragin-Zeller, "The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land" (NYU Press, 2023)

24 juli 2023 | 63 min

In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations.

In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (New York University Press, 2023), Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel's steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost.

The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state.

Lea Taragin-Zeller is Assistant Professor in the Federmann School of Public Policy and Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Yamin Levy, "The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition" (MHC Press, 2023)

23 juli 2023 | 54 min

Erica Brown, "Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning" (Maggid, 2023)

22 juli 2023 | 21 min

Moshe Miller, "Rising Moon: Unraveling the Book of Ruth" (Kodesh Press, 2022)

21 juli 2023 | 35 min

Paul Hanebrink, "In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944" (Cornell UP, 2018)

21 juli 2023 | 66 min

Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2018)

19 juli 2023 | 72 min

Béla Bodó, "Black Humor and the White Terror" (Routledge, 2023)

19 juli 2023 | 77 min

Béla Bodó's book Black Humor and the White Terror (Routledge, 2023) examines political humor as a reaction to the lost war, the post-war chaos, and antisemitic violence in Hungary between 1918 and 1922. While there is an increased body of literature on Jewish humor as a form of resistance and a means of resilience during the Holocaust, only a handful of studies have addressed Jewish humor as a reaction to physical attacks and increased discrimination in Europe during and after the First World War. The majority of studies have approached the issue of Jewish humor from an anthropological, cultural, or linguistic perspective; they have been interested in the humor of lower- or lower-middle-class Jews in the East European shtetles before 1914.

On the other hand, this study follows a historical and political approach to the same topic and focuses on the reaction of urban, middle-class, and culturally assimilated Jews to recent events: to the disintegration of the Dual Monarchy, the collapse of law and order, increased violence, the reversal of Jewish emancipation and the rise of new and more pernicious antisemitic prejudices. The study sees humor not only as a form of entertainment and jokes as literature and a product of popular culture, but also as a heuristic device to understand the world and make sense of recent changes, as well as a means to defend one's social position, individual and group identity, strike back at the enemy, and last but not least, to gain the support and change the hearts and minds of non-Jews and neutral bystanders.

Unlike previous scholarly works on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this study sees Budapest Jewish humor after WWI as a joint adventure: as a product of urban and Hungarian culture, in which Jewish not only played an important role but also cofounded. Finally, the book addressed the issue of continuity in Hungarian history, the "twisted road to Auschwitz" whether urban Jewish humor, as a form of escapism, helped to desensitize the future victims of the Holocaust to the approaching danger, or it continued to play the same defensive and positive role in the interwar period, as it had done in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.

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Ben Nadler, "The Jewish Deli: An Illustrated Guide to the Chosen Food" (Chronicle Books, 2023)

18 juli 2023 | 54 min

Judith Roumani, "Jews in Southern Tuscany During the Holocaust" (Lexington Books, 2020)

15 juli 2023 | 91 min

David Curwin, "Kohelet: A Map to Eden" (Maggid, 2023)

13 juli 2023 | 17 min

Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon, 2022)

12 juli 2023 | 65 min

Today I talked to Joseph Sassoon about his book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (Pantheon, 2022)

They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as ‘the Rothschilds of the East.’

Mesopotamian in origin, and for more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and sons starting over with nothing, and beginning to trade in India in cotton and opium.

The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factories, and setting up branches in shipping in China, and expanding beyond, to Japan, and further west, to Paris and London. They became members of British parliament; were knighted; and owned and edited Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The Observer.

And in 1887, the exalted dynasty of Sassoon joined forces with the banking empire of Rothschild and were soon joined by marriage, fusing together two of the biggest Jewish commerce and banking families in the world.

Against the monumental canvas of two centuries of the Ottoman Empire and the changing face of the Far East, across Europe and Great Britain during the time of its farthest reach, Joseph Sassoon gives us a riveting generational saga of the making of this magnificent family dynasty.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible" (Princeton UP, 2023)

8 juli 2023 | 42 min

Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text.

But in The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge.

Dr. Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life.

The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Daniel Boyarin, "The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto" (Yale UP, 2023)

7 juli 2023 | 55 min

Jennifer Caplan, "Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials" (Wayne State UP, 2023)

4 juli 2023 | 61 min

Lia Brozgal and Rebecca Glasberg, eds., "A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Leïla Sebbar" (U California Press, 2023)

4 juli 2023 | 98 min

Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, "Stereotyping Religion II: Critiquing Clichés" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

1 juli 2023 | 42 min

Building on the success of Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés, this follow up volume dismantles a further 10 widespread stereotypes and clichés about religion, focusing on clichés that a new generation of students are most familiar with. Each chapter includes: A description of a particular cliché; Discussion of where it appears in popular culture or popular media; Discussion of where it appears in scholarly literature; A historical contextualization of its use in the past; An analysis of the social or rhetorical work the cliché accomplishes in the present. Clichés addressed include: "Religion and science naturally conflict", "All religions are against LGBTQ rights", "Eastern religions are more spiritual than Western religions", "Religion is personal and not subject to government regulation", "Religious pluralism gives everyone a voice", etc. Written in an easy and accessible style, Stereotyping Religion II: Critiquing Clichés is suitable for all readers looking to clear away unsophisticated assumptions in preparation for more critical studies.

Brad Stoddard is Associate Professor in the History and Art History Department at McDaniel College, Westminster, MD. He researches religion in the United States. He is the author of Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida's Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State (2021) and has edited or coedited several books. He is currently researching the topic of entheogens.

Craig Martin is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY. His research interests include method and theory in the study of religion, discourse analysis and ideology critique, and poststructuralism. His books include A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (2017) and Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture (2022). He edits a book series with Bloomsbury titled Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com

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Anna Müller, "An Ordinary Life?: The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996" (Ohio UP, 2023)

30 juni 2023 | 74 min

Edward Kissi, "Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples" (Routledge, 2021)

29 juni 2023 | 115 min

David Wenham, "Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

27 juni 2023 | 36 min

Yaakov Beasley, "Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: Lights in the Valley" (Maggid, 2020)

26 juni 2023 | 55 min

Illuminations Episode 9: Rituals for a Dying World

22 juni 2023 | 23 min

W. Gil Shin, "The 'Exodus' in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31): A Lukan Form of Israel's Restoration Hope" (Brill, 2022)

21 juni 2023 | 34 min

Daniel A. Klein, "Shadal on Numbers: Samuel David Luzzatto's Interpretation of the Book of Bemidbar" (Kodesh Press, 2023)

18 juni 2023 | 30 min

Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)

18 juni 2023 | 51 min

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement.

Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023) challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith.

Orit Avishai is an ethnographer at Fordham University, where she teaches in the Sociology Department and in the Program on Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work considers how ideology and culture, broadly defined, shape social institutions, identities, political dialogue, and cultural practices. Her recent public-facing writing has appeared in The Conversation, The Katz Center Blog, and Religion Dispatches. Dr. Avishai has degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, the Yale Law School, and Tel Aviv University Law School.

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Pinchas Blitt, "A Promise of Sweet Tea" (Azrieli Foundation, 2021)

16 juni 2023 | 96 min

Randy Grigsby, "This Labyrinth of Darkness and Light: Henrietta Szold, the Rescue of Children from Hitler's Europe and Her Palestine Experience" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2022)

8 juni 2023 | 53 min

Randy Grigsby, "A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019)

6 juni 2023 | 56 min

In October 1938, eight-year-old Josef Rosenbaum, his mother, and his younger sister set out from Germany on a cruel odyssey, fleeing into eastern Europe along with thousands of other refugees. Sent to Siberian slave labor camps in the wildernesses, they suffered brutal cold, famine, and disease. When Germany invaded Russia many refugees were forced out of Siberia to primitive tent camps in Uzbekistan, accompanied by the Polish army-in-exile previously imprisoned by the Soviets. Within weeks the commander of the army, General Wladyslaw Anders, received orders to relocate his army to Iran to train to fight alongside the British in North Africa. Instructed to leave without the civilians, Anders instead ordered all evacuees, including Jews, to head southward with his troops. Joe and the refugees were again loaded on trains, accompanied by the Polish soldiers, and sent to the port of Pahlavi on the Caspian Sea.

Then, transported by trucks over treacherous mountain roads, they finally arrived in Tehran, where they struggled to survive in horrifying conditions. In October 1942, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem accepted responsibility for the nine hundred orphaned Jewish children in the camp, and by January 1943, the agency secured travel certificates for the Tehran Children to evacuate to Palestine. Joe and the other children, after five terrible years, finally reached safety at the Athlit Detention Camp, north of Haifa, on 18 February 1943.

Readers will find the story is one of the swift brutalities of war, and the suffering of civilians swept up in the maelstrom of fierce conflict. Randy Grigsby's book A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019) recreates a remarkable, and little-known story of escape and survival during the Second World War.

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Eliyana R. Adler and Katerina Capková, "Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

4 juni 2023 | 57 min

Béla Bodó, "The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921" (Routledge, 2019)

30 maj 2023 | 108 min

Hilary Frances Aked, "Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity" (Verso, 2023)

30 maj 2023 | 82 min

Bart D. Ehrman, "Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

28 maj 2023 | 37 min

Jessica M. Marglin, "The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Princeton UP, 2022)

27 maj 2023 | 61 min

In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama’s riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Tracing a decade-long legal battle involving Jews, Muslims, and Christians from both sides of the Mediterranean, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a riveting history of citizenship across regional, cultural, and political borders.

On its face, the crux of the lawsuit seemed simple: To which state did Shamama belong when he died? But the case produced hundreds of pages in legal briefs and thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees before the man’s estate could be distributed among his quarrelsome heirs. Jessica Marglin follows the unfolding of events, from Shamama’s rise to power in Tunis and his self-imposed exile in France, to his untimely death in Livorno and the clashing visions of nationality advanced during the lawsuit. Marglin brings to life a Dickensian array of individuals involved in the case: family members who hoped to inherit the estate; Tunisian government officials; an Algerian Jewish fixer; rabbis in Palestine, Tunisia, and Livorno; and some of Italy’s most famous legal minds.

Drawing from a wealth of correspondence, legal briefs, rabbinic opinions, and court rulings, The Shamama Case reimagines how we think about Jews, the Mediterranean, and belonging in the nineteenth century.

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Aomar Boum, "Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2023)

26 maj 2023 | 65 min

In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the forced labor camps of Algeria and Morocco, Jews and other "undesirables" faced brutal conditions and struggled to survive in an unforgiving landscape quite unlike Europe. In Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa (Stanford UP, 2023), historian Aomar Boum and illustrator Nadjib Berber take us inside this lesser-known side of the traumas wrought by the Holocaust by following one man's journey as a Holocaust refugee.

Hans Frank is a Jewish journalist covering politics in Berlin, who grows increasingly uneasy as he witnesses the Nazi Party consolidate power and decides to flee Germany. Through connections with a transnational network of activists organizing against fascism and anti-Semitism, Hans ultimately lands in French Algeria, where days after his arrival, the Vichy regime designates all foreign Jews as "undesirables" and calls for their internment. On his way to Morocco, he is detained by Vichy authorities and interned first at Le Vernet, then later transported to different camps in the deserts of Morocco and Algeria. With memories of his former life as a political journalist receding like a dream, Hans spends the next year and a half in forced labor camps, hearing the stories of others whose lives have been upended by violence and war.

Through bold, historically inflected illustrations that convey the tension of the coming war and the grimness of the Vichy camps, Aomar Boum and Nadjib Berber capture the experiences of thousands of refugees through the fictional Hans, chronicling how the traumas of the Holocaust extended far beyond the borders of Europe.

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Saskia Coenen Snyder, "A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting" (Oxford UP, 2022)

25 maj 2023 | 60 min

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews.

In A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting (Oxford University Press, 2023), historian Dr. Saskia Coenen Snyder traces how once-peripheral Jewish populations became the central architects of a new, global exchange of diamonds that connected African sites of supply, European manufacturing centers, American retailers, and western consumers. Centuries of restrictions had limited Jews to trade and finance, businesses that often heavily relied on internal networks. Jews were well-positioned to become key players in the earliest stage of the diamond trade and its growth into a global industry, a development fueled by technological advancements, a dramatic rise in the demand of luxury goods, and an abundance of rough stones. Relying on mercantile and familial ties across continents, Jews created a highly successful commodity chain that included buyers, brokers, cutters, factory owners, financiers, and retailers.

Working within a diasporic ethnic community that bridged city and countryside, metropole and colony, Jews helped build a flourishing diamond industry, notably Hatton Garden in London and the Diamond District of New York City, and a place for themselves in the modern world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Avigail Rock, "Great Biblical Commentators: Biographies, Methodologies, and Contributions" (Maggid, 2023)

23 maj 2023 | 38 min

The vast and vibrant world of biblical commentary has, over the generations, shaped not only our understanding of the Tanakh, but Judaism's worldview and values as well. The biblical commentator - or parshan - is a spiritual seeker, proposing answers to the theological and existential questions raised by the text and serving as mediator between Tanakh and the reader. Keenly aware of their contemporary reality, biblical exegetes search for the Torah's answers to both timeless human issues and to the most crucial questions of their time.

The widely hailed work, Great Biblical Commentators: Biographies, Methodologies, and Contributions (Maggid, 2023) by Dr. Avigail Rock (of blessed memory), is a groundbreaking study that surveys over twenty of the greatest biblical exegetes in the course of Jewish history, beginning with Onkelos,continuing with leading medieval commentators such as Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Ramban, and Aharonim such as Malbim and Netziv, and ending with influential twentieth-century commentators. It includes discussion of the commentators' exegetical methods, their interactions with their historical period and environment, and their contributions to the world of exegesis. Through exploration of the commentators' biographies and methodologies, and enriched by carefully chosen and insightful examples from their works, Avigail Rock contextualizes and illuminates their philosophies, while giving us a glimpse into their masterful thought and analyses.

Join as we speak with Avigail Rock's brother, Avraham Poupko about his sister's rich legacy in Torah teaching and her Great Biblical Commentators.

Rabbanit Dr. Avigail (Poupko) Rock (1971–2019) was a prominent lecturer and educator in the field of Tanakh and its exegesis. Dr. Rock received her PhD from the Tanakh department of Bar-Ilan University for her thesis on the biblical exegete R. Yosef ibn Caspi. She was one of the first women licensed as a Rabbinical Advocate and taught at the Institute for Rabbinical Advocates. Due to her unique skill in deriving inspirational educational messages from literary and exegetical analysis, Dr. Avigail Rock was a sought-after lecturer and a source of inspiration for students all over the world. Her untimely passing at the age of forty-eight left her family and community bereft of her teachings, sage advice, and unfailing good humor.

For more about Dr. Avigail Rock and her Torah, visit: AvigailRock.com.

Avraham Poupko may be reached at: avrahampoupko9@gmail.com

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu.

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Elly Gotz, "Flights of Spirit" (Azrieli Foundation, 2018)

20 maj 2023 | 55 min

Simon Geissbühler, ed., "Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath" (Ibidem Press, 2016)

19 maj 2023 | 61 min

Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)

17 maj 2023 | 39 min

Oded Zinger, "Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

11 maj 2023 | 54 min

Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)

10 maj 2023 | 33 min

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich.

Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life.

In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton, 2023), Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Samantha Pickette, "Peak TV's Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy" (Lexington, 2022)

7 maj 2023 | 66 min

Ephraim Chamiel, "To Know Torah" (2018)

6 maj 2023 | 33 min

Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)

3 maj 2023 | 27 min

Ostap Kin, "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" (HURI, 2022)

29 april 2023 | 51 min

Remember the Sabbath (with Senator Joe Lieberman)

27 april 2023 | 46 min

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman, "Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus" (U Rochester Press, 2020)

22 april 2023 | 112 min

Barak S. Cohen, "For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod" (Brill, 2017)

21 april 2023 | 31 min

Barak S. Cohen, "The Legal Methodology of Late Nehardean Sages in Sasanian Babylonia" (Brill, 2011)

20 april 2023 | 63 min

Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)

20 april 2023 | 48 min

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them?

Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.

With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion....

Mentioned in this episode:

Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."
Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."
Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.
Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.
"Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")
Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.
Leon Feuchtwanger
"There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.")
Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real"
Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

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Joshua Berman, "Narrative Analogy in the Hebrew Bible: Battle Stories and Their Equivalent Non-battle Narratives" (Brill, 2004)

19 april 2023 | 22 min

Timothy Sean Quinn, "Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon" (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021)

18 april 2023 | 95 min

Piotr M. A. Cywiński, "Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human" (Muzeum Auschwitz, 2022)

16 april 2023 | 61 min

The Future of Antisemitism: A Discussion with Dave Rich

15 april 2023 | 59 min

Laura Hobson Faure, "A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

10 april 2023 | 73 min

Helene J. Sinnreich, "The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

7 april 2023 | 47 min

Laura Arnold Leibman, "Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family" (Oxford UP, 2021)

5 april 2023 | 51 min

S. L. Wisenberg, "The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

4 april 2023 | 24 min

Today I talked to S. L. Wisenberg about her book The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home (U Massachusetts Press, 2023).

As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. In this remarkable collection of essays, she recalls chasing popularity, taking a Neiman Marcus sponsored class about fashion at age eleven. She tells funny but poignant stories about her travels in Paris, Vienna, and Poland, including a numbing visit to Auschwitz. In one essay Wisenberg searches through family records and history books and conducts interviews to learn more about Selma, Alabama, where her great grandparents ended up after leaving Lithuania. In another she describes going through sorority rush when she’s twenty-nine and teaching at the university. This is a moving, sometimes hilarious exploration of love, life, history. As the reviewer in the Southern Review of Books wrote,” This luxe tapestry of stories and ideas creates a vivid image of Wisenberg as a woman, as Jewish, and as a thinker in the world…. This book is at once intellectual, deeply personal, and delightful.”

S.L. Wisenberg is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In; the essay collection Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions; and a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The former co-director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University, she has taught workshops and read and lectured widely. Wisenberg lives in Chicago, where she edits Another Chicago Magazine. When she's not writing, she's walking through her Chicago neighborhood, fixing a stir-fry, or collecting grocery lists that people leave behind.

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Andrea Hammel, "Finding Refuge: Stories of the Men, Women and Children who fFed to Wales to Escape the Nazis" (Honno Press, 2022)

4 april 2023 | 42 min

Jeremy Kagan, "The Intellect and the Exodus" (Maggid, 2018)

3 april 2023 | 55 min

Andrew D. Berns, "The Land Is Mine: Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

2 april 2023 | 66 min

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and built environments of Bible stories. The Land Is Mine: Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) asks what inspired this and suggests that the answer lies not in timeless exegetical or theological trends, but in the material realities of late medieval and early modern Iberia, during a period of drastic changes in land use.

The book uses a highly traditional source base in a decidedly untraditional way. In Jewish Studies, Andrew D. Berns observes, biblical commentary is typically studied as an intramural activity. Though scholars have conceded that Jewish scriptural exegesis welcomes material and ideas from other fields and traditions, little to no work treats premodern Hebrew Bible commentary as also drawing upon Classical and Christian sources as well as contemporary writings on land management and political economy. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama were engaged with questions that had broad resonance during their lives: the proper way to treat the land, the best occupations to pursue, and the ideal setting for human community. Scriptural commentary was the forum in which they addressed these problems and posed solutions to them.

A work of intellectual history, The Land Is Mine demonstrates that it is impossible to understand Jewish culture without considering the physical realities on which it depended.

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Ari Joskowicz, "Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2023)

2 april 2023 | 66 min

Philip Jenkins, "He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91" (Oxford UP, 2022)

1 april 2023 | 28 min

David Horgan, "Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West" (U Nevada Press, 2021)

1 april 2023 | 89 min

Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West (U Nevada Press, 2021) tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, a mother (Rachel Koskin) and her daughter (Helmi). With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the Second World War to become United States citizens after seeking safe harbor in the unlikely western desert town of Reno, Nevada. This compelling narrative is also a memoir, told lovingly by Helmi's son, David, of growing up under the wings of these strong women in an unusual American family.

Rachel Koskin was a middle-class Russian Jew born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1896. Ten years later, her family fled from the murderous pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire eastward to Harbin, a Russian-controlled city within China's borders on the harsh plain of Manchuria. Full of lively detail and the struggles of being stateless in a time of war, the narrative follows Rachel through her life in Harbin, which became a center of Russian culture in the Far East; the birth of her daughter, Helmi, in Kobe, Japan; their life together in the slums of Shanghai and back in Japan during World War II, where they endured many more hardships; and their subsequent immigration to the United States.

This remarkable account uncovers a history of refugees living in war-torn China and Japan, a history that to this day remains largely unknown. It is also a story of survival during a long period of upheaval and war--from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust--and an intimate portrait of an American immigrant family. David reveals both the joys and tragedies he experienced growing up in a multicultural household in post-Second World War America with a Jewish mother, a live-in Russian grandmother, and a devout Irish Catholic American father.

As David develops a clearer awareness of the mysterious past lives of his mother and grandmother--and the impact of these events on his own understanding of the long-term effects of fear, trauma, and loss--he shows us that, even in times of peace and security, we are all shadows of our past, marked by our experiences, whether we choose to reveal them to others or not.

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Eric Alterman, "We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel" (Basic Book, 2022)

30 mars 2023 | 63 min

Sara Koplik, "A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan" (Brill, 2015)

30 mars 2023 | 76 min

Suzanna Eibuszyc, "Memory Is Our Home: Loss and Remembering--Three Generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s" (Ibidem, 2022)

29 mars 2023 | 113 min

Roni Mikel-Arieli, "Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948-1994)" (de Gruyter, 2022)

28 mars 2023 | 136 min

Karen Baum Gordon, "The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)

27 mars 2023 | 66 min

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.

In The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust (U Tennessee Press, 2021), Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed.

Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father’s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family’s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations—now many years after the tragic events of World War II—what it means to remember.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Kieron Pim, "Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth" (Granta Books, 2022)

26 mars 2023 | 59 min

Max Kaiser, "Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

21 mars 2023 | 85 min

Publishing Jewish Children's Books: A Chat with Joni Sussman

19 mars 2023 | 49 min

Ellin Bessner, "Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II" (New Jewish Press, 2018)

18 mars 2023 | 59 min

Simon Parkin, "The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp" (Scribner, 2022)

18 mars 2023 | 68 min

The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp (Scribner, 2022 is the “riveting…truly shocking” (The New York Times Book Review) story of a Jewish orphan who fled Nazi Germany for London, only to be arrested and sent to a British internment camp for suspected foreign agents on the Isle of Man, alongside a renowned group of refugee musicians, intellectuals, artists, and—possibly—genuine spies.

Following the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, Peter Fleischmann evaded the Gestapo’s roundups in Berlin by way of a perilous journey to England on a Kindertransport rescue, an effort sanctioned by the UK government to evacuate minors from Nazi-controlled areas.train. But he could not escape the British police, who came for him in the early hours and shipped him off to Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, under suspicion of being a spy for the very regime he had fled.

During Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews like Peter escaped and found refuge in Britain. After war broke out and paranoia gripped the nation, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that these innocent asylum seekers—so-called “enemy aliens”—be interned.

When Peter arrived at Hutchinson Camp, he found one of history’s most astounding prison populations: renowned professors, composers, journalists, and artists. Together, they created a thriving cultural community, complete with art exhibitions, lectures, musical performances, and poetry readings. The artists welcomed Peter as their pupil and forever changed the course of his life. Meanwhile, suspicions grew that a real spy was hiding among them—one connected to a vivacious heiress from Peter’s past.

Drawing from unpublished first-person accounts and newly declassified government documents, award-winning journalist Simon Parkin reveals an “extraordinary yet previously untold true story” (Daily Express) that serves as a “testimony to human fortitude despite callous, hypocritical injustice” (The New Yorker) and “an example of how individuals can find joy and meaning in the absurd and mundane” (The Spectator).

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spofity here. War Books in on YouTube and on Facebook.

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Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)

18 mars 2023 | 106 min

Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman

17 mars 2023 | 64 min

Philip W. Blood, "Birds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

13 mars 2023 | 66 min

Omer Bartov, "The Butterfly and the Axe" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2023)

10 mars 2023 | 67 min

Sharon Shalom, "From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Ethiopian Jews" (Gefen Books, 2016)

8 mars 2023 | 58 min

The Sobibor and Treblinka Death Camps: A Discussion with Chris Webb

8 mars 2023 | 68 min

Kiril Feferman, "If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)

7 mars 2023 | 90 min

On Chaim Grade’s "The Yeshiva"

5 mars 2023 | 62 min

Jordan Gorfinkel, "The Koren Tanakh Graphic Novel: Esther" (Koren, 2023)

4 mars 2023 | 43 min

Francine Lazarus, "A Hidden Jewish Child from Belgium: Survival, Scars and Healing" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2017)

3 mars 2023 | 102 min

Francine Lazarus survived WWII in Belgium hidden with strangers, isolated from her family, and moved from place to place. She witnessed murder and was often injured herself. With her father murdered in Auschwitz, her story continues post-war with the young Francine, neglected and abused by her family, being sent into foster care. At 13 she was sent to work and forced to abandon education. Like most child Survivors, she was told to forget about her war experiences. After an involuntary migration to Australia, her life began to improve. She created a loving family and, in middle age, earned a bachelor's and master's degrees. However, this testimony is much more than a chronicle of Francine's life. Plagued by secrecy, guilt, and shame, she explains how silence affected her life, and the events that prompted her to share her story.

A Hidden Jewish Child from Belgium: Survival, Scars and Healing (Vallentine Mitchell, 2017) is particularly valuable because Francine relates her memories, emotions and introspection to the existing literature on Hidden Children. The research on her life, family and their history (including books, papers, archives, and museum documents) is interspersed throughout the book, offering a detailed portrayal of her situation. This description by a Survivor of her reconstruction and self-healing process is rare in existing literature. Furthermore, her immigration, part of the recovery process, is a fascinating and under-researched topic, which allows for a unique insight into post-war expatriation. The issue of reconstruction is what makes this book a considerable addition to current literature. It fills the gap between the intimacy of individual memoirs and the past ten years' academic research conducted on elderly hidden Jewish children by historians, psychologists, and other professionals.

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Measure for Measure Episode 2: Olives

3 mars 2023 | 20 min

Reuven Mohl, "Faith Fulfilled: Megillat Esther and Ma'ariv Evening Service for Purim" (Urim Publications, 2022)

3 mars 2023 | 43 min

Kenneth R. Stow, "Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2016)

28 februari 2023 | 86 min

Susan Weingarten, "Haroset: A Taste of Jewish History" (Toby Press, 2019)

26 februari 2023 | 49 min

Ron Hirschbein and Amin Asfari, "Jews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination" (Routledge, 2023)

26 februari 2023 | 76 min

Alexandra Chiriac, "Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest" (de Gruyter, 2022)

25 februari 2023 | 69 min

Jonathan Homrighausen, "Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: The Song of Songs, and The Saint Johns Bible" (Liturgical Press, 2022)

25 februari 2023 | 44 min

More on Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust

24 februari 2023 | 82 min

Sarah M. Zaides, "Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire" (Libra Kitap, 2022)

24 februari 2023 | 68 min

Digging for Answers: The Archaeology of Jerusalem and the Politics of Archaeology

23 februari 2023 | 67 min

Katharina Galor, an archaeology professor at the at the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University who has done a lot of excavation in Israel, is the author of The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (2013). She takes us through the history of Jerusalem from its Canaanite beginnings to the capital of Israel today.

We discuss the foundations and geography of this fortified city in the hills, the importance of water, and the lives of ordinary citizens. We talk about the First and Second Temples and the improvements made by Herod “the Great” whom Christians recall as a notorious infanticide yet who is curiously prominent today—partly because many of his improvements are still visible, partly because they point to aspects of history that both Jews and Christians (but not Muslims) wish to emphasize—which brings us to the politics of digging up the past in the Holy Land. Finally, we turn to the problematic German miniseries Unorthodox that was so popular on Netflix recently and its portrayal of traditional Hasidic Jews in New York and progressive Germans in Berlin.

Katy Galor’s faculty webpage and Joukowsky Institute page at Brown University
Katy Galor and co-author Sa'ed Atshan discuss their book, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians (2020), at the Watson Institute, Brown University.
Katy Galor’s books at Amazon.com.
Katy Galor’s article: “King Herod in Jerusalem: The Politics of Cultural Heritage,” Jerusalem Quarterly, Issue 62 (Spring 2015). Also here.
Trailer for Unorthodox, Netflix miniseries, 2020.
Article by Leah Aharoni: “Netflix’s ‘Unorthodox’ Degrades Hasidic Jews into Caricatures,” Jewish Journal, April 27, 2020.
Article by Julie Joanes: “Everything ‘Unorthodox’ gets wrong about being Orthodox,” Forward, April 30, 2020.

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Peter Hayes, "Why? Explaining the Holocaust" (Norton, 2017)

23 februari 2023 | 64 min

Elżbieta Janicka and Michael Steinlauf, "This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022)

22 februari 2023 | 89 min

Oren Kessler, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

21 februari 2023 | 87 min

In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities that for two decades had midwifed the Zionist project. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives—Jewish, British, and Arab—and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict ever since. Yet incredibly, no history of this seminal, formative first “Intifada” has ever been published for a general audience.

The 1936–1939 revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting rival families, city and country, rich and poor in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself, shredding the social fabric, sidelining pragmatists in favor of extremists, and propelling waves of refugees from their homes. British forces’ aggressive counterinsurgency took care of the rest, finally quashing the uprising on the eve of World War II. The revolt to end Zionism had instead crushed the Arabs themselves, leaving them crippled in facing the Jews’ own drive for statehood a decade later.

To the Jews, the insurgency would leave a very different legacy. It was then that Zionist leaders began to abandon illusions over Arab acquiescence, to face the unnerving prospect that fulfilling their dream of sovereignty might mean forever clinging to the sword. The revolt saw thousands of Jews trained and armed by Britain—the world’s supreme military power—turning their ramshackle guard units into the seed of a formidable Jewish army. And it was then, amid carnage in Palestine and the Hitler menace in Europe, that portentous words like “partition” and “Jewish state” first appeared on the international diplomatic agenda.

This is the story of two national movements and the first sustained confrontation between them. The rebellion was Arab, but the Zionist counter-rebellion—the Jews’ military, economic, and psychological transformation—is a vital, overlooked element in the chronicle of how Palestine became Israel.

Today, eight decades on, the revolt’s legacy endures. Hamas’s armed wing and rockets carry the name of the fighter-preacher whose death sparked the 1936 rebellion. When Israel builds security barriers, sets up checkpoints, or razes homes, it is evoking laws and methods inherited from its British predecessor. And when Washington promotes a “two-state solution,” it is invoking a plan with roots in this same pivotal period.

Based on extensive archival research on three continents and in three languages, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) is the origin story of the world’s most intractable conflict, but it is also more than that. In Oren Kessler’s engaging, journalistic voice, it reveals world-changing events through extraordinary individuals on all sides: their loves and their hatreds, their deepest fears and profoundest hopes.

Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

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Jonathan Rivett Robinson, "Markan Typology: Miracle, Scripture and Christology in Mark 4:35–6:45" (T&T Clark, 2022)

20 februari 2023 | 24 min

Azzan Yadin-Israel, "Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

20 februari 2023 | 52 min

David Arnovitz, "The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Exodus" (Koren, 2020)

19 februari 2023 | 42 min

John D. Hosler, "Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace" (Yale UP, 2022)

16 februari 2023 | 48 min

When the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate entered Jerusalem in 638, the city was quite different from what it is today–one of the most important cities for three religions.

As John Hosler writes in his latest book, Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022):

“Three things may seem nearly inconceivable to modern readers: that the Temple Mount, a place of such incredible significance and symbolism, once served as Jerusalem’s garbage dump; that it once went wholly unmentioned in a political treaty; and that a conqueror essentially acquired it with little effort.”

Throughout his book, starting from the Persian invasion of 614 and ending with the Sixth Crusade in 1229, John explains how these successive “falls” of the city to invaders ended up setting the boundaries for inter-religious relations for centuries afterward. Invaders may have wanted to expel their religious competitors–but soon learned that governing the city without their help was impossible, eventually settling on a system of grudging tolerance and respect for each other’s holy sites.

In this interview, John and I talk about the many “falls” of Jerusalem: to the Persians, the Arabs, and the Crusaders, and how the many negotiations over the city helped build a durable status quo that persisted for centuries.

John D. Hosler is a Professor of Military History at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. An expert in medieval warfare in Europe and the Near East, he is the author of over 60 essays and reviews, and also the author and editor of seven books, including John of Salisbury: Military Authority of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Brill: 2013), and The Siege of Acre: 1189-1191 (Yale University Press: 2018), the latter of which was named among the best books of 2018 by the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. He is a Trustee of the U.S. Commission for Military History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and he sits on the editorial board for War Studies Journal.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Jerusalem Falls. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Rūta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff, "Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)

15 februari 2023 | 56 min

Rhiannon Graybill, "Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible" (Oxford UP, 2021)

15 februari 2023 | 52 min

Daniel Lasker, "Karaism: An Introduction to the Oldest Surviving Alternative Judaism" (Littman Library, 2022)

14 februari 2023 | 59 min

Jacky Comforty, "The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust" (Lexington Books, 2021)

13 februari 2023 | 88 min

Canadian Witnesses to the Horrors of the Holocaust

13 februari 2023 | 30 min

Iggerot Malkhei Rabbanan: Letters From Leading Torah Scholars to Melekh (Marc B.) Shapiro

12 februari 2023 | 35 min

Golda Akhiezer, "Historical Consciousness, Haskalah, and Nationalism Among the Karaites of Eastern Europe" (Brill, 2017)

11 februari 2023 | 90 min

Alan Verskin, "Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David Reubeni Through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe" (Stanford UP, 2023)

6 februari 2023 | 73 min

Jason Olson and James Goldberg, "The Burning Book" (Common Consent Press, 2022)

6 februari 2023 | 61 min

Rachel Adelman, "The Female Ruse: Women's Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible" (Sheffield Press, 2017)

5 februari 2023 | 29 min

In Rachael E. Adelman's monograph The Female Ruse: Women's Deception and Divine Sanction in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield Press, 2017) she explores how the feminine trickster archetype plays a central role in the Hebrew bible and is an important forces that drives the narrative forward and unmasks wisdom.

From Eve to Esther, the Hebrew Bible is replete with gendered tales of trickery. A lie is uttered, a mask donned, a seduction staged, while redemption is propelled forward, guided by the divine hand. From the first 'female ruse' - Eve presenting the fruit of the tree of knowledge to Adam - humanity becomes embodied, engaged in history, moving from the Garden to exile, from wandering to homeland and redemption (and back again). Consider Rebekah dressing her beloved son in goatskins to steal the blessing from his blind father; Lot's daughters lying with their drunken father, and then conceiving the founding fathers of Ammon and Moab; Leah and Rachel, the mothers of the twelve tribes of Israel, duping Jacob on their wedding night; Tamar's seduction of Judah, her father-in-law, who then bears the progenitor of the Davidic line; Naomi sending Ruth to the threshing floor to seduce Boaz by night; Bathsheba invoking an oath that King David had supposedly made in order to forward Solomon, her son, as successor to the monarchy; and Queen Esther concealing her Jewish identity in the Persian imperial court. Over the course of nine chapters, the author traces these narratives of deception; in each case, God is in cahoots with these feminine agents in advancing the providential plan. A tension holds between the 'best laid plans' of men and the divine will as forwarded by women. Drawing on classic rabbinic sources and modern literary exegesis, the author exposes the conflict between the simple progression of genealogies and the process of selection through alliances of family and kin. Women are at the crux of that conflict, seemingly compelled to choose the indirect route while the deity appears to endorse their lie.

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Rowan Dorin, "No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe" (Princeton UP, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 51 min

Michah Gottlieb, "The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle-Class German Judaism As Spiritual Enterprise" (Oxford UP, 2021)

4 februari 2023 | 40 min

M. M. Silver, "The History of Galilee, 1538-1949" (Lexington Books, 2022)

4 februari 2023 | 116 min

Geneviève Zubrzycki, "Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival" (Princeton UP, 2022)

3 februari 2023 | 71 min

Yonatan Adler, "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal" (Yale UP, 2022)

1 februari 2023 | 96 min

Meir M. Bar-Asher, "Jews and the Qur'an" (Princeton UP, 2022)

1 februari 2023 | 71 min

Mikel Burley, "A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion: Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

1 februari 2023 | 59 min

Chris Webb, "The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance" (Ibidem, 2016)

31 januari 2023 | 41 min

Arthur Keefer, "Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

31 januari 2023 | 46 min

Andrea Dara Cooper, "Gendering Modern Jewish Thought" (Indiana UP, 2021)

31 januari 2023 | 63 min

Mark A. Schneegurt, "Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews" (2020)

30 januari 2023 | 80 min

The Mesopotamian Connection: Comparing the Bible to Other Literature of the Ancient Near East

30 januari 2023 | 61 min

Menachem Brod, "In Search of Truth: Three Yeshiva Students on a Spiritual Journey" (BSD Publishers, 2022)

29 januari 2023 | 66 min

Apocalypse Past, Present, and Future: Thinking about the End in History and Culture

29 januari 2023 | 62 min

Radu Ioanid, "The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

28 januari 2023 | 83 min

Igor H. De Souza, "Rewriting Maimonides: Early Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed" (de Gruyter, 2018)

27 januari 2023 | 90 min

Silvia Nacamulli, "Jewish Flavours of Italy: A Family Cookbook" (Green Bean Books, 2022)

25 januari 2023 | 57 min

Jewish Flavours of Italy: A Family Cookbook (Green Bean Books, 2022) is a culinary journey through Italy and a deep dive into family culinary heritage. With more than 100 kosher recipes, Silvia offers readers a unique collection of authentic and traditional Italian-Jewish dishes, combined with stunning photography, practical tips, and clear explanations. With a delicious mix of recipes, family stories and history, Silvia offers a unique insight into centuries' old culinary traditions.

Discover recipes from everyday home-cooked meals to special celebration menus for Jewish holidays. Highlights include recipes such as pasta e fagioli (borlotti bean soup), family favorites such as melanzane alla parmigiana (eggplant parmigiana), as well as delicious Jewish dishes such as Carciofi alla Giudia (Jewish-style fried artichokes), challah bread, and sarde in saor (Venetian sweet and sour sardines).

Silvia's extensive cooking repertoire combined with her life experiences means that her recipes and family stories are one-of-a-kind. She introduces the reader to soup, pasta, matzah, and risotto dishes, then moves on to meat, poultry, fish, and vegetable recipes. Silvia finishes with mouth-watering desserts such as orecchie di Amman (Haman's ears), Roman Jewish pizza ebraica (nut and candied fruit cakes) and sefra (aromatic semolina bake). Even the most sweet-toothed readers will be satisfied!

Each recipe is introduced by Silvia in a friendly and conversational tone that will get readers involved before they even get the chance to preheat the oven. Throughout the book, in-depth features highlight ingredients such as artichokes, zucchini flowers and eggplants. A personal touch shines through and provides a connection with the author. Silvia's enthusiastic and charming personality transforms this collection of recipes into a culinary experience that will be cherished by generations to come.

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Frank Wolff, "Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund" (Haymarket Books, 2021)

25 januari 2023 | 81 min

Progressive Souls: Religion and the Pursuit of a Just Society (Part 2)

22 januari 2023 | 25 min

Progressive Souls: Religion and the Pursuit of a Just Society (Part 1)

21 januari 2023 | 27 min

Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

20 januari 2023 | 73 min

Nothing Matters: About the Idea of "Emptiness"

17 januari 2023 | 27 min

James M. Deem, "The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp" (Mariner Books, 2020)

16 januari 2023 | 70 min

Elia Meghnagi, "Escape from Benghazi: Diary of an Imposter" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2022)

15 januari 2023 | 113 min

Donna Stein, "Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch" (Skira, 2022)

14 januari 2023 | 40 min

Mordechai Schiffman, "Psyched for Torah" (Kodesh Press, 2022)

13 januari 2023 | 41 min

Wout J. van Bekkum, "The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.)" (Brill, 2022)

12 januari 2023 | 79 min

Sarah Imhoff, "The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist" (Duke UP, 2022)

11 januari 2023 | 67 min

David Z. Moster, "Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol" (Palgrave Pivot, 2018)

11 januari 2023 | 43 min

Gil Hovav, "Candies from Heaven" (Green Bean Books, 2023)

8 januari 2023 | 81 min

Joshua Kulp and Jason Rogoff, "Reconstructing the Talmud: An Introduction to the Academic Study of Rabbinic Literature" (Hadar Press, 2014)

8 januari 2023 | 65 min

Melila Hellner-Eshed, "Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar" (Stanford UP. 2021)

4 januari 2023 | 70 min

Aaron W. Hughes, "Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast" (NYU Press, 2016)

3 januari 2023 | 72 min

Nomads in the Bible

31 december 2022 | 28 min

Julia Elsky, "Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France" (Stanford UP, 2020)

28 december 2022 | 75 min

Who Wrote the Bible? Sorting out the History of the Bible We Have.

27 december 2022 | 56 min

Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

27 december 2022 | 59 min

Ron Kronish, "Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" (2022)

27 december 2022 | 45 min

Ruth Tsoffar, "Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture" (Routledge, 2019)

25 december 2022 | 111 min

Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

24 december 2022 | 57 min

Kenneth B. Moss, "An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland" (Harvard UP, 2021)

24 december 2022 | 64 min

The early 1930s constituted an ambiguous moment for the roughly three million Jews that resided in the Polish Republic. On the one hand, as recent scholars have emphasized, Polish Jews found numerous opportunities to partake in flourishing cultural and political projects that spanned the ideological spectrum from Zionism to Yiddishism to Polish integrationism to various brands of socialism. In addition, Josef Pilsudski’s government – while by no means an ally to Polish Jewry – was the lesser of two evils compared to the explicitly anti-Semitic Endecja regime that ruled the country by the end of the decade. At the same time, however, trouble lurked around every corner. Polish Jews found their earning opportunities deeply limited, due to both economic depression and a widespread social prejudice that blocked them from getting jobs. Even more concerning, the rise of fascist politics – in Poland and abroad – made clear the fledgling state’s weaknesses, and cast a shadow of doubt over any sense that acceptance would prevail over national hatred. Polish Jews now grappled with the possibility that Jewish life in Eastern Europe might not be feasible going forward. What was to be done amidst these precarious circumstances? How was one to plan for the future, both as an individual and as a member of a minority community? How was one to handle the anxiety of unclear and multifarious dangers?

In his new volume An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard UP, 2021), Kenneth Moss has resurrected the mentalité of those that struggled daily with these questions, illustrating what it meant for Polish Jews to grope for meaning in the face of constant uncertainty and real dread. To accomplish this task, Moss has assembled and examined an astounding breadth of documents produced by people from throughout Polish Jewish society. Readers will find analyses of Polish Jewish intellectual luminaries like Max Weinreich, Jacob Lestschinsky and Chaim Grade, each of whom allowed recent events to influence and mutate their understandings of Jewish life and community. Moss also shines a light on more common Jews that no less vociferously sought to forge practical and pragmatic solutions to their increasingly dire situations. The result is a monograph dedicated to the daily experience of minority life in the modern world; a world permeated by a sense of unease at what tomorrow might bring.

James Benjamin Nadelis a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University.

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Zvi Preigerzon, "Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022)

20 december 2022 | 130 min

Ariana Huberman. "Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

20 december 2022 | 79 min

Richard Brian Miller, "Why Study Religion?" (Oxford UP, 2021)

20 december 2022 | 44 min

Karma Ben-Johanan, "Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II" (Harvard UP, 2022)

20 december 2022 | 62 min

Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Karma Ben-Johanan presents a revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue.

A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never been rejected by God. In a few carefully phrased statements, two millennia of deep hostility were swept into the trash heap of history.

But old animosities die hard. While Catholic and Jewish leaders publicly promoted interfaith dialogue, doubts remained behind closed doors. Catholic officials and theologians soon found that changing their attitude toward Jews could threaten the foundations of Christian tradition. For their part, many Jews perceived the new Catholic line as a Church effort to shore up support amid atheist and secular advances. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary rabbinical literature, Dr. Ben-Johanan shows that Jewish leaders welcomed the Catholic condemnation of antisemitism but were less enthusiastic about the Church’s sudden urge to claim their friendship. Catholic theologians hoped Vatican II would turn the page on an embarrassing history, hence the assertion that the Church had not reformed but rather had always loved Jews, or at least should have. Orthodox rabbis, in contrast, believed they were finally free to say what they thought of Christianity.

Jacob’s Younger Brother pulls back the veil of interfaith dialogue to reveal how Orthodox rabbis and Catholic leaders spoke about each other when outsiders were not in the room. There Ben-Johanan finds Jews reluctant to accept the latest whims of a Church that had unilaterally dictated the terms of Jewish–Christian relations for centuries.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kiril Feferman, "The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus" (Yad Vashem, 2016)

17 december 2022 | 133 min

Kiril Feferman's The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Yad Vashem, 2016) presents a comprehensive account of the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus in the Holocaust years. Based on extensive archival research, Feferman covers the life and destruction of the Jewish population in the region and describes in detail the relations between Jews and non-Jews before and during the war; the evacuation of Jews into these regions and out of them; the German occupation and the annihilation of the Ashkenazi Jewish population; the fate of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the area; Jewish responses; and reactions of local populations, including Cossacks, devout Orthodox Christians and Muslims.

Objective factors, such as the availability of German manpower and food, weather and geographic conditions, in addition to subjective factors, such as the attitudes of Wehrmacht commanders, left their imprint on the implementation of the “Final Solution” policy in these areas. By the time the Germans occupied the Crimea in November 1941, it was absolutely clear to them that the Jews had to be eliminated. All the more so when they came to dominate the North Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Yet, the Nazi decision-makers were vexed by the need to clarify who was a Jew. The case of the Ashkenazi Jews was clear-cut, and their fate was similar to that of their brethren elsewhere in Europe. However, the Germans faced a formidable difficulty in categorizing the non-Ashkenazi Karaites and Krymchaks in the Crimea, and Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus, who, according to the Nazi world-view, shared some but not all racial and religious characteristics of Jews. Subsequently, German investigation involved a thorough pseudo-scientific analysis of racial and religious features by the Nazi academy, as well as SS “researchers.”

Set against the background of the ongoing murder of Ashkenazi Jews in these regions and local politics with geo-political implications, this research title also focuses on the support – or lack thereof – lent to Karaites, Krymchaks and Mountain Jews by local Muslims. These interwoven histories cover a hitherto unexplored terrain in Holocaust history, and offer a fascinating window into the history of the Crimea and the North Caucasus and the fate of their Jewish inhabitants during World War II.

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Beverley Chalmers, "Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust" (Grosvenor House, 2020)

15 december 2022 | 64 min

Daniel Gross. "A Banker's Journey: How Edmond J. Safra Built a Global Financial Empire" (Radius Book Group, 2022)

14 december 2022 | 62 min

Who was Edmond J. Safra? "The greatest banker of his generation," in the estimation of a former World Bank President. The founder of four massive financial institutions on three continents, and a proud child of Beirut's Jewish quarter. An innovative avatar of financial globalization, and a faithful heir to a tradition of old-world banking. The leading champion and protector of the Sephardic diaspora.

In A Banker's Journey: How Edmond J. Safra Built a Global Financial Empire (Radius Book Group, 2022), financial journalist and historian Daniel Gross, who, like Safra, traces his heritage to Aleppo, Syria, reconstructs the public life of an intensely private man. With exclusive access to Safra's personal archives, Gross tracks the banker's remarkable journey from Beirut to Milan, São Paulo, Geneva, and New York--to the pinnacle of global finance.Edmond Safra was fifteen in 1947, when his father sent him to establish a presence in Milan, Italy. Fluent in six languages, and with an eye for value, managing risk, and personal potential, Safra was in perpetual motion until his tragic death in 1999. The modern, global financial empire he built was based on timeless principles: a banker must protect his depositors and avoid excessive leverage and risk. In an age of busts and bailouts, Safra posted remarkable returns while rarely suffering a credit loss. From a young age, Safra assumed the mantle of leadership in the Syrian-Lebanese Jewish community, providing personal aid, supporting the communities that formed in exile, and championing Sephardic religious and educational efforts in Israel and around the world. Edmond J. Safra's life of achievement in the twentieth century offers enduring lessons for those seeking to make their way in the twenty-first century. He inspired generations to make the world a better place.

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Joanna Newman, "Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945" (Berghahn Books, 2019)

12 december 2022 | 66 min

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

12 december 2022 | 58 min

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic.

Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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On "Genesis"

7 december 2022 | 37 min

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950" (Stanford UP, 2022)

6 december 2022 | 65 min

Jay Michaelson, "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth" (Oxford UP, 2022)

6 december 2022 | 65 min

Gabriel Polley, "Palestine in the Victorian Age: Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land" (I. B. Tauris, 2022)

5 december 2022 | 67 min

Yochai Ataria, "Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

5 december 2022 | 53 min

Shaul Bartal and Nesya Rubinstein-Shemer, "Hamas and Ideology: Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qara?awi on the Jews, Zionism and Israel" (Routledge, 2017)

4 december 2022 | 30 min

Sheikh Yusūf al- Qaraḍāwī is regarded as the most influential contemporary Muslim religious figure. His best-selling book, Al-Ḥalal wal-Ḥaram fi al-Islam ("The Forbidden and the Permitted in Islam") is perhaps one of the most widely read Islamic works, after the Qur’ān. The subject of jihad in Palestine is a salient feature of Qaraḍāwī’s thought and is addressed frequently in his books. His views on Israel and on the Jews shape those of many Muslims throughout the world.

Hamas and Ideology: Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qara?awi on the Jews, Zionism and Israel (Routledge, 2017) paints al- Qaraḍāwī’s portrait within the context of the subject of the struggle for Palestine and assesses why he is committed so fervently to the Palestinian course. It also sheds light on another important aspect of al-Qaradawi’s thought, namely the marked contrast between his ideas regarding the Muslim world and his views on relations with other religions and countries. Whereas al- Qaraḍāwī is considered to be a moderate in Islamic matters, his attitude toward the Jews and to Israel is one of abiding hatred and uncompromising struggle. The book aims to classify Qaraḍāwī’s thought along the axis of moderation and extremism by drawing comparisons between Qaraḍāwī’s teachings and those of other Muslim jurists. Furthermore, it compares the features of antisemitic writing with that of Qaraḍāwī in order to answer the question as to whether Qaraḍāwī’s teachings actually constitute an expression of anti-semitism.

Despite the subject of jihad in Palestine being so central to Qaraḍāwī’s thought, there has not been a comprehensive and systematic academic study of this to date. The book therefore represents a major contribution to the field and will appeal to anyone studying the Israel-Palestine conflict, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence.

The book was published also in Hebrew by the Pardes Publishing House in 2021

Dr Nesya Rubinstein-Shemer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her research focuses on classical Islamic law and the relations between Islam and Judaism.

Dr Shaul Bartal is a teaching associate in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is a specialist on Palestinian affairs and Islamic fundamentalism.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon Books, 2022)

1 december 2022 | 44 min

The Sassoons were one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, alongside such names as the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Swires. They dominated the India-China opium trade through the David Sassoon and E.D. Sassoon companies. They became Indian tycoons, English aristocracy, Hong Kong board directors, and Shanghai real estate moguls.

Yet unlike the Kadoories and Swires, the Sassoon companies no longer exist today.

Professor Joseph Sassoon in his latest book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (Pantheon, 2022) helps to answer that question, from the Sassoons’ start fleeing Baghdad for Bombay, through to Victor Sassoon’s investments in the Shanghai before the Second World War.

In this interview, Joseph and I talk about the Sassoon family: from David, the patriarch of the family, through to Victor Sassoon, Shanghai real estate mogul. And we also think about the Sassoons as a business: how did this great, global family trading house decline–and are there lessons for the businesses of today?

Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Trustee of the Bodleian Library. His previous books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press: 2012), The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the Middle East (I. B. Taurus, 2010), and Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (Cambridge University Press: 2016).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Sassoons. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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James Yansen, "Daughter Zion's Trauma: A Trauma Informed Reading of Lamentations" (Gorgias Press, 2019)

30 november 2022 | 165 min

Utilizing insights from trauma studies, James Yansen's book Daughter Zion's Trauma: A Trauma Informed Reading of Lamentations (Gorgias Press, 2019) advances the view that awareness of trauma's potential effects sheds light on many of the book of Lamentations' complex literary features, and suggests new interpretive possibilities. Three characteristic features of traumatic experiences make this concept useful for a critical reading of Lamentations: 1) survivors' testimonies often convey a history that is not straightforwardly referential; 2) trauma causes rupture in memory; and 3) the trauma process includes rhetorical dimensions; individuals and communities work through and construct trauma in different ways in order to reconstitute themselves and ensure their survival in the aftermath of extreme catastrophe. Furthermore, social, political, cultural, historical, and theological/religious contexts are crucial for understanding how individuals and collectivities construe, respond to, witness to, work through, and create trauma.

Attending to Lamentations' likely traumatic matrix, the concept of non-referential history functions as a heuristic lens through which to view the historical significance of the Book's content, particularly its ubiquitous uses of stereotypical and metaphorical language. In addition, trauma-informed structural analysis demonstrates and mirrors the debilitating realities of caesura in life often associated with experiences of trauma. Drawing on insights from cultural trauma, specifically the rhetorical dimensions of the trauma process, Daughter Zion's Trauma asserts that Lamentations ensures the survival of those whose pain and anguish it voices by strategically adapting some of ancient Israel's religious traditions. The literary figure of Daughter Zion embodies and witnesses to the trauma of the survivor-communities she represents. The sheer enormity of Daughter Zion's trauma overshadows and undermines assertions and acknowledgements of her culpability. Further, protest, ambiguity, and ambivalent hope form the foundation for resilience and survival in Lamentations. Ultimately, trauma-informed readings of biblical literature that utilize an historically-informed, synchronic approach enable biblical scholars to pursue the interpretive possibilities of trauma studies without bracketing historical questions.

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Jonathan Rosen and Henry Herz, "Coming of Age: 13 B'nai Mitvah Stories" (Albert Whitman & Company, 2022)

28 november 2022 | 49 min

The Future of Religious Studies: A Conversation with Russell McCutcheon

28 november 2022 | 75 min

Moshe Koppel, "Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures" (Maggid, 2020)

25 november 2022 | 49 min

Joseph McBride, "Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge" (Columbia UP, 2021)

24 november 2022 | 87 min

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films―including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment―Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society.

In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition.

Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. His many books include the critical study How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia, 2018) as well as acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg and three books on Orson Welles.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Eli Gumener, "A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir Of Sorrow" (Slavica, 2022)

23 november 2022 | 123 min

Books, Antisemitism, and a Viral Tweet: A Conversation with Library Director Susan Kusel

22 november 2022 | 63 min

Need help curating a list of Holocaust books for your students or library patrons? What’s on your shelf? What should be there? This podcast episode explores:

The most commonly assigned Holocaust books.
Why some of them are books you should never assign.
Recommendations for books to assign, read, and share.
Gaps in the literature.
Gatekeepers of higher education.
Susan’s wish-list.

Our guest is: Susan Kusel, who is the Library Director at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia. She is also an author, a children’s book consultant and a former independent bookstore buyer. She has served on multiple book award committees including the Caldecott Medal and as the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award. She is a former board member of the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut picture book, The Passover Guest won the Sydney Taylor Book Award.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Deborah Hopkinson, We Must Not Forget
Dita Kraus, A Delayed Life: The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz
Susan Kusel, The Passover Guest
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Doreen Rappaport, Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
David Safier, 28 Days: A Novel of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto
Hana Volavkova et al, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944
Liza Wiemer, The Assignment
Elie Wiesel, Night
Susan’s wish list
The Blog: The Sydney Taylor Schooze
The Association of Jewish Libraries
Sydney Taylor Book Award

Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish a project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Boruch Twersky, "From Moav to Mashiach" (Menucha Publishers, 2022)

18 november 2022 | 16 min

Samuel J. Levine, "Was Yosef on the Spectrum?: Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources" (Urim Publications, 2018)

18 november 2022 | 64 min

Michael Frank, "One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World" (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

17 november 2022 | 60 min

With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she'd grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.

Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other's company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey--measured by both time and distance--of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.

Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time--and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (Simon and Schuster, 2022) is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.

Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience.

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Francesca Stavrakopoulou, "God: An Anatomy" (Knopf, 2022)

14 november 2022 | 46 min

Ephraim (Alexander) Kholmyansky, "The Voice of Silence: The Story of the Jewish Underground in the USSR" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

10 november 2022 | 110 min

J. Richard Middleton, "Abraham's Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God" (Baker Academic, 2021)

9 november 2022 | 60 min

Sarah Ifft Decker, "The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities" (Pennsylvania State, 2022)

7 november 2022 | 45 min

Alan Verskin, "A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide--a Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue" (Stanford UP, 2019)

31 oktober 2022 | 63 min

Rachel Aumiller, "A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism" (de Gruyter, 2021)

27 oktober 2022 | 83 min

John Jeffries Martin, "A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World" (Yale UP, 2022)

27 oktober 2022 | 58 min

Professor Martin’s A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (Yale, 2022) is a survey of Early Modern European history from the Age of Discovery to the French Revolution with two important distinctions. First, Professor Martin views modernity through the enduring dream of the Apocalypse (which he calls the “stamp of modernity,” 250); second, he compares the Christian philosophy of the Apocalypse to the views of the two other great European religious traditions in this era—Judaism and Islam. The result is a magisterial survey of the age that presents familiar stories examined from a new angle.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike understood the rapidly-changing, modern world they shared in terms of their common Abrahamic faith with its messianic elements, or “Apocalyptic Braid” (13). And, in addition, Christian Habsburgs and Muslim Ottomans entertained competing narratives of World Empire contested on continental battlefields and in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in literature. The Beautiful Ending ultimately was both the balm for the terrible uncertainties of the age but also a motivation for the modern Europeans to shape their own destiny—a motivation that Professor Martin argues has remained with us until today—“the idea that we are not simply made by history but also make history continues to stem from faith, and it matters little whether or not this faith is religious” (247).

John Jeffries Martin is a historian of early modern Europe at Duke University. He specializes in social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), which won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), as well as this book, A Beautiful Ending. He is the author of over 50 articles and essays and several edited volumes, including The Renaissance World (2007).

After recording this interview about history for the New Books in History Podcast, Krzysztof Odyniec and John Jeffries Martin recorded a second conversation about Apocalypse from the Early Modern period to the present day for the Almost Good Catholics podcast; the link is here.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. His forthcoming book is Diplomacy at the Edges of Empires: Johannes Dantiscus in Spain, 1519-1352 (published by Brepols). He also hosts and produces the Almost Good Catholics podcast.

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Sustainable Agriculture in the Global South: A Religious Response to the Global Food Crisis

25 oktober 2022 | 44 min

Rachel Schreiber, "Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration" (Temple UP, 2021)

25 oktober 2022 | 85 min

Ela Gezen et al., "Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990" (Berghahn Books, 2022)

21 oktober 2022 | 63 min

David Weinfeld, "An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism" (Cornell UP, 2022)

18 oktober 2022 | 63 min

In An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism (Cornell UP, 2022), David Weinfeld presents the biography of an idea, cultural pluralism, the intellectual precursor to modern multiculturalism. He roots its origins in the friendship between two philosophers, Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen and African American Alain Locke, who advanced cultural pluralism in opposition to both racist nativism and the assimilationist "melting pot." It is a simple idea—different ethnic groups can and should coexist in the United States, perpetuating their cultures for the betterment of the country as whole—and it grew out of the lived experience of this friendship between two remarkable individuals.

Kallen, a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, became a leading American Zionist. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, taught at Howard University and is best known as the intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of The New Negro in 1925. Their friendship began at Harvard and Oxford during the years 1906 through 1908 and was rekindled during the Great Depression, growing stronger until Locke's death in 1954. To Locke and Kallen, friendship itself was a metaphor for cultural pluralism, exemplified by people who found common ground while appreciating each other's differences. Weinfeld demonstrates how this understanding of cultural pluralism offers a new vision for diverse societies across the globe. An American Friendship provides critical background for understanding the conflicts over identity politics that polarize US society today.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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P. De Vries, "The Kābôd of Yhwh in the Old Testament: With Particular Reference to the Book of Ezekiel" (Brill, 2015)

17 oktober 2022 | 30 min

Eran Kaplan, "Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

11 oktober 2022 | 62 min

Warren Klein et al., "Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History" (Mineged, 2022)

7 oktober 2022 | 55 min

Angela Costley, "Creation and Christ: An Exploration of the Topic of Creation in the Epistle to the Hebrews" (Mohr Siebeck, 2021)

7 oktober 2022 | 36 min

Ion Popa, "The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust" (Indiana UP, 2017)

3 oktober 2022 | 122 min

Aviva Ben-Ur, "Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)

30 september 2022 | 54 min

Reeva Spector Simon, "The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II" (Routledge, 2019)

28 september 2022 | 23 min

Andreas Hackl, "The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv" (Indiana UP, 2022)

27 september 2022 | 61 min

The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this description and the reality of everyday life. In this gap resides a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority, to some degree denied full benefits of equal urban citizenship.

Much of the discourse concerning this descriptive gap focuses on attempts to preserve or contextualise the claim to social liberalism from the Israeli Jewish perspective. A new book by the anthropologist Andreas Hackl, takes a different point of view. The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv (Indiana UP, 2022) focuses on what he terms the “immersive invisibility” of Israel’s minority Palestinian population: the challenges they face, the strategies they deploy, and ultimately the consequences of acts of personal and collective self-censorship that define and circumscribe their everyday life and presence in Tel Aviv.

The Invisible Palestinians documents the experiences of a diverse Palestinian population in the Jewish Israeli city: residents and commuters, professionals and day laborers, activists, artists, students. Differences of education, economic wherewithal, and social class aside, all share one central experience: circumscribed citizenship of the Jewish metropolis.

Andreas Hackl is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as World Development, American Ethnologist, and Social Anthropology. He has worked as a consultant with the International Labour Organization and as a newspaper correspondent based in Jerusalem.

Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.

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NBN Classic: Paul Hanebrink, "A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism" (Harvard UP, 2018)

25 september 2022 | 37 min

NBN Classic: Marc Dollinger, "Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s" (Brandeis UP, 2018)

25 september 2022 | 32 min

NBN Classic: Alexander Gendler, "Khurbm 1914-1922: Prelude to the Holocaust" (Varda Books, 2019)

24 september 2022 | 70 min

NBN Classic: Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, "Holiness and Transgression Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth" (ASP, 2017)

24 september 2022 | 74 min

Frederick Beiser, "Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography" (Oxford UP, 2018)

23 september 2022 | 57 min

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1842 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholarship has experienced a mini-renaissance in the last thirty years in the English speaking world, knowledge of Cohen, his scholarship on Kant, his activity in the Jewish community, and his battle against anti-semitism in Germany have remained largely confined to academic Jewish studies. Fortunately Beiser’s new book Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford UP, 2018) commands a broader audience with much to offer historians, philosophers, theologians in addition to Jewish thinkers. In the course of this NBN conversation, Professor Beiser and Avi Bernstein, Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis University discuss Cohen’s

• Lifelong quest for a “religion of reason”

• Effort to “rescue” Kant from psychologists who had misunderstood him

• Hostility to Spinoza

• Interest in infinitesimally small quantities

• Left-of-center Wilhelmine politics

• System of philosophy

• Unrequited love affair with German culture

• Ontological argumentation for God

Cohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism is left largely unremarked in Beiser’s book, as the author freely admits. With humility Beiser calls on his colleagues in Jewish Studies to go more deeply than he into this “masterpiece” of Cohen’s dotage, for in his estimation the Religion of Reason contains arguments for the idea of God that remain worthy of readers even today.

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Dario Miccoli, "A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Indiana UP, 2022)

22 september 2022 | 70 min

Corinne E. Blackmer, "Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

19 september 2022 | 33 min

David Bashevkin, "Sin•a•gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2019)

19 september 2022 | 61 min

Sara Ronis, "Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia" (U California Press, 2022)

19 september 2022 | 65 min

Sasha Senderovich, "How the Soviet Jew Was Made" (Harvard UP, 2022)

14 september 2022 | 89 min

Tamar Biala, "Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash" (Brandeis UP, 2022)

13 september 2022 | 61 min

Kimberley Czajkowski and Benedikt Eckhardt, "Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context" (Oxford UP, 2021)

12 september 2022 | 90 min

Book Talk 55: Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"

12 september 2022 | 89 min

Seth M. Ehorn, "Exodus in the New Testament" (T&T Clark, 2022)

9 september 2022 | 36 min

Tilde Rosmer, "The Islamic Movement in Israel" (U Texas Press, 2022)

7 september 2022 | 80 min

Michael Engel, "Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism: Investigating the Human Intellect" (Bloomsbury, 2016)

5 september 2022 | 78 min

Manuel Duarte de Oliveira, "Humanity Divided: Martin Buber and the Challenges of Being Chosen" (de Gruyter, 2021)

2 september 2022 | 45 min

Matthew Teller, "Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City" (Other Press, 2022)

1 september 2022 | 52 min

Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)

30 augusti 2022 | 64 min

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career.

In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.

Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, his work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, and elsewhere. Friedman's last book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal.

Matti Friedman on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Ben Ackerman, "Open When You Are: A Mystical Novel" (2016)

30 augusti 2022 | 16 min

Emily Michelson, "Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance" (Princeton UP, 2022)

29 augusti 2022 | 47 min

Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 2022), Dr. Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism.

Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Dr. Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available.

Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Philip Hollander, "From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature" (Indiana UP, 2019)

25 augusti 2022 | 127 min

On Jewish Sexual Ethics

25 augusti 2022 | 35 min

Yael Halevi-Wise, "The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua" (Penn State UP, 2020)

24 augusti 2022 | 90 min

Stu Halpern, "Esther in America" (Maggid, 2020)

23 augusti 2022 | 34 min

Matthew Mark Silver, "The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades" (Lexington Books, 2021)

13 augusti 2022 | 66 min

On Sholem Aleichem’s "The Tevye Stories"

12 augusti 2022 | 25 min

Alexander Green, "Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History" (SUNY Press, 2019)

11 augusti 2022 | 69 min

Ari D. Kahn, "The Crowns on the Letters: Essays on the Aggada and the Lives of the Sages" (OU Press, 2020)

10 augusti 2022 | 52 min

Jason A. Staples, "The Idea of 'Israel' in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

8 augusti 2022 | 34 min

On Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich"

3 augusti 2022 | 30 min

Wayne Allen, "Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

3 augusti 2022 | 64 min

Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Bible with and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently" (HarperOne, 2020)

3 augusti 2022 | 67 min

In The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020), Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include the creation of the world, the role of Adam and Eve, the Suffering Servant of Isiah, the book of Jonah, and Psalm 22, whose words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” Jesus quotes as he dies on the cross.

Comparing various interpretations – historical, literary, and theological - of each ancient text, Levine and Brettler offer deeper understandings of the original narratives and their many afterlives. They show how the text speaks to different generations under changed circumstances, and so illuminate the Bible’s ongoing significance. By understanding the depth and variety by which these passages have been, and can be, understood, The Bible With and Without Jesus does more than enhance our religious understandings, it helps us to see the Bible as a source of inspiration for any and all readers.

Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University.

Marc Zvi Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee, "Eco Bible: An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus" (ICSD, 2021)

29 juli 2022 | 60 min

David Konstan, "The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

28 juli 2022 | 62 min

Hanan Hammad, "Unknown Past: Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022)

27 juli 2022 | 84 min

Culturally Competent Health Care, Equality in Health Care: The Case of Muslims and Jews in the UK

27 juli 2022 | 29 min

Tova Ganzel, "Ezekiel's Visionary Temple in Babylonian Context" (de Gruyter, 2021)

25 juli 2022 | 44 min

Giore Etzion, "The Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew" (Routledge, 2019)

22 juli 2022 | 23 min

Elliott Rabin, "The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

22 juli 2022 | 59 min

Francine Friedman, "Like Salt for Bread: The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina" (Brill, 2021)

20 juli 2022 | 87 min

Beverley Chalmers, "Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule" (Grosvenor House, 2015)

15 juli 2022 | 60 min

Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House, 2015) is a fascinating and gripping examination of birth, sex and abuse during the Nazi era. Dr Chalmers’ unique lens on the Holocaust provides a stunning and controversial exposé of the voices of both Jewish and non-Jewish women living under Nazi rule. Based on twelve years of study, the book takes an inter-disciplinary view incorporating women’s history, Holocaust studies, social sciences and medicine, in a unique, cutting-edge examination of what women themselves said, thought and did.

Dr Chalmers (DSc(Med);PhD) has dedicated her life to studying women’s experiences of giving birth in difficult social, political, economic and religious environments. During her distinguished academic career, she has held professorial appointments in both the Medical and Social Sciences and has served, for decades, as a maternal and child health consultant for numerous United Nations and other global aid agencies. Her inter-disciplinary focus and extensive international experience provide a novel perspective on the Nazi era and on the neglected issue of the Nazi abuse of childbearing and sexuality.

"This book should be a ‘must’ for everybody dealing with the cruel chapters of the Holocaust, especially for those who are dealing with research about the subject of women and children, and medicine, during the Shoah” (Prof. Dr. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, Director, The Joseph Carlebach Institute, Bar-Ilan University, Israel).

“This book has an utterly unique, in-depth focus on all aspects of sexuality and reproduction during the Nazi regime; the author has written the first-ever, comprehensive tome on the treatment of women and infants that is essential for many disciplines” (Prof. Caroline Pukall, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Director of SexLab and the Sex Therapy Service, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada).

Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University.

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Evan Berry, "Climate Politics and the Power of Religion" (Indiana UP, 2022)

14 juli 2022 | 56 min

Yehudah Mirsky, "Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

13 juli 2022 | 88 min

John F. Sears, "Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel" (Purdue UP, 2021)

12 juli 2022 | 102 min

Tova Ganzel, "Ezekiel: From Destruction to Restoration" (Maggid, 2020)

12 juli 2022 | 35 min

Matt Reingold, "Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis" (Lexington, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 58 min

Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis (Lexington Books, 2022) by Matt Reingold, published by Lexington Books as part of its Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series, offers an incisive—and prescient, given the recent dissolution of the incumbent government—consideration of how political cartoonists in Israel broaden the conversation about the various challenges faced by the country.

Organized thematically around issues that emerged at various points across the three-year period under consideration (including political mudslinging, the ultra-Orthodox community, the Coronavirus pandemic, and coverage of Benjamin Netanyahu in the right-leaning press), analysis of the cartoons complemented by interviews with many of the cartoonists whose works feature in the book, Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons moves the conversation about the Jewish State away from its typically partisan (and thus limiting) vistas. Reingold shows how with humor, satirical nous, and a sophisticated awareness of their audiences, the cartoonists’ work often cut across the traditional faultlines of Israeli society (Religious/Secular; Ashkenazi/Mizrachi; Cosmopolitan/Narrow; and of course, “Left”/”Right”), engaging with a more representative (if, of necessity, less tidy) discussion about Israel today.

As Israel prepares for its fifth election in three years, following the collapse of the most broad-based coalition government in the country’s history (led, not-entirely-incidentally, by the country’s first religiously observant prime minister), Reingold’s book gives nuance and context to the conversation about Israel in Israel.

Matt Reinhold has a PhD in Jewish Education. He teaches Jewish history and Jewish thought at Tanenbaum CHAT, a community Jewish high school in Toronto, Canada.

Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.

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Robin Dunbar, "How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures" (Oxford UP, 2022)

7 juli 2022 | 63 min

Vered Noam, "Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature" (Oxford UP, 2018)

6 juli 2022 | 52 min

The shifting image of the Hasmoneans in the eyes of their contemporaries and later generations is a compelling issue in the history of the Maccabean revolt and the Hasmonean commonwealth. Based on a series of six Jewish folktales from the Second Temple period that describe the Hasmonean dynasty and its history from its legendary founders, through achievement of full sovereignty, to downfall, Vered Noam's Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature (Oxford UP, 2018) examines the Hasmoneans through the lens of reception history. On the one hand, these brief, colorful legends are embedded in the narrative of the historian of the age, Flavius Josephus; on the other hand, they are scattered throughout the extensive halakhic-exegetical compositions known as rabbinic literature, redacted and compiled centuries later.

Each set of parallel stories is examined for the motivation underlying its creation, its original message, language, and the historical context. This analysis is followed by exploration of the nature of the relationship between the Josephan and the rabbinic versions, in an attempt to reconstruct the adaptation of the putative original traditions in the two corpora, and to decipher the disparities, different emphases, reworking, and unique orientations typical of each. These adaptations reflect the reception of the pristine tales and thus disclose the shifting images of the Hasmoneans in later generations and within distinct contexts. The compilation and characterization of these sources which were preserved by means of two such different conduits of transmission brings us closer to reconstruction of a lost literary continent, a hidden Jewish Atlantis of early pseudo-historical legends and facilitates examination of the relationship between the substantially different libraries and worlds of Josephus and rabbinic literature.

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Yehudah Mirsky, "Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution" (Yale UP, 2014)

4 juli 2022 | 56 min

Christopher Silver, "Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2022)

4 juli 2022 | 105 min

Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of twentieth-century North Africa, one that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization.

If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities.

With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our present.

You can listen to the full versions of the songs mentioned in this interview here:

Louisa Tounsia’s "Ma fiche flous"
Habiba Messika’s “Anti Souria Biladi”
Samy Elmaghribi’s “Allah watani oua-sultani”

Avery Weinman is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches Jewish history in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with emphasis on Sephardi and Mizrahi radicals in British Mandatory Palestine. She can be reached at averyweinman@ucla.edu.

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Archie T. Wright, "Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers" (Fortress Press, 2022)

28 juni 2022 | 45 min

Satan's transformation from opaque functionary to chief antagonist is one of the most striking features of the development of Jewish theology in the Second Temple Period and beyond. Once no more than an "accuser" testing members of the human community, Satan, along with his demons, is presented by Jewish apocalyptic texts and the New Testament as a main source of evil in the world. In Satan and the Problem of Evil, noted scholar Archie Wright explores this dynamic in both its historical and theological trajectories.

Interactions with Zoroastrianism led Jewish and Christian writers of the Second Temple Period to separate God from responsibility for evil in the world. This led to the emergence of a heavenly being that is responsible for evil and suffering: Satan. Satan and the Problem of Evil charts the development of Satan traditions and the problem of evil from the Hebrew Bible and its various translations in the Greek Septuagint to Jewish literature from the Second Temple Period to the Greek New Testament. It concludes by examining the writings of the early church theologians, from the late first century through the fourth century CE. Wright argues that these latter writers present a shift in the understanding of Satan to one that is significantly different from the Jewish Scriptures, extrabiblical Jewish literature, and the New Testament.

Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers (Fortress Press, 2022) offers researchers, scholars, students, and even the general reader a definitive treatment of a perennial question.

Archie T. Wright is interim executive director of the Catholic Biblical Association and visiting lecturer at the London School of Theology. He is the author of The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature (Fortress, 2015).

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Matthew Teller, "Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City" (Other Press/Profile Books, 2022)

24 juni 2022 | 70 min

Marc David Baer, "German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus" (Columbia UP, 2020)

24 juni 2022 | 49 min

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile.

In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (Columbia University Press, 2020), Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Nathan A. Kurz, "Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

22 juni 2022 | 54 min

Jerry Z. Muller, "Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes" (Princeton UP, 2022)

20 juni 2022 | 67 min

W. H. Bellinger Jr., "Introducing Old Testament Theology" (Baker Academic, 2021)

20 juni 2022 | 26 min

Menachem Kaiser, "Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure" (Mariner Books, 2021)

14 juni 2022 | 71 min

The Future of Religion: A Conversation with Robin Dunbar

14 juni 2022 | 50 min

Paul Lerner et al., "Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

13 juni 2022 | 66 min

David de Jong, "Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties" (Mariner Books, 2022)

13 juni 2022 | 54 min

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.

In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.

In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer, "If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

13 juni 2022 | 50 min

Guy MacLean Rogers, "For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66-74 CE" (Yale UP, 2022)

8 juni 2022 | 65 min

Dainy Bernstein, "Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods" (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022)

7 juni 2022 | 73 min

On the Myth of Divine Chosenness

7 juni 2022 | 53 min

Olga Bertelsen, "In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s" (Lexington Books, 2022)

6 juni 2022 | 55 min

Matthew Mark Silver, "Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

3 juni 2022 | 67 min

Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (U Alabama Press, 2020) moves away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores.

Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire.

In his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

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Nehemia Polen, "Stop, Look, Listen: Celebrating Shabbos Through a Spiritual Lens" (Koren, 2022)

3 juni 2022 | 47 min

Richard G. Marks, "Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th-19th Centuries)" (Routledge, 2021)

2 juni 2022 | 52 min

Jason Sion Mokhtarian, "Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies Between Magic and Science" (U California Press, 2022)

2 juni 2022 | 53 min

Jeffrey Herf, "Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

2 juni 2022 | 35 min

Mark A. Raider and Gary Phillip Zola, "New Perspectives in American Jewish History: A Documentary Tribute to Jonathan D. Sarna" (Brandeis UP, 2021)

2 juni 2022 | 49 min

John K. Roth and Carol Rittner, "The Memory of Goodness: Eva Fleischner and Her Contributions to Holocaust Studies" (NCCHE, 2022)

1 juni 2022 | 77 min

Chiara Camarda et al., "The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

27 maj 2022 | 31 min

Maksim Goldenshteyn, "So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

26 maj 2022 | 47 min

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust.

In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered.

Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners.

In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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Yechiel Weizman, "Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2022)

26 maj 2022 | 40 min

Howard Mortman, "When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill" (Cherry Orchard, 2020)

25 maj 2022 | 59 min

K. Friedla and M. Nesselrodt, "Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

25 maj 2022 | 46 min

Daniel C. Matt, "Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation" (Yale UP, 2022)

24 maj 2022 | 33 min

Elijah is a zealous prophet, attacking idolatry and injustice, championing God. He performs miracles, restoring life and calling down fire. When his earthly life ends, he vanishes in a whirlwind, carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot. Was this a spectacular death, or did Elijah escape death entirely? The latter view prevailed. Though residing in heaven, Elijah revisits earth--to help, rescue, enlighten, and eventually herald the Messiah. Because of his messianic role, Jews open the door for Elijah during each seder--the meal commemorating liberation from slavery and anticipating final redemption.

Tune in as we speak with Daniel C. Matt about his recent book, Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation.

PLEASE NOTE: For a limited time, anyone can order the title at a 25% discount with free shipping, by using the code ELIJAH during checkout, at this link.

Also here are several video links related to Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation:

1) A conversation about Becoming Elijah between Daniel Matt and Barry Holtz at an event sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, in Manhattan, March 3, 2022:

2) A conversation between Daniel Matt and Estelle Frankel, sponsored by Chochmat HaLev, in Berkeley, March 31, 2022.

3) A talk by Daniel Matt on Becoming Elijah, sponsored by New Lehrhaus, in Berkeley, Sunday, April 3, 2022.

Daniel C. Matt is a leading authority on Jewish mysticism. He served as professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications, in addition to the The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (12 vols.), include The Essential Kabbalah (1995), God and the Big Bang (1996), and Zohar: Annotated and Explained (2002). Daniel also teaches an online Zohar course: www.sup.org/zohar/course

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Peter Kreeft, "Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs" (Ignatius Press, 2016)

20 maj 2022 | 34 min

Maria Chiara Rioli, "A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956" (Brill, 2020)

13 maj 2022 | 51 min

The history of the Palestine War does not only concern military history. It also involves social, humanitarian and religious history, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Jerusalem. A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956 (Brill, 2020) offers a complex narrative of the Latin patriarchal diocese, commonly portrayed as monolithically aligned with anti-Zionist and anti-Muslim positions during the “long” year of 1948. Making use of largely unpublished archives in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, including the recently released Pius XII papers, Maria Chiara Rioli depicts a church engaged in multiple and sometimes contradictory pastoral initiatives, amid harsh battles, relief missions for Palestinian refugees, theological reflections on Jewish converts to Catholicism, political relations with the Israeli and Jordanian authorities, and liturgical responses to a fluid and uncertain scenario.

The pieces of this history include the Jerusalem grand mufti’s appeal to Pius XII to support the Arab cause, the Catholic liturgies for peace and international mobilization during the Palestine War and Suez crisis, refugees petitioning the patriarch for aid, and Jewish converts establishing Christian kibbutzim. New archival collections and records reveal hidden aspects of the lives of women, children and other silenced actors, faith communities and religious institutions during and after 1948, connecting narratives that have been marginalized by a dominant historiography more focused on military campaigns or confessional conflicts.

A Liminal Church weaves diocesan history with global history. In the momentous decade from 1946 to 1956, the study of the transnational Jerusalem Latin diocese, as split between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus, with ties to diaspora and religious international networks and comprising clergy from all over the world, attests to the possibilities of contrapuntal narratives, reintroducing complexity to a deeply and painfully polarized debate, exposing false assumptions and situating changes and ruptures in a long-term perspective.

Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter: @robbyref

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Louis Fishman, "Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland" (Edinburgh UP. 2021)

10 maj 2022 | 62 min

Jaclyn Granick, "International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

6 maj 2022 | 52 min

Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, "The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020)

4 maj 2022 | 55 min

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map.

In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Christine Leuenberger and Dr. Izhak Schnell delve beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine. Chapters chart the cartographic history of the region, from the introduction of Western scientific and legal paradigms that seemingly legitimized and depoliticized new land regimes to the rise of new mapping technologies and software that expanded access to cartography into the public sphere. Maps produced by various sectors like the "peace camps" or the Jewish community enhanced national belonging, while others, like that of the Green Line, served largely to divide.

The stories of Israel's many boundaries reveal that there is no absolute, technocratic solution to boundary-making. As boundaries continue to be controversial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains intractable and unresolved,The Politics of Maps uses nationally-based cartographic discourses to provide insight into the complexity, fissures, and frictions within internal political debates, illuminating the persistent power of the nation-state as a framework for forging identities, citizens, and alliances.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Dr. Izhak Schnell was not able to join the audio interview about this book. His written answers to the questions are here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Moshe Shokeid, "Can Academics Change the World?: An Israeli Anthropologist's Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus" (Berghahn, 2020)

3 maj 2022 | 56 min

AD KAN (NO MORE) was founded in 1988 by a group of academics at Tel Aviv University. The initiative, a public pressure group, was prompted by public indifference (at best) about Israel’s 20-year occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and its forceful attempts to suppress the nascent First Intifada popular uprising in the West Bank. Whilst outward facing in their basic ambitions, the founder members of AD KAN also understood that academia’s failure to engage with the realities of the moment—through debate, protest, even applied research—could easily be taken too as acceptance of the status quo, embodying as it did the subaltern position of the Palestinian people.

Can Academics Change the World? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus (Berghahn Books, 2020) by Moshe Shokeid, is a personal account of the author’s experiences as co-founder of AD KAN. An account of dissent on campus, the book is at once a memoir, a historical account, and an anthropological consideration of the academic’s responsibility as a public intellectual.

Can Academics Change the World? remains relevant today, with many of the issues underpinning the formation and activities of AD KAN still live: the occupation of the West Bank; attempts to force Israel into concession and compromise, principally through the Boycott, Diversification, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign; and the continued status of the academic as public intellectual, in Israel and elsewhere—this cast against a university landscape that has reorganized itself around a different set of principles in the three decades since AD KAN ceased its activities.

Professor Moshe Shokeid is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. His other books include Three Jewish Journeys through the Anthropologist's Lens: From Morocco to the Negev, Zion to the Big Apple, the Closet to the Bimah; A Gay Synagogue in New York; Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York; and The Dual Heritage: Immigrants from the Atlas Mountains in an Israeli Village.

Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv.

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Sebastian Huebel, "Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

2 maj 2022 | 68 min

Steve A. Wiggins, "Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons" (Fortress, 2020)

27 april 2022 | 56 min

Tomer Persico, "In God’s Image: The Making of the Modern World" (Yediot Aharonot, 2021)

25 april 2022 | 61 min

In God’s Image: The Making of the Modern World (Yediot Aharonot, 2021) examines the central role that the biblical idea of the “image of God” has played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes—selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning—this book guides the reader through a cultural history of the Judeo-Christian tradition, from biblical times through modernity. It explains how each of these ideals was profoundly influenced by a central ancient conception – that every human being was created in the divine image of God. The book makes the case for a cultural, ideational understanding of history that places the development of the individual at the core of Western civilization.

In our interview, we will focus not only on the ideas of the book but also on how they are deeply relevant to our existential Western society challenges around spirituality, anxiety, social media, and more. This interview is relevant not only for scholars but also for students, lay leaders, and anyone interested in how ideas have been shaped in history.

In God’s Image posits the fundamental role of the idea of the Image of God – running through the Jewish and Christian traditions and being constantly reinterpreted – in the making of the moral ideals and social institutions that we hold dearly today.

Dr. Tomer Persico serves as the Academic Director at Kolot and a member of the senior management team, and a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Between 2018 and 2021 he was the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Yiddish in Europe

20 april 2022 | 18 min

Sigal Naor Perelman, "Machluta" (Pardes, 2020)

19 april 2022 | 63 min

Charles Dellheim, "Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern" (Brandeis UP, 2021)

19 april 2022 | 106 min

Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)

14 april 2022 | 54 min

Michael Carasik, "The Commentators' Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqra'ot Gedolot" (Jewish Publication Society, 2018)

13 april 2022 | 42 min

Anthony Shaw and Giora Goodman, "Hollywood and Israel: A History" (Columbia UP, 2022)

8 april 2022 | 53 min

From Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry and illuminate how media and soft power have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Hollywood and Israel: A History (Columbia University Press, 2022), Shaw and Goodman draw on a vast range of archival sources to demonstrate how show business has played a pivotal role in crafting the U.S.-Israel alliance. They probe the influence of Israeli diplomacy on Hollywood’s output and lobbying activities but also highlight the limits of ideological devotion in high-risk entertainment industries. The book details the political involvement with Israel—and Palestine—of household names such as Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and Natalie Portman. It also spotlights the role of key behind-the-scenes players like Dore Schary, Arthur Krim, Arnon Milchan, and Haim Saban.

Bringing the story up to the moment, Shaw and Goodman contend that the Hollywood-Israel relationship might now be at a turning point. Shedding new light on the political power that images and celebrity can wield, Hollywood and Israel shows the world’s entertainment capital to be an important player in international affairs.

Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams

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Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, "American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York" (Princeton UP, 2021)

5 april 2022 | 72 min

On Leaving Hasidism

31 mars 2022 | 55 min

Andrew Lawler, "Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City" (Doubleday, 2021)

28 mars 2022 | 48 min

Elisheva Carlebach and Deborah Dash Moore, "The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (6): Confronting Modernity, 1750-1880" (Yale UP, 2019)

22 mars 2022 | 63 min

Ken Krimstein, "When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

22 mars 2022 | 44 min

Martin Shuster, "How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism" (Indiana UP, 2021)

22 mars 2022 | 40 min

Dan Grunfeld, "By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream" (Triumph Books, 2022)

21 mars 2022 | 51 min

When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City.

That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive.

In By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream (Triumph Books, 2022), Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described.

The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale.

From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.

Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Helene Meyers, "Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

11 mars 2022 | 51 min

Brett Kahr, "Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis" (Confer Books, 2022)

11 mars 2022 | 74 min

Jeffery D. Long and Michael G. Long, "Nonviolence in the World's Religions: A Concise Introduction" (Routledge, 2021)

10 mars 2022 | 67 min

Racheli Haliva, "Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020)

7 mars 2022 | 61 min

Jadwiga Biskupska, "Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

4 mars 2022 | 60 min

Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, "The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture" (Harvard UP, 2021)

3 mars 2022 | 76 min

The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose.

Recent scholarship has overturned popular assumptions about Israel’s past, suggesting, for instance, that the five books of the Torah were written not by Moses but during the reign of Josiah centuries later. The sources of the Gospels are also under scrutiny. In this book, Dr. Konrad Schmid and Dr. Jens Schröter reveal the long, transformative journeys of these and other texts en route to inclusion in the holy books. The New Testament, the authors show, did not develop in the wake of an Old Testament set in stone. Rather the two evolved in parallel, in conversation with each other, ensuring a continuing mutual influence of Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, Schmid and Schröter argue that Judaism might not have survived had it not been reshaped in competition with early Christianity.

The book argues that the Bible is the result of diverse developments that unfolded over many centuries. It is not a homogeneous document but reflects a multiplicity of different viewpoints on the God of Israel and his interventions in history. And finally, the Bible generated a rich history of reception and interpretation that Jews and Christians alike should keep constantly in mind when trying to understand the Bible, interpret it, and live with it and according to its precepts.

A remarkable synthesis of the latest Old and New Testament scholarship, the book is the most comprehensive history yet told of the world’s best-known literature, revealing its buried lessons and secrets.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Brian Ogren, "Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World" (NYU Press, 2021)

3 mars 2022 | 53 min

Gardner Thompson, "Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel" (Saqi, 2020)

2 mars 2022 | 44 min

Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, "The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto" (Routledge, 2020)

28 februari 2022 | 60 min

Kei Hiruta, "Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity" (Princeton UP, 2021)

28 februari 2022 | 50 min

Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented "everything that I detest most," while Arendt met Berlin's hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, tragedy and passion, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin tells, for the first time, the full story of the fraught relationship between these towering figures, and shows how their profoundly different views continue to offer important lessons for political thought today.

Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, Kei Hiruta's Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the Arendt-Berlin conflict, from their first meeting in wartime New York through their widening intellectual chasm during the 1950s, the controversy over Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, their final missed opportunity to engage with each other at a 1967 conference and Berlin's continuing animosity toward Arendt after her death. Hiruta blends political philosophy and intellectual history to examine key issues that simultaneously connected and divided Arendt and Berlin, including the nature of totalitarianism, evil and the Holocaust, human agency and moral responsibility, Zionism, American democracy, British imperialism and the Hungarian Revolution. But, most of all, Arendt and Berlin disagreed over a question that goes to the heart of the human condition: what does it mean to be free?

Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Joanna Sliwa, "Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

25 februari 2022 | 85 min

Erica Brown, "Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile" (Maggid, 2020)

25 februari 2022 | 47 min

Jon Butler, "God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan" (Harvard UP, 2020)

24 februari 2022 | 63 min

In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.

Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.

God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan (Harvard UP, 2020) portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University and Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Becoming America and the prizewinning Awash in a Sea of Faith and The Huguenots in America. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.

Justin McGeary is Directory of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales.

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Haim Jachter, "Bridging Traditions: Demystifying Differences Between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews" (Maggid, 2022)

24 februari 2022 | 26 min

Allison Schachter, "Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

24 februari 2022 | 56 min

Exploring Autonomy: A History of Jewish Self-Governance in Eastern Europe

23 februari 2022 | 20 min

Catherine Ehrlich, "Irma's Passport: One Woman, Two World Wars, and a Legacy of Courage" (She Writes Press, 2021)

21 februari 2022 | 56 min

Markus Zehnder, "The Bible and Immigration: A Critical and Empirical Reassessment" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)

17 februari 2022 | 58 min

Michael Marmur and David Ellenson, "American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement, and Belief" (Brandeis UP, 2020)

16 februari 2022 | 50 min

Manoela Carpenedo, "Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus: Judaizing Evangelicals in Brazil" (Oxford UP, 2021)

15 februari 2022 | 67 min

Federica Francesconi, "Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

14 februari 2022 | 52 min

In her recent book on the Jewish community of Modena in Italy, Federica Francesconi tells a tale of contradictions. Segregated to the city’s ghetto in the 17th century, the Jewish merchants of the city nonetheless possessed an enormous presence in its economic, governmental and cultural milieu. By the start of the 19th century, these merchants even took center stage in Modena’s political scene following Napoleon’s conquest of Italy and the subsequent abolition of the ghettos themselves. How did this transformation occur? In what ways had life in the Modena – and in the Modenese ghetto – prepared these Jewish merchants to perform such leadership roles and to advocate fluently for the values of the French Enlightenment? To answer these questions, Francesconi tracks the development of the Modenese Jewish community since the arrival of her protagonists in the city in the middle of the 16th century, describing the techniques that merchant family members employed to stay abreast of – and innovate on – Modenese, Italian and European intellectual trends. The reader is not only privy to the economic activities of these figures, but also sees how they acted – for centuries – as cultural intermediaries for the rulers of the Este Duchy, who sought their advice on purchases of art, books and pieces of material culture. The book thus features Jews that do not fit neatly on the dichotomy between assimilation/conversion and communal isolation, but instead embodied aspects of both the ghetto society they dominated and the broader city setting with which they continually engaged.

As the narrative progresses, the archival material that Francesconi has uncovered also gives readers glimpses into the rich social life of an Early Modern Jewish community in the midst of gradual change. The merchants’ personal worship sites became synagogues for the whole ghetto. Their personal libraries – stocked with Kabbalistic masterpieces – were the sites of communal activity. Excluded from official leadership, Modenese Jewish women nonetheless found avenues to participate in shaping their own religious practices and the moral priorities of the community at large. Itself a series of cordoned off houses and living spaces, the ghetto was both “domestic” and a venue that fostered a nascent “civil society”; a “laboratory” that gave the Jewish merchants of Modena their first experiences with governmental practices.

At once an intellectual, socio-economic, religious and cultural history, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is not only a microhistory of Jewish life over the course of three centuries. It is, moreover, a model for understanding how Jews navigated, interpreted and even co-opted the policies of state institutions that emerged for the first time in the Early Modern period.

James Benjamin Nadel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University.

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Yakov Nagen, "Be, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality Between East and West" (Maggid, 2019)

9 februari 2022 | 30 min

Patrick Hicks, "In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program" (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2020)

8 februari 2022 | 23 min

In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they’ll be forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. Eli glimpses Werher von Braun and other scientists, who helped developed the V-2 rocket and were later recruited in Operation Paperclip to work in the United States on our nascent rocket program. Hicks describes Hessel’s struggle to survive the deprivations and torture by sociopathic ‘kapos’ in control of daily humiliations, cruelty, and murder at Dora. Approximately 20,000, mostly Jews, were murdered there, and very few survived. Eli survives, immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and gets recruited by the Kennedy Space Center. One day, he sees the infamous Wernher von Braun, now a respected United States citizen – his expertise, along with those of other Nazis, enabled the building of our space program. This is a story about resilience in the face of evil and the human capacity to recuperate, rebuild, and re-start.

Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names, Adoptable, and This London—he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which was published by Steerforth/Random House. He earned a doctorate in Irish Literature from the University of Sussex and is currently writer in residence at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Holocaust Studies. His work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Huffington Post, Guernica, The Utne Reader, and many others. When he’s not writing Hicks is busy raising his son, who was adopted from South Korea. He is passionate about international travel and lived in Europe for seven years. He has plans to visit Spain, England, Ireland, and Germany, followed by trips to Israel and England.

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Ola Hnatiuk, "Courage and Fear" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019)

8 februari 2022 | 63 min

Susan Gilson Miller, "Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2021)

3 februari 2022 | 80 min

When France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a highly regarded Casablancan Jewish lawyer, quickly claimed a role of rescuer and almost single-handedly organized a sweeping program of wartime refugee relief. But for all her remarkable achievements, Benatar's story has never been told.

In Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa (Stanford UP, 2021), Susan Gilson Miller introduces readers to a woman who fought injustice as an anti-Fascist resistant, advocate for refugee rights, liberator of Vichy-run forced labor camps, and legal counselor to hundreds of Holocaust survivors. Miller crafts a gripping biography that spins a tale like a Hollywood thriller, yet finds its truth in archives gathered across Europe, North Africa, Israel, and the United States and from Benatar's personal collection of eighteen thousand documents now housed in the US Holocaust Museum.

Years of Glory offers a rich narrative and a deeper understanding of the complex currents that shaped Jewish, North African, and world history over the course of the Second World War. The traumas of genocide, the struggle for anti-colonial liberation, and the eventual Jewish exodus from Arab lands all take on new meaning when reflected through the interstices of Benatar's life. A courageous woman with a deep moral conscience and an iron will, Nelly Benatar helped to lay the groundwork for crucial postwar efforts to build a better world over Europe's ashes.

Avery Weinman is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches Jewish history in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with emphasis on Sephardi and Mizrahi radicals in British Mandatory Palestine. She can be reached at averyweinman@ucla.edu.

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Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, "American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York" (Princeton UP, 2022)

1 februari 2022 | 61 min

Rich Brownstein, "Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide" (McFarland, 2021)

1 februari 2022 | 47 min

Mir Yarfitz, "Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina" (Rutgers UP, 2019)

28 januari 2022 | 72 min

The 15 Best Films about the Holocaust

27 januari 2022 | 73 min

Samuel J. Spinner, "Jewish Primitivism" (Stanford UP, 2021)

26 januari 2022 | 77 min

Andrew Porwancher, "The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton" (Princeton UP, 2021)

26 januari 2022 | 41 min

Karen Rostoger-Gruber, "The Family (and Frog! ) Haggadah" (Behrman House, 2017)

25 januari 2022 | 51 min

Jason Lustig, "A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021)

24 januari 2022 | 59 min

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (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 way 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 Jewish 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.

Jason 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' central 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 an 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 about the past.

Jason 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’s also an affiliate of the History department. His first book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture, published by Oxford University Press in December 2021, traces the twentieth-century struggle over who might “own” Jewish history, especially after the Nazi looting of Jewish archives. Dr. Lustig is also the host and creator of the Jewish 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: jlustig@austin.utexas.edu.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Yakir Englander, "The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)

17 januari 2022 | 60 min

Marc Caplan, "Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism" (Indiana UP, 2021)

13 januari 2022 | 70 min

Anat Plocker, "The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties" (Indiana UP, 2022)

12 januari 2022 | 69 min

Gideon Sapir and Daniel Statman, "State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical-Legal Inquiry" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

11 januari 2022 | 57 min

Melissa Stoller, "Sadie’s Shabbat Stories" (Spork, 2020)

11 januari 2022 | 56 min

Stephanie M. Pridgeon, "Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

5 januari 2022 | 130 min

Rich Brownstein, "Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide" (McFarland, 2021)

31 december 2021 | 66 min

Noam Sachs Zion, "Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy" (Jewish Publication Society, 2021)

31 december 2021 | 72 min

Ann Koffsky, "Kayla and Kugel's Happy Hanhukkah" (Apples and Honey Press, 2020)

28 december 2021 | 38 min

Beate Kowalski and Susan E. Docherty, "The Reception of Exodus Motifs in Jewish and Christian Literature: "Let My People Go!" (Brill, 2021)

23 december 2021 | 39 min

Marcia Pally, "From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

21 december 2021 | 78 min

Izabela Wagner, "Bauman: A Biography" (Polity, 2020)

17 december 2021 | 59 min

Julian E. Zelizer, "Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement" (Yale UP, 2021)

17 december 2021 | 54 min

"Bambi" isn't about what you think it's about: Jack Zipes explains

15 december 2021 | 40 min

Jonathan Sacks, "The Koren Standard Tanakh Maalot" (Koren, 2021)

14 december 2021 | 49 min

Menachem Kellner, "We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

13 december 2021 | 69 min

Sonia Gollance, "It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity" (Stanford UP, 2021)

7 december 2021 | 83 min

Noah Isenberg ed., Shelley Frisch, trans., "Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 december 2021 | 50 min

Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton UP, 2021) brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as Billie) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. From a humorous account of Wilder's stint as a hired dancing companion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dispatches from the international film scene, to his astute profiles of writers, performers, and political figures, the collection offers fresh insights into the creative mind of one of Hollywood's most revered writer-directors.

Wilder's early writings--a heady mix of cultural essays, interviews, and reviews--contain the same sparkling wit and intelligence as his later Hollywood screenplays, while also casting light into the dark corners of Vienna and Berlin between the wars. Wilder covered everything: big-city sensations, jazz performances, film and theater openings, dance, photography, and all manner of mass entertainment. And he wrote about the most colorful figures of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Prince of Wales, actor Adolphe Menjou, director Erich von Stroheim, and the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Film historian Noah Isenberg's introduction and commentary place Wilder's pieces--brilliantly translated by Shelley Frisch--in historical and biographical context, and rare photos capture Wilder and his circle during these formative years.

Filled with rich reportage and personal musings, Billy Wilder on Assignment showcases the burgeoning voice of a young journalist who would go on to become a great auteur.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Rani Jaeger, "Abraham the Hebrew Believer: Secularism and Religion in the Work of Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973)"

1 december 2021 | 51 min

Hadassah Lieberman, "Hadassah: An American Story" (Brandeis UP, 2021)

29 november 2021 | 61 min

Grant T. Harward, "Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2021)

26 november 2021 | 85 min

Annegret Oehme, "The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations" (Brill, 2021)

26 november 2021 | 57 min

Dana Mack, "All Things That Deserve to Perish: A Novel of Wilhelmine Germany" (2020)

22 november 2021 | 42 min

Despite all the attention paid to the two world wars of the twentieth century, not a great deal of historical fiction focuses on the period that preceded them. Dana Mack’s debut novel, All Things That Deserve to Perish, is an exception. Through its depictions of Berlin high society, the Junkers from the agricultural estates of old Prussia, and interfaith marriages, the novel explores the fraught transition to a modern, commercial economy that simultaneously promoted and complicated relations between Germans at all levels of society and their Jewish fellow citizens.

Mack focuses her story on Elisabeth von Schwabacher, the daughter of a successful Jewish financier who has just returned from Vienna to her parents’ home in Berlin when the book opens. Lisi, as she’s known, has been training as a classical pianist, and her great ambition is to perform in concert halls and private soirées.

Or is it? Lisi’s mother pushes the conventional future of wife and mother and rigorously oversees a diet and makeover program to ready Lisi for society, but neither of her parents wants to force their daughter into marriage, especially to a non-Jewish man. It’s Lisi herself who encourages the attentions of two noblemen, both to some extent fortune hunters—the widowed Prince Egon von Senbeck-Wittenbach and the impoverished Junker Count Wilhelm von Boening. And Lisi is also the one who chooses, when her parents press her for a decision, to start an affair with one of her suitors without considering how that may affect her ability to perform.

The casual antisemitism expressed by many of the characters in this book is almost more jarring than the occasional outbursts of hatred and bigotry. But it is both true to the times and revealing of the fundamental social rifts in Wilhelmine Germany that, less than fifty years later, would explode in the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

A historian, journalist, and musician, Dana Mack has published two nonfiction books on marriage and parenthood, as well as articles on music, history, culture, family issues, and education in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other publications. All Things That Deserve to Perish is her first novel.

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Matthew Levering, "Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism" (Cascade Books, 2021)

19 november 2021 | 21 min

What does it mean to be the people of God? Is it possible for Jewish and Christian people to engage in fruitful dialogue about their faiths, with integrity and mutual respect? Despite, or perhaps because of, the bitterly tragic history between them, especially of the ill-treatment of Jewish people under the false guise of Christianity, ongoing efforts toward charitable understanding and friendship are to be especially treasured.

Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism (Cascade Books, 2021) is the dogmatic sequel to Levering’s Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage, in which he argued that God’s purpose in creating the cosmos is the eschatological marriage of God and his people. God sets this marriage into motion through his covenantal election of a particular people, the people of Israel. Central to this people’s relationship with the Creator God are their Scriptures, exodus, Torah, Temple, land, and Davidic kingship. As a Christian Israelology, this book devotes a chapter to each of these topics, investigating their theological significance both in light of ongoing Judaism and in light of Christian Scripture (Old and New Testaments) and Christian theology.

Tune is as we speak with Matthew Levering about his recent book, Engaging the Doctrine of Israel.

Matthew Levering is the James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary, in Mundelein, Illinois. He is the author of over thirty books, including four previous volumes in his Engaging the Doctrine dogmatic series. He is the co-editor of two quarterly journals, Nova et Vetera and International Journal of Systematic Theology.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)

18 november 2021 | 60 min

David Barak-Gorodetsky, "Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

18 november 2021 | 45 min

In this episode, I interview David Barak-Gorodetzky about his new book, Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist (U Nebraska Press, 2021). This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes—the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor—offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism—especially his championing of a binational state—against all odds. Like a prophet unable to suppress his prophecy, Magnes could not resist a religious calling to take political action, whatever the cost. In Palestine no one understood his uniquely American pragmatism and insistence that a constitutional system was foundational for a just society. Jewish leaders regarded his prophetic politics as overly conciliatory and dangerous for negotiations. Magnes’s central European allies in striving for a binational Palestine, including Martin Buber, credited him with restoring their faith in politics, but they ultimately retreated from binationalism to welcome the new State of Israel. In candidly portraying the complex Magnes as he understood himself, Barak-Gorodetsky elucidates why Magnes persevered, despite evident lack of Arab interest, to advocate binationalism with Truman in May 1948 at the ultimate price of Jewish sovereignty. Accompanying Magnes on his long-misunderstood journey, we gain a unique broader perspective: on early peacemaking efforts in Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish role in the history of the state, binationalism as political theology, an American view of binationalism, and the charged realities of Israel today.

Bar Guzi is PhD candidate at Brandeis University. His research focuses on modern Jewish thought and theology. Bar’s dissertation discerns and conceptualizes a non-supernaturalistic current of American Jewish thought that is nevertheless profoundly concerned with God. He can be found on Twitter and reached via email at bguzi@brandeis.edu.

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Daniel C. Matt, "The Zohar" (Stanford UP, 2018)

17 november 2021 | 62 min

Yair Wallach, "A City in Fragments: Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem" (Stanford UP, 2020)

15 november 2021 | 85 min

Andrea Gondos, "Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity" (SUNY Press, 2020)

4 november 2021 | 51 min

Long before Kabbalah books lined multiple books shelves in bookstores, Jewish educators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thought of copious ways of making Kabbalah more accessible for readers who were not acquainted with this lore. The book, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020), introduces the reader to an early seventeenth-century rabbi, Yissachar Baer, who lived and worked in Prague. Each of his four works seeks to illuminate a different facet of the Zohar (Book of Splendour), the medieval classic of kabbalistic speculation. His goal was to simplify the language of the Zohar as well as to assemble its halakhic teachings so Jews could enrich their daily observance of the commandments with the corresponding mystical explanation. He also wrote a short introduction to the study of Kabbalah and organized brief excerpts of the Zohar into an anthology. His works were important mediators of the Zohar and Kabbalah to Jewish and Christian readers alike.

Andrea Gondos is an Emmy Noether post-doctoral fellow at Freie Universität (Berlin) where her current research centers on women's health and healing as discussed in early modern Jewish recipe books of magic and practical Kabbalah Her next book project will examine how the female body and its reproductive powers constituted a unique epistemological space for ba’alei shem (Jewish wonder-working healers) where knowledge concerning creation and regeneration could be accessed and controlled. Prior to joining the Emmy Noether research group, she held post-doctoral positions at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She was also a fellow at the Katz Centre of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Amy Sodaro, "Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence" (Rutgers UP, 2018)

4 november 2021 | 62 min

Aubrey L. Glazer, "Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide" (Academic Studies Press, 2013)

3 november 2021 | 57 min

Jan Rybak, "Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914-1920" (Oxford UP, 2021)

2 november 2021 | 82 min

Jan Rybak's Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914-1920 (Oxford UP, 2021) examines Zionist activism in East-Central Europe during the years of war, occupation, revolution, the collapse of empires, and the formation of nation states in the years 1914 to 1920. Against the backdrop of the Great War—its brutal aftermath and consequent violence—the day-to-day encounters between Zionist activists and the Jewish communities in the region gave the movement credibility, allowed it to win support and to establish itself as a leading force in Jewish political and social life for decades to come. Through activists' efforts, Zionism came to mean something new: rather than being concerned with debates over Jewish nationhood and pioneering efforts in Palestine, it came to be about aiding starving populations, organizing soup-kitchens, establishing orphanages, schools, kindergartens, and hospitals, negotiating with the authorities, and leading self-defence against pogroms. Through this engagement Zionism evolved into a mass movement that attracted and inspired tens of thousands of Jews throughout the region. Everyday Zionism approaches the major European events of the period from the dual perspectives of Jewish communities and the Zionist activists on the ground, demonstrating how war, revolution, empire, and nation held very different meanings for people, depending on their local circumstances. Based on extensive archival research, the study shows how during the war and its aftermath East-Central Europe saw a large-scale nation-building project by Zionist activists who fought for and led their communities to shape for them a national future.

Avery Weinman is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches Jewish history in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with emphasis on Sephardi and Mizrahi radicals in British Mandatory Palestine. She can be reached at averyweinman@ucla.edu.

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Jason Gile, "Ezekiel and the World of Deuteronomy" (T&T Clark, 2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 30 min

Meni Even-Israel, "The Steinsaltz Tanya V3: Sha'ar Hayihud Veha'emuna and Iggeret Hateshuva" (Maggid, 2021)

27 oktober 2021 | 45 min

Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)

26 oktober 2021 | 53 min

Caroline A. Kita, "Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater" (Indiana UP, 2019)

26 oktober 2021 | 52 min

Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

25 oktober 2021 | 66 min

Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, "A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg" (Yale UP, 2021)

15 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Dov Zakheim, "The Prince and the Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince" (Maggid, 2021)

15 oktober 2021 | 39 min

Eliyana R. Adler, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2020)

14 oktober 2021 | 64 min

Mikhael Manekin, "The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power" (Evrit, 2021)

13 oktober 2021 | 55 min

Yakov Nagen, "The Soul of the Mishna" (Maggid, 2021)

12 oktober 2021 | 34 min

Jeffrey Veidlinger, "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

12 oktober 2021 | 52 min

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Metropolitan Books, 2021) repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of the award-winning books, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. He is the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former vice-president of the Association for Jewish Studies.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

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John-Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

12 oktober 2021 | 59 min

Shay Hazkani, "Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War" (Stanford UP, 2021)

29 september 2021 | 82 min

Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020)

22 september 2021 | 74 min

Kristin Swenson, "A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible" (Oxford UP, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 65 min

Rachel Rojanski, "Yiddish in Israel: A History" (Indiana UP, 2020)

20 september 2021 | 98 min

Emmanuel Navon, "The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

16 september 2021 | 42 min

The first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the Jewish psyche. He sheds light on the people of Israel’s foreign policy through the ages: the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Jewish diasporas in Europe from the Middle Ages to the emancipation, the emerging nineteenth-century Zionist movement, and Zionist diplomacy following World War I and surrounding World War II.

Navon elucidates Israel’s foreign policy from the birth of the state in 1948 to our days: the dilemmas and choices at the beginning of the Cold War; Israel’s attempts to establish periphery alliances; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel’s relations with Europe, the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United Nations, and the Jewish diasporas; and how twenty-first-century energy geopolitics is transforming Israel’s foreign relations today.

Navon’s analysis is rooted in two central ideas, represented by the Star of David (faith) and the scepter (political power). First, he contends that the interactions of Jews with the world have always been best served by combining faith with pragmatism. Second, Navon shows how the state of Israel owes its diplomatic achievements to national assertiveness and hard power—not only military strength but economic prowess and technological innovation. Demonstrating that diplomacy is a balancing act between ideals and realpolitik, The Star and the Scepter draws aspirational and pragmatic lessons from Israel’s exceptional diplomatic history.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Shlomit Naim Naor, "The Things We Are Not Talking About" (2020)

13 september 2021 | 59 min

Ori Yehudai, "Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

9 september 2021 | 82 min

Sarah Bunin Benor et al., "Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

2 september 2021 | 67 min

Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni (Rutgers University Press, 2020), explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today.

Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture.

Interviewees:

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and courtesy Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California.

Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University.

Sharon Avni is Professor of Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and a Research Associate at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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A. J. Culp, "Memoir of Moses: The Literary Creation of Covenantal Memory in Deuteronomy" (Fortress, 2019)

1 september 2021 | 13 min

Danny Adeno Abebe, "From Africa To Zion" (Miskal, 2021)

31 augusti 2021 | 52 min

Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards" (Cherry Orchard, 2021)

30 augusti 2021 | 84 min

Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. "The Essential Talmud" (Maggid, 2010)

27 augusti 2021 | 44 min

David J. Goldberg, “Rabbi With A Cause: Israel and Identity” (Open Agenda, 2021)

27 augusti 2021 | 88 min

Naphtaly Shem-Tov, "Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation" (Routledge, 2021)

25 augusti 2021 | 81 min

Stanley Mirvis, "The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2020)

23 augusti 2021 | 60 min

Ilana Maymind, "Exile and Otherness: The Ethics of Shinran and Maimonides" (Lexington Books, 2020)

13 augusti 2021 | 46 min

Eliza Ablovatski, "Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

11 augusti 2021 | 62 min

Daniel A. Klein (trans.), "Shadal on Leviticus" (Kodesh Press, 2020)

10 augusti 2021 | 37 min

Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known by his Hebrew acronym Shadal, was the leading Italian Jewish scholar of the 19th century. A linguist, educator, and religious thinker, he devoted his talents above all to the interpretation of the Bible. As a master of Hebrew grammar and usage, he focused on the plain meaning of the text. Although he was a devout believer in the divinity, unity, and antiquity of the Torah, Shadal approached the text in a remarkably free spirit of inquiry, drawing upon a wide variety of sources, ancient and contemporary, Jewish and non-Jewish. As a result, his interpretations may strike even the modern reader as fresh and novel.

Shadal's treatment of the books of the Torah consisted of his Italian translation of the text and his Hebrew-language commentary. Here, for the first time, is an all-English version of both the text translation and the unabridged commentary. Daniel A. Klein, translator and editor of Luzzatto's commentaries, has supplied copious explanatory notes and a list identifying the sources cited. Through Kodesh Press, Daniel Klein has translated Shadal's commentaries on Genesis (2019), Exodus (2015), and Leviticus (2020).

Join us as we speak with Daniel Klein about Luzzatto's life and commentaries on the Torah!

Daniel A. Klein is an attorney and legal writer, and a graduate of Yeshiva University and New York University School of Law. His study of Italian as a youthful hobby led to a fascination with Italian Jewish culture and, in particular, the works of Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto).He and his wife live in Rochester, New York, where he has taught Judaic studies at elementary, high school, and adult levels.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Mika Ahuvia, "On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture" (U California Press, 2021)

9 augusti 2021 | 58 min

Elizabeth Anthony, "The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust" (Wayne State UP, 2021)

8 augusti 2021 | 66 min

Leonard J. Greenspoon, "Olam Ha-zeh V'olam Ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice" (Purdue UP, 2017)

4 augusti 2021 | 55 min

Robin Derricourt, "Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions" ( Manchester UP, 2021)

29 juli 2021 | 55 min

What do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread?

Robin Derricourt considers the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism and working backwards through Islam, Christianity and Judaism to Zoroastrianism, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions ( Manchester UP, 2021) opens up the conditions that allowed religious movements to emerge, attract their first followers and grow. Throughout history there have been many prophets: individuals who believed they were in direct contact with the divine, with instructions to spread a religious message. While many disappeared without trace, some gained millions of followers and established a lasting religion. Derricourt considers and gives new insights on the origins of major religions and raises essential questions about why some succeeded where others failed. And who does not want to know that!

Robin Derricourt is an Honorary Professor of History in the School of Humanities at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas (2011), Antiquity Imagined: The Remarkable Legacy of Egypt and the Ancient Near East (2015) and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory (2018), which received the PROSE Award for Archaeology and Ancient History.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com.

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Moshe Halbertal, "Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism" (Yale UP, 2020)

27 juli 2021 | 31 min

Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

16 juli 2021 | 54 min

Under the Arch of Titus: A Gateway to the Jewish Community

14 juli 2021 | 31 min

David Arnovitz, "Samuel: The Making of the Monarchy, Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel" (Koren Publishers, 2021)

14 juli 2021 | 18 min

Yael Ziegler, "Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World" (Koren Publishers, 2021)

14 juli 2021 | 32 min

Leonard Greenspoon, "Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

9 juli 2021 | 67 min

In his book Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Leonard Greenspoon is the first to examine thoroughly Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation.

Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked.

Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible.

Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.

Leonard Greenspoon is Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization and a professor of theology and of classical and Near Eastern studies at Creighton University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, "Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews" (North Atlantic Books, 2021)

9 juli 2021 | 63 min

Michael Fishbane, "Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

9 juli 2021 | 55 min

Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, "Talks on the Parasha" (Maggid, 2015)

8 juli 2021 | 48 min

Ruth Mazo Karras, "Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

2 juli 2021 | 61 min

Assaf Shelleg, "Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project" (Oxford UP, 2020)

2 juli 2021 | 56 min

Sina Kahen, "Ideas: Bereshit" (2020)

1 juli 2021 | 71 min

Mariusz Kalczewiak, "Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture" (U Alabama Press, 2019)

25 juni 2021 | 53 min

Isaac W. Oliver, "Luke's Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts" (Oxford UP, 2021)

23 juni 2021 | 39 min

Hugh McLeod and Todd Weir, "Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century" (Oxford UP, 2020)

10 juni 2021 | 38 min

Edward B. Westermann, "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany" (Cornell UP, 2021)

10 juni 2021 | 73 min

Natalia Aleksiun, "Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust" (Littman Library, 2021)

31 maj 2021 | 63 min

Thoroughly researched, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021) highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history devoted themselves to creating a sense of Polish Jewish belonging while also fighting for their rights as an ethnic minority. The political climate made it hard for these men and women to pursue an academic career; instead they had to continue their efforts to create and disseminate Polish Jewish history by teaching outside the university and publishing in scholarly and popular journals. By introducing the Jewish public to a pantheon of historical heroes to celebrate and anniversaries to commemorate, they sought to forge a community aware of its past, its cultural heritage, and its achievements---though no less important were their efforts to counter the increased hostility towards Jews in the public discourse of the day. In highlighting the role of public intellectuals and the social role of scholars and historical scholarship, this study adds a new dimension to the understanding of the Polish Jewish world in the interwar period.

Natalia Aleksiun is Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College New York. She published Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 and co-edited two volumes of Polin examining Holocaust memory and Jewish historiography. She has recently published a critical edition of The Destruction of Żółkiew Jews by Gershon Taffet. She is preparing a volume of Polin devoted to Jewish childhoods, children and child rearing in Eastern Europe. She is also completing two books on Jewish medical students in East Central Europe and on daily life in hiding in Eastern Galicia. She is coeditor in chief of East European Jewish Affairs.

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Katarzyna Person, "Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation" (Cornell UP, 2021)

28 maj 2021 | 56 min

Zev Eleff, "Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life" (Wayne State UP, 2020)

27 maj 2021 | 61 min

Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life (Wayne State University Press, 2020), by Zev Eleff, challenges the current historical paradigm in the study of Orthodox Judaism and other tradition-bound faith communities in the United States. Paying attention to "lived religion," the book moves beyond sermons and synagogues and examines the webs of experiences mediated by any number of American cultural forces. Eleff lucidly explores Orthodox Judaism's engagement with Jewish law, youth culture and gender, and how this religious group has been affected by its indigenous context. To do this, the book makes ample use of archives and other previously unpublished primary sources.

Eleff explores the curious history of Passover peanut oil and the folkways and foodways that battled in this culinary arena to both justify and rebuff the validity of this healthier substitute for other fatty ingredients. He looks at the Yeshiva University quiz team's fifteen minutes of fame on the nationally televised College Bowl program and the unprecedented pride of young people and youth culture in the burgeoning Modern Orthodox movement. Another chapter focuses on the advent of women's prayer groups as an alternative to other synagogue experiences in Orthodox life and the vociferous opposition it received on the grounds that it was motivated by "heretical" religious and social movements. Whereas past monographs and articles argue that these communities have moved right toward a conservative brand of faith, Eleff posits that Orthodox Judaism-like other like-minded religious enclaves-ought to be studied in their American religious contexts.

The microhistories examined in Authentically Orthodox are some of the most exciting and understudied moments in American Jewish life and will hold the interest of scholars and students of American Jewish history and religion.

Zev Eleff is chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College and associate professor of Jewish History at Touro College.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Devi Mays, "Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora" (Stanford UP, 2020)

26 maj 2021 | 85 min

A Conversation with Jessica Kirzane about Yiddish Studies

20 maj 2021 | 62 min

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: how Jessica first began to learn Yiddish, what drew her to translation work, the importance of finding encouraging mentors and creating peer supports, what it means to be “contingent” faculty, and a discussion of her new book Diary of A Lonely Girl.

Our guest is: Dr. Jessica Kirzane, who teaches Yiddish language as well as courses in Yiddish literature and culture. She received her PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Dr. Kirzane is the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. In addition, she has held several positions at the Yiddish Book Center: Translation Fellow in 2017-18, Pedagogy Fellow in 2018-19, and as an editor and contributor to the Teach Great Jewish Books site of the Yiddish Book Center. Her research interests include race, sex, gender, and regionalism in American Jewish and Yiddish literature and has published articles on the idea of rural America in Yiddish literature, interethnic romance in Yiddish periodicals, and lynching in American Yiddish literature. Most recently she has published a translation of Miriam Karpilove's The Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2020).

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

The Yiddish Book Center
“New York’s First-Time Women Voters” in Jewish Currents
“Freydl” in Columbia Journal
The Abandoned Book: A New Collection of Yiddish Translations.
To Tread on New Ground: Selected Hebrew Writings of Hava Shapiro. Ed. Carole Balin and Wendy Zierler (Wayne State University Press, 2014)
Have I Got a Story For You: More than a Century of Yiddish Fiction from the Forward. (Norton, 2016)
Diary of A Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

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Leon R. Kass, "Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus" (Yale UP, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 66 min

Everything, in the end, comes down to Exodus. Everything that we are as a civilization goes back to Exodus. Every person, religious or not, who wants to consider him or herself educated needs to engage with Exodus.

And, fortunately for us, the noted academic Leon Kass has provided us with that unique thing—a book that is both magisterial and readable. We will discuss with him his 2021 work, Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2012).

Kass examines Exodus in meticulous detail. We learn, among other things, that Exodus is a story of how all human beings can rise from the depths of despair and oppression and of how one group, in particular, formed a society that has influenced many others down to this day in everything from compassion for the downtrodden to humane treatment of animals to wise stewardship of the land. Not to mention the fact that our foundational laws and traditional family and current government structures derive from the events narrated in Exodus.

Kass writes, “I undertook this study mainly to explore basic questions of people formation: What makes a people a people? What forms their communal identity, holds them together, guides their lives? For what should they strive? Exodus speaks to these questions through two unfolding and intersecting stories: the founding of the Israelite nation via deliverance and command, and the growing knowledge of God via divine revelation.”

This is the perfect treatise for general readers on questions that are as relevant as ever: What is justice? What do we want our nation to be? What is my personal responsibility to others?

The book also brims with drama—we are dealing here, after all, with Moses and mountaintops, pharaohs and plagues, God’s love and human faithlessness. For those not raised in religious households, this book is a gateway to understanding those who were and enriches us culturally.

We will focus primarily in this interview with Dr. Kass (he is also a physician and one of the leading bioethicists of our times) on the role that the Sabbath plays in Exodus and in our own lives. His treatment of that subject alone demands attention.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, "The Erez Concise Guide Series" (Koren, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 31 min

Harry Freedman, "Reason to Believe: The Controversial Life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 64 min

Louis Jacobs was Britain's most gifted Jewish scholar. A Talmudic genius, outstanding teacher and accomplished author, cultured and easy-going, he was widely expected to become Britain's next Chief Rabbi.

Then controversy struck. The Chief Rabbi refused to appoint him as Principal of Jews' College, the country's premier rabbinic college. He further forbade him from returning as rabbi to his former synagogue. All because of a book Jacobs had written some years earlier, challenging from a rational perspective the traditional belief in the origins of the Torah, the Jewish Bible.

The British Jewish community was torn apart. It was a scandal unlike anything they had ever previously endured. The national media loved it. Jacobs became a cause celebre, a beacon of reason, a humble man who wouldn't be compromised. His congregation resigned en masse and created a new synagogue for him in Abbey Road, the heart of fashionable 1970s London. It became the go-to venue for Jews seeking reasonable answers to questions of faith.

A prolific author of over 50 books and hundreds of articles on every aspect of Judaism, from the basics of religious belief to the complexities of mysticism and law, Louis Jacobs won the heart and affection of the mainstream British Jewish community. When the Jewish Chronicle ran a poll to discover the Greatest British Jew, Jacobs won hands down. He said it made him feel daft.

In Reason To Believe: The Controversial Life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021), Harry Freedman tells the dramatic and touching story of Louis Jacobs's life, and of the human drama lived out by his family, deeply wounded by his rejection.

Harry Freedman is a leading British author of popular works on Jewish culture and history. His publications include The Talmud: A Biography, Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul, The Murderous History of Bible Translations and The Gospels' Veiled Agenda. He has written for the Guardian, Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Quarterly, Judaism Today and contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Modern Jewish Culture.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Robert D. Miller II, "Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021)

13 maj 2021 | 26 min

Mira Sucharov, "Borders and Belonging: A Memoir" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

11 maj 2021 | 53 min

Mira Sucharov’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), is a work that takes seriously the feminist adage that the “personal is political,” and vice versa. Through an intimate telling of her life, Sucharov uses the work to trace her shifting relationship to Israel, and the Israeli-Plaestinitan conflict, the meaning of diaspora Jewish identity, and what writing about International Relation can look like. The memoir covers topics such as the divorce of her parents, her time spent at Jewish summer camps as a child, visits to Israel, and her time in graduate school then later as a professional academic working in the field of Political Science, specializing in Israel-Palestine. Throughout, Sucharov touches on themes of identity, gender, disability, and home. It is a work of use to scholars across the humanities and social sciences for its honest approach to the subjective dynamics of academic engagement.

Mira Sucharov is Professor of Political Science and University Chair of Teaching Innovation at Carleton University. She is the author of Public Influence: A Guide to Op-Ed Writing and Social Media Engagement (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (SUNY Press, 2005). She is also co-editor of the volumes Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: Foundational & Contemporary Debates, and Methodology and Emotion in International Relations: Parsing the Passions.

In this gripping and honest memoir, Mira Sucharov shows what a search for political and emotional home looks like. Sucharov suffered from childhood phobias triggered by her parents' divorce, and she sought emotional refuge in Jewish summer camp. But three years spent living in Israel in her twenties shook her to her core. Ultimately, encounters with colleagues, students, friends and lovers force her to confront what it means to be able to write, advocate and teach about Israel/Palestine in a way that balances affirmation with authenticity.

Claire English is PhD Candidate in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal.

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Amelia M. Glaser, "Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine" (Harvard UP, 2020)

5 maj 2021 | 60 min

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020) effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York-based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's "At the Border of China."

These poets dreamed of a moment when "we" could mean "we workers" rather than "we Jews." Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she also directs the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Jewish Studies, programs.

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Lila Corwin Berman, "The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution" (Princeton UP, 2020)

5 maj 2021 | 55 min

For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism.

With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts―most importantly, tax policies―situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals. Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political influence, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies.

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Adam Hochschild, "Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)

4 maj 2021 | 52 min

Svenja Bethke, "Dance on the Razor's Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

30 april 2021 | 58 min

Daniel Herskowitz, "Heidegger and His Jewish Reception" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

28 april 2021 | 70 min

Thomas Robinson and Hillary Rodrigues, "World Religions Reader: Understanding Our Religious World" (ROBINEST, 2020)

23 april 2021 | 42 min

Massoud Hayoun, "When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History" (New Press, 2019)

21 april 2021 | 73 min

Rachel B. Gross, "Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice" (NYU Press, 2021)

19 april 2021 | 63 min

In 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history surrounding them.

In Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (NYU Press, 2021), Rachel B. Gross argues that nostalgic activities such as visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street or eating traditional Jewish foods should be understood as American Jewish religious practices. In making the case that these practices are not just cultural, but are actually religious, Gross asserts that many prominent sociologists and historians have mistakenly concluded that American Judaism is in decline, and she contends that they are looking in the wrong places for Jewish religious activity. If they looked outside of traditional institutions and practices, such as attendance at synagogue or membership in Jewish Community Centers, they would see that the embrace of nostalgia provides evidence of an alternative, under-appreciated way of being Jewish and of maintaining Jewish continuity.

Tracing American Jews’ involvement in a broad array of ostensibly nonreligious activities, including conducting Jewish genealogical research, visiting Jewish historic sites, purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish nostalgia to children, and seeking out traditional Jewish foods, Gross argues that these practices illuminate how many American Jews are finding and making meaning within American Judaism today.

Rachel B. Gross is Assistant Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Sheila E. Jelen, "Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies" (Wayne State UP, 2020

12 april 2021 | 70 min

In Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts-those that exist on the border between ethnography and art-Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust.

S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (1912-1914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (1906-1935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Maurice Samuel's The World of Sholem Aleichem (1944), Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski's Life Is with People (1952), Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition (1967), and Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1983), alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations.

Salvage Poetics is particularly attentive to how literary scholars deploy the notion of "ethnography" in their readings of literature in languages and/or cultures that are considered "dead" or "dying" and how their definition of an "ethnographic" literary text speaks to and enhance the scientific discipline of ethnography. This book makes a fresh contribution to the fields of American Jewish cultural and literary studies and art history.

Interviewee: Sheila E. Jelen is associate professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Cedric Cohen-Skalli, "Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography" (Brandeis UP, 2020)

9 april 2021 | 98 min

Dina Porat, "Vengeance and Retribution Are Mine: Community, the Holocaust, and Abba Kovner's Avengers" (Pardes, 2019)

6 april 2021 | 63 min

Roundtable on Medieval Conspiracy Theories

31 mars 2021 | 67 min

Join us today for a roundtable conversation with three leading medieval scholars about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in history.

Michael T. Bailey, professor of history at Iowa State University is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of the idea of the Witches’ Sabbath, the verifiable hysterical historical panic about a gathering of diabolical witches joined together to dance with the devil himself in order to spread evil power, a nocturnal festival capable of destroying flora and fauna.

Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, and translator of the first Blood Libel accusation in England, speaks on her historical forte: the dangerous, long-lived, and utterly spurious assertion that Jews ritually murder a Christian child to celebrate Passover. Emerging in medieval England and flourishing throughout the whole of the premodern era, the Blood Libel was responsible for another form or murderous hysteria.

Sean Field, a specialist on religious life in medieval France, speaks about the creation of mystery around the Templars. This is a different kind of conspiracy theory, that develops later around a specific and very real event. King Philip IV of France accused the Templars of a laundry list of spiritual and corporeal crimes; almost all the accused were entirely innocent. Though there was much furor contemporaneously, there was no belief that the Templars were involved in some sort of international secret financial skullduggery. Instead that modern balderdash developed much later and sticks with us. Our conversation covers the appeal of conspiracy theories, how they gain traction, and how they might be handled. Though our discussion is based in history it has strong repercussions for the current political and cultural situation.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)

22 mars 2021 | 64 min

Joshua Cole, "Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2019)

17 mars 2021 | 64 min

Joshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery.

Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political violence in Constantine in August 1934 that resulted in the deaths of 25 Jews and 3 Muslims, the book reveals fissures within colonial society in Algeria that French authorities had a vested interest in provoking and nurturing. The particular conflict that pitted Muslims against Jews with such intensity over the course of a few days during the interwar period gave the French state an opportunity to fuel tensions between these communities in order to resist political reforms extending key rights of citizenship to Muslims in Algeria.

The book also makes the compelling case that a particular figure, Mohamed El Maadi, a Muslim Algerian who served in the French military and developed ties to extreme-right politics, played a key role in the conflict, including planning and participating in the murders. Beyond the revelation of a principal culprit during the episode, Lethal Provocation also tracks the ways the French authorities, including the police and other segments of the colonial state refused to understand the riots and murders as anything other than the expression of an inherent and essential rift between Jews and Muslims. Reframing the Constantine murders, a tragic and violent set of events that took place in 1930s Algeria, the book also makes clear that the riots are/were also en episode of a very French history.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Jennifer Anne Moses, "The Man Who Loved His Wife" (Mayapple Press, 2021)

9 mars 2021 | 34 min

Richard Kalmin, "Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context" (U California Press, 2014)

5 mars 2021 | 50 min

Miriam Udel, "Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature" (NYU Press, 2020)

4 mars 2021 | 53 min

While there has been a recent boom in Jewish literacy and learning within the US, few resources exist to enable American Jews to experience the rich primary sources of Yiddish culture. Stepping into this void, Miriam Udel has crafted collection, Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2020), which offers a feast of beguiling original translations of stories and poems for children.

Arranged thematically―from school days to the holidays―the book takes readers from Jewish holidays and history to folktales and fables, from stories of humanistic ethics to multi-generational family sagas. Featuring many works that are appearing in English for the first time, and written by both prominent and lesser-known authors, this anthology spans the Yiddish-speaking globe―drawing from materials published in Eastern Europe, New York, and Latin America from the 1910s, during the interwar period, and up through the 1970s. With its vast scope, Honey on the Page offers a cornucopia of delights to families, individuals and educators seeking literature that speaks to Jewish children about their religious, cultural, and ethical heritage.

Complemented by whimsical, humorous illustrations by Paula Cohen, an acclaimed children’s book illustrator, Udel’s evocative translations of Yiddish stories and poetry will delight young and older readers alike.

Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox rabbinate.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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David Stavrou, "Leaving Zion: The Israeli Diaspora in Europe" (Pardes, 2019)

2 mars 2021 | 62 min

Rachel S. Mikva, "Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Beacon, 2020)

26 februari 2021 | 65 min

I. Stavans and J. Lambert, "How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish" (Restless Books, 2020)

23 februari 2021 | 48 min

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, entitled How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020), and edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City’s Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

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Hannah Hahn, "They Left It All Behind: Trauma, Loss, and Memory Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and their Children" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

19 februari 2021 | 33 min

Naomi Seidman, "Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition" (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019)

19 februari 2021 | 59 min

Dina Danon, "The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History" (Stanford UP, 2020)

18 februari 2021 | 51 min

Max Gross, "The Lost Shtetl" (HarperCollins, 2020)

16 februari 2021 | 30 min

Today I spoke with Max Gross about his book The Lost Shtetl (HarperCollins, 2020). Imagine a Jewish village hidden in the forests of Poland that somehow escapes the Holocaust. Eighty years later, a young woman divorces her husband and runs into the surrounding forest. The town sends a young man to find her. He’s an orphan and expendable because he’s not that good a marriage prospect, but suddenly he finds himself in modern-day Poland. He finds it hard to believe that all the Jews of Poland have been murdered along with most of Europe’s Jewry. Officials toss him in an institution and study him for months until a Yiddish translator is found. And when they fly him home in a helicopter, the townspeople think the Messiah has finally come. The Lost Shtetl is about love, family, community, religion, class, government, politics, antisemitism, assimilation, and history itself. Although the town never heard of electricity, running water, or cars, never advanced in science or medicine, and never even heard of sliced bread, it’s not clear that progress is going to be good for everyone in Kreskol.

Max Gross was born in New York City in 1978 and is the son of two writers. After attending Saint Ann’s School and Dartmouth College, he worked at the Forward and as a travel correspondent for the New York Post before becoming the Editor-in-Chief of Commercial Observer. He wrote a book about dating called "From Schlub to Stud" but has since been rescued from the single man's fate by his beloved wife and son, with whom he lives in Queens, New York. The Lost Shtetl, his first novel, is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a recipient of an honorable mention for the Sophie Brody Medal, and winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. Gross is also a lifelong traveler, having studied in Scotland and London, and having lived in Arad, Israel for a year. When not writing, he is a degenerate poker player who once had the distinction of beating the 2003 World Series of Poker champion, Chris Moneymaker, in a media versus professional tournament.

I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com.

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Charles Hirschkind, "The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

12 februari 2021 | 89 min

Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo.

The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Gennady Estraikh, "Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century" (ASP, 2020)

5 februari 2021 | 64 min

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, "Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism" (Princeton UP, 2020)

26 januari 2021 | 69 min

Michael E. Pregill, "The Golden Calf Between Bible and Qur'an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam" (Oxford UP, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 62 min

In his exciting and thorough book, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford, 2020), Michael Pregill explores the biblical and Qur'anic episode of the golden calf as understood by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. The incident refers, of course, to when the Israelites created a golden calf in the absence of the Prophet Musa. Pregill shows that the episode's various interpretations across time reflect the cultural, religious, ideological, social, textual, and other contexts in which the issue was being discussed. Each community sought to legitimate its own existence, theology, and tradition through its interpretation. So, for instance, the episode is central to Jewish and Christian arguments over the inheritance of the covenantal legacy of Israel. Each community also appropriates and subverts the apologetic renderings and tropes of the other communities, not passively accepting or rejecting but strategically negotiating with it to adapt to new contexts. The episode therefore becomes crucial for the community’s self-identification. More specific to Islam is a key component of his argument that while western academic scholars draw heavily from the tafsir tradition, they fail to situate the episode in its historical context in the late antique milieu.

In our discussion today, Pregill describes the golden calf episode at length from biblical and Qur’anic perspectives. He summarizes some of the major arguments and contributions of the book, identifies scholars with whom he is in conversation, discusses the status of Qur’anic studies today, reflects on the identity of the mysterious Samiri in the Qur’anic version, emphasizes the recent diminished importance and the dire need of exploring tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) in the study of Islam, explains the relationship between western scholars of Islam (or the Qur’an specifically) and classical Muslim exegetes, and a lot more.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Kathryn Ciancia, "On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World" (Oxford UP, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 60 min

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state.

As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs.

Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

Kathryn Ciancia is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has taught since 2013. She holds a BA from Oxford University, an MA from University College-London, and a PhD from Stanford University. Her first book, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World, has just been published by Oxford University Press. She is now at work on a new book about the role of Poland's global consular network in policing the boundaries of citizenship between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Cold War.

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Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann, "Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 65 min

David Nasaw, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War" (Penguin, 2020)

19 januari 2021 | 56 min

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries.

The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany.

A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin, 2020) tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com.

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Anne Goldman, "Stargazing in the Atomic Age" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

18 januari 2021 | 59 min

During World War II, with apocalypse imminent, a group of well-known Jewish artists and scientists sidestepped despair by challenging themselves to solve some of the most difficult questions posed by our age. Many of these people had just fled Europe. Others were born in the United States to immigrants who had escaped Russia's pogroms. Alternately celebrated as mavericks and dismissed as eccentrics, they trespassed the boundaries of their own disciplines as the entrance to nations slammed shut behind them.

In Stargazing in the Atomic Age (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Anne Goldman deftly interweaves personal and intellectual history in lucent essays that throw new light on these figures and their virtuosic thinking. In sentences that mingle learning with self-revelation, juxtaposition becomes an instrument for making the familiar strange, leading us to question our assumptions about who these iconic characters were and where their contributions can lead us. In these pages, Albert Einstein plays Mozart to align mathematical principles with the music of the spheres. Here, too, Grace Paley and Saul Bellow contemplate the dirt and dazzle of the New York and Chicago streets from their walk-ups while dreaming up characters whose bravura equals the panache and twang of vernacular speech. Nearby, Marc Chagall eludes the worst of World War II by painting buoyant scenes on the ceiling of the Paris Opera in brilliant stained glass no less exuberant than the effervescent jazz of George Gershwin's own Rhapsody in Blue. In these essays, Goldman reminds readers that Jewish history offers as many illustrations of achievement as of affliction. At the same time, she gestures toward the ways in which invention and art that defy partisanship might offer us an example as we enter a newly divisive era.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

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L. Hilton and A. Patt, "Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)

18 januari 2021 | 72 min

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, "Advancing Holocaust Studies" (Routledge, 2020)

14 januari 2021 | 72 min

Roy E. Gane, "Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch" (Eisenbrauns, 2020)

11 januari 2021 | 41 min

For many years, the historical-critical quest for a reconstruction of the origin(s) and development of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch has been dominated by the documentary hypothesis, the heuristic power of which has produced a consensus so strong that an interpreter who did not operate within its framework was hardly regarded as a scholar. However, the relentless march of research on this topic has continued to yield new and refined analyses, data, methodological tools, and criticism.

Join us as we speak with Dr. Roy E. Gane about the book Exploring the Composition of the

Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch (Eisenbrauns, 2020), edited by L.S. Baker Jr., Kenneth Bergland, Felipe A. Masotti, and A. Rahel Wells, a volume that investigates new ideas about the composition of the Pentateuch arising from careful analysis of the biblical text against its ancient Near Eastern background.

Covering a wide spectrum of topics and diverging perspectives, the chapters in this book are grouped into two parts. The first is primarily concerned with the history of scholarship and alternative approaches to the development of the Pentateuch. The second focuses on the exegesis of particular texts relevant to the composition of the Torah. The aim of the project is to foster investigation and collegial dialogue in a spirit of humility and frankness, without imposing uniformity.

In addition to the editors, the contributors include Tiago Arrais, Richard E. Averbeck, John S. Bergsma, Joshua A. Berman, Daniel I. Block, Richard Davidson, Roy E. Gane, Duane A. Garrett, Richard S. Hess, Benjamin Kilchör, Michael LeFebvre, Jiří Moskala, and Christian Vogel.

Tune in as we speak with Roy E. Gane about new approaches to the composition of the Pentateuch!

Roy Gane is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Languages at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI. He contributed a chapter and wrote the introduction for Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch, and has published many other works, including Cult & Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy, and the NIV Application Commentary for Leviticus and Numbers.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Marina Rustow, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue" (Princeton UP, 2020)

5 januari 2021 | 77 min

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo?

This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews.

But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer.

No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it.

Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo!

Notably mentioned in this episode:

Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011)
Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008)
Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000)
S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964)
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab.

Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies.

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Adina Hoffman, "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City" (FSG, 2017)

4 januari 2021 | 53 min

Shaul Magid, "Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism" (Academic Studies Press, 2019)

31 december 2020 | 54 min

Anna Hájková, "The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt" (Oxford UP, 2020)

30 december 2020 | 57 min

Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020) is the first in-depth analytical history of a prisoner society during the Holocaust. Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Rather than depict the world of the prisoners as an atomized state of exception, it argues that the prisoner societies in the Holocaust are best understood as existing among the many versions of societies as we know them. This book challenges the claims of Holocaust exceptionalism and insisting that we view it with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prisoner society Terezín produced its own social hierarchies, but the contents of categories such as class changed radically: seemingly small differences among prisoners could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half year of the ghetto’s existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. The shared Jewishness of the prisoners was not the basis of their identities, but rather, prisoners embraced their ethnic origin. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis.

Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick. Hájková has co-edited the yearbook Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente between 2006 and 2008. A special issue of German History on “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma” appeared online this summer. She has also edited family wartime diaries from the Communist resistance in the Holocaust. She is on Twitter at @ankahajkova.

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Michal S. Raucher, "Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority Among Haredi Women" (Indiana UP, 2020)

17 december 2020 | 59 min

Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

14 december 2020 | 63 min

Jonathan Boyarin, "Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side" (Princeton UP, 2020)

30 november 2020 | 65 min

New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. In Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press, 2020), Jonathan Boyarin presents a uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see.

Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork.

A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness.

Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His books include Jewish Families, Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side, and The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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John K. Roth, "The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities" (Oxford UP, 2018)

19 november 2020 | 68 min

M. Wodziński and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

18 november 2020 | 45 min

Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)

12 november 2020 | 61 min

V. Nesfield and P. Smith, "The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel's Literary Works" (SUNY Press, 2019)

11 november 2020 | 50 min

An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to write about his experiences, but that he did so with elegance and profundity. His novels grapple with questions of tradition, memory, trauma, madness, atrocity, and faith. The Struggle for Understanding examines Wiesel’s literary, religious, and cultural roots and the indelible impact of the Holocaust on his storytelling. Grouped in sections on Hasidic origins, the role of the Other, theology and tradition, and later works, the chapters cover the entire span of Wiesel’s career. Books analyzed include the novels Dawn, The Forgotten, The Gates of the Forest, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Testament, The Time of the Uprooted, The Sonderberg Case, and Hostage, as well as his memoir, Night. What emerges is a portrait of Wiesel’s work in its full literary richness.

Victoria Nesfield is Research Coordinator in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, in the United Kingdom. Philip Smith is Professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design Hong Kong.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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N. Chare and D. Williams, "Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando" (Berghahn Books, 2019)

2 november 2020 | 53 min

Rachel Manekin, "The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 oktober 2020 | 53 min

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over three hundred young Jewish women from Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) fled their communities and sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism.

Relying on a wealth of archival documents, including court testimonies, letters, diaries, and press reports, in The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rachel Manekin reconstructs the stories of three Jewish women runaways and reveals their struggles and innermost convictions. Unlike Orthodox Jewish boys, who attended "cheders," traditional schools where only Jewish subjects were taught, Orthodox Jewish girls were sent to Polish primary schools. When the time came for them to marry, many young women rebelled against the marriages arranged by their parents, with some wishing to pursue secondary and university education. After World War I, the crisis of the rebellious daughters in Kraków spurred the introduction of formal religious education for young Orthodox Jewish women in Poland, which later developed into a worldwide educational movement. Manekin chronicles the belated Orthodox response and argues that these educational innovations not only kept Orthodox Jewish women within the fold but also foreclosed their opportunities for higher education.

Exploring the estrangement of young Jewish women from traditional Judaism in Habsburg Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century, The Rebellion of the Daughters brings to light a forgotten yet significant episode in Eastern European history.

Rachel Manekin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. Her area of specialization is the social, political, and cultural history of Galician Jewry. She is also the author of The Jews of Galicia and the Austrian Constitution: The Beginning of Modern Jewish Politics (Jerusalem: Shazar Institute, 2015).

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Bernice Lerner, "All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

16 oktober 2020 | 46 min

Karen Taliaferro, "The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

13 oktober 2020 | 81 min

Religious freedom debates set blood boiling. Just consider notable Supreme Court cases of recent years such as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission or Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania. How can we reach any agreement between those who adhere strictly to the demands of divine law and the individual conscience and those for whom human-derived law is paramount? Is there any legal and philosophical framework that can mediate when tensions erupt between the human right of religious liberty and laws in the secular realm?

In her 2019 book, The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths (Cambridge UP), Karen Taliaferro argues that natural law can act as just such a mediating tool. Natural law thinking can both help protect religious freedom and enable societies across the globe to maintain social peace and to function on the basis of fairness to all. Taliaferro shows that natural law is not merely a somewhat arcane legal philosophy promulgated by a subset of mostly conservative Catholic scholars and philosophers. She argues that natural law offers those in many faith traditions and those of no faith whatever a workable, intellectually rich way to examine fundamental questions of law and fairness without relegating religion to ever-diminishing permissible venues.

One of the signal contributions of the book is that Taliaferro shows us how non-Christian thinkers such as the Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and Sophocles in his play Antigone (and Taliaferro’s original and provocative reading of that work alone is well worth the price of the book) employed natural law reasoning even if they did not use the term as such. For those who need to learn how societies around the world (and Taliaferro draws fascinatingly on her own experiences in the Middle East at times in the book) can balance the rights of religious people and the demands of other citizens for a strict, often ruthless secularism this book is the place to start. Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Jewish Architecture: A Stage for Jewish Liturgy

12 oktober 2020 | 28 min

R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewish American Literature" (MLA, 2020)

9 oktober 2020 | 64 min

Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memory" (Indiana UP, 2016)

8 oktober 2020 | 34 min

Alan Brill, " Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter" (Lexington, 2019)

2 oktober 2020 | 37 min

Alan L. Mittleman, "Does Judaism Condone Violence?: Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition" (Princeton UP, 2018)

29 september 2020 | 61 min

Kenneth Austin, "The Jews and the Reformation" (Yale UP, 2020)

21 september 2020 | 39 min

Karen E. H. Skinazi, "Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2018)

21 september 2020 | 61 min

Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. In Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves.

She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations. Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem “Eshes Chayil,” the Biblical description of an Orthodox “Woman of Valor.” This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values.

Ultimately, these women create paths that unite their work, passions, and families under the framework of an “Eshes Chayil,” a woman who situates religious conviction within her own power.

Dr. Karen E. H. Skinazi is a Senior Lecturer (associate professor) and the Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol in the UK. She published a critical edition of the 1916 novel Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012) by Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, the first Asian North American novelist. She is currently working on a project examining the productive interface between Muslim and Jewish women’s lives, literature, and activism.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Matthew Thiessen, "Jesus and the Forces of Death" (Baker Academic, 2020)

18 september 2020 | 37 min

Aaron Koller, "Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

18 september 2020 | 61 min

Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, "Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism" (SUNY Press, 2020)

11 september 2020 | 42 min

Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (SUNY Press, 2020), edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world.

In recent years, many formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews have documented leaving their communities in published stories, films, and memoirs. This movement is often identified as “off the derech” (OTD), or off the path, with the idea that the “path” is paved by Jewish law, rituals, and practices found within their birth communities. This volume tells the powerful stories of people abandoning their religious communities and embarking on uncertain journeys toward new lives and identities within mainstream society. Off the Derech is divided into two parts: stories and analysis. The first includes original selections from contemporary American and global authors writing about their OTD experiences. The second features chapters by scholars representing such diverse fields as literature, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, religion, and gender studies. The interdisciplinary lenses provide a range of methodologies by which readers can better understand this significant phenomenon within contemporary Jewish society.

Today I talked to: Ezra Cappell, Professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Perlmutter Fellows Program at the College of Charleston; Jessica Lang, a Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Baruch College, CUNY; Jericho Vincent, a writer and lecturer; Frieda Vizel, a specialized tour guide in Jewish Brooklyn.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020)

9 september 2020 | 52 min

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford University Press) traces the origins of the idea, its development, and its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflicts, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society.

The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model.

Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights.

Alexander Kaye, Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair of Israel Studies; Assistant Professor, Department of Near East and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/

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T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust" (Berghahn, 2020)

8 september 2020 | 66 min

In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns out that, sometimes, they did. And even when they didn’t, petitioning local, regional or national officials (often all at the same time) could delay deportations or punishments or even function as a form of resistance.

Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (Berghahn Books) looks at these petitions from a variety of perspectives. As editors Thomas Kaplan and Wolf Gruner argue, this is a topic that is surprisingly undercovered. And it’s a topic rich in insight and importance. The book shows clearly that petitioning was a common practice. It shows clearly that petitions were sometimes granted. It shows clearly that petitions sometimes led to unexpected and unusual outcomes. And it shows us that studying petitions sometimes opens our eyes to new ways of understanding old topics.

The book isn’t the last word on petitions, nor does it pretend to be. Rather, Kaplan and Gruner open up a new avenue of investigation, one that offers researchers topics to work on for many years to come.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is the Leon Levine Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies at Appalachian State University.

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, Professor of History and Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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Assaf Gavron, "The Hilltop" (Scribner, 2015)

7 september 2020 | 52 min

Mordantly funny and deeply moving, The Hilltop about life in a West Bank settlement has been hailed as “brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and “The Great Israeli Novel [in which] Gavron stakes his claim to be Israel’s Jonathan Franzen” (Tablet).

On a rocky hilltop stands Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a fledgling outpost of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. According to government records it doesn’t exist; according to the military it must be defended. On this contested land, Othniel Assis—under the wary gaze of the Palestinians in the neighboring village—lives on his farm with his ever-expanding family. As Othniel cheerfully manipulates government agencies, more settlers arrive, and a hodge-podge of shipping containers and mobile homes takes root.

One steadfast resident is Gabi Kupper, a former kibbutz dweller who savors the delicate routines of life on the settlement. When Gabi’s prodigal brother, Roni, arrives penniless on his doorstep with a bizarre plan to sell the “artisanal” olive oil from the Palestinian village to Tel Aviv yuppies, Gabi worries his life won’t stay quiet for long. Then a nosy American journalist stumbles into Ma’aleh Hermesh C, and Gabi’s worst fears are confirmed. The settlement becomes the focus of an international diplomatic scandal, facing its greatest threat yet.

This “indispensable novel” (The Wall Street Journal) skewers the complex, often absurd reality of life in Israel. Grappling with one of the most charged geo-political issues of our time, “Gavron’s story gains a foothold in our hearts and minds and stubbornly refuses to leave” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Tamar Herzig, "A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019)

4 september 2020 | 64 min

Yehoshua November, "Two Worlds Exist" (Orison Books, 2016)

4 september 2020 | 56 min

John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book" (Viking, 2019)

31 augusti 2020 | 62 min

Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020)

31 augusti 2020 | 63 min

In her new book, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy (Belknap Press), Dr. Victoria de Grazia takes the story of Attilio Teruzzi and explores the social history of fascism.

When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife.

In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.

The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man.

Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.

De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

Victoria de Grazia is the Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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Rafael Medoff, "The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust" (JPS, 2019)

31 augusti 2020 | 61 min

Like so many Americans, American Jews supported President Roosevelt. They adored him. They believed in him. They idolized him.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have.

Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society) reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust.

Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away—actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.

What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president’s private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt’s statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration’s policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Rabbi Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and coeditor of the institute’s online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century" (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 augusti 2020 | 75 min

Natan M. Meir, "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" (Stanford UP, 2020)

19 augusti 2020 | 57 min

Marion Kaplan, "Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal" (Yale UP, 2020)

14 augusti 2020 | 52 min

Alice Connor, "Fierce: Women of the Bible and Their Stories of Violence, Mercy, Bravery, Wisdom, Sex, and Salvation" (Fortress, 2017)

14 augusti 2020 | 78 min

Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM)

7 augusti 2020 | 46 min

Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation" (Yale UP, 2018)

31 juli 2020 | 67 min

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 8: A Very Difficult Man to Kill

28 juli 2020 | 43 min

Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March of 1938, Robert Eisler wrote to Oxford asking about being appointed to the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, thereby gaining a way out of Nazi-controlled Europe. On the day after Hitler held a rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna attended by 200,000 Austrian supporters, a letter came expressing regret that Oxford was unable to offer any assistance. Desperate to find an escape, Eisler wrote to friends all over Europe and America, asking for help. Finally, Gilbert Murray, Eisler’s old friend from his days with the League of Nations, stepped in and secured him the Oxford readership, which he was to have taken in October and held for three years. But on May 20th, Eisler was arrested and spent the next fifteen months in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he would see the things that inspired him to write Man into Wolf. I talk about the events of 1938 with Steven Beller and we also examine the case of a high-ranking S.S. officer who was expelled for plagiarizing Eisler’s work on Jesus.

Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar)

Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford

Additional voices: Brian Evans and Chiara Ridpath

Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra.

Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.

Special thanks to the Warburg Institute.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1951.

———.“The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics 59, no. 2, part 1 (January 1949):

77-94.

Hackett, David A. The Buchenwald Report. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

Heschel, Susannah. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Jacob, Heinrich E. Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015.

Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepeg

Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio.edu.

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Shneur Zalman Newfield, "Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism" (Temple UP, 2020)

22 juli 2020 | 65 min

Those who exit a religion—particularly one they were born and raised in—often find themselves at sea in their efforts to transition to life beyond their community. In Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple UP, 2020), Schneur Zalman Newfield, who went through this process himself, interviews seventy-four Lubavitch and Satmar ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who left their communities.He presents their motivations for leaving as well as how they make sense of their experiences and their processes of exiting, detailing their attitudes and opinions regarding their religious upbringing. Newfield also examines how these exiters forge new ways of being that their upbringing had not prepared them for, while also considering what these particular individuals lose and retain in the exit process.

Degrees of Separation presents a comprehensive portrait of the prolonged state of being “in-between” that characterizes transition out of a totalizing worldview. What Newfield discovers is that exiters experience both a sense of independence and a persistent connection; they are not completely dislocated from their roots once they “arrive” at their new destination. Moreover, Degrees of Separation shows that this process of transitioning identity has implications beyond religion.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Adam Brown, "Judging 'Privileged' Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the 'Grey Zone'" (Berghahn, 2015)

2 juli 2020 | 71 min

Yitzhak Lewis, "Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity" (SUNY Press, 2020)

29 juni 2020 | 55 min

The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work.

Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020) lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and the emergence of “modern literature” in the storytelling of R. Nachman. Reading his tales and teachings alongside the social, legal, and intellectual history of the time, the book’s guiding question is literary: How does R. Nachman represent this changing environment in his writing? Lewis paints a nuanced and fascinating portrait of a literary thinker and creative genius at the very moment his world was evolving unrecognizably. He argues compellingly that R. Nachman’s narrative response to his changing world was a major point of departure for Jewish literary modernity.

Yitzhak Lewis is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, China.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Mara Benjamin, "The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought" (Indiana UP, 2018)

25 juni 2020 | 77 min

Gabriel Finder, "Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

22 juni 2020 | 83 min

David Slucki et al., "Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust" (Wayne State UP, 2020)

22 juni 2020 | 72 min

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 2: Value Theory

16 juni 2020 | 52 min

In this episode (# 2), we discuss Eisler’s early years as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in turn-of-the-century Vienna with historian Steven Beller. We also hear from the closest living relative of Robert Eisler, his grand-nephew Richard Regen. Philosopher Tom Hurka provides some background for understanding the arguments Eisler is making in Studies in Value Theory, especially his critiques of hedonism and aesthetic philosophy. Finally, we look at the events surrounding Eisler’s dramatic arrest and trial for attempted art theft in Udine in 1907 and discuss its short- and long-term consequences.

Voice of Robert Eisler: Caleb Crawford

Additional voices: Brian Evans

Editing and engineering: March Washelesky

Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and his Israeli Orchestra.

Guests: Steven Beller (independent scholar), Tom Hurka (Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto), Richard Regen (grand-nephew of Robert and Lili Eisler).

Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.

Special thanks to the Warburg Institute, the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, and to the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College.

Bibliography and further reading:

-Beller, Steven, ed. Rethinking Vienna 1900. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.

-Beller, Steven. Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1989.

-Eisler, Robert. “The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics, Vol. 59, No. 2, Part 1 (Jan., 1949), pp. 77-94.

-Eisler, Robert. “Der Wille zum Schmerz, Ein psychologisches Paradox.” Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universitat zu Wien (1904), pp. 63-79.

-Eisler, Robert. Studien zur Werttheorie. Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1902.

-Fabian, Reinhard and Peter M. Simons. “The Second Austrian School of Value Theory.” In Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background, ed. by Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith, pp. 29-78. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1986.

-Frondzi, Risieri. What Is Value? An Introduction to Axiology. Second edition. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1971.

-Grassl, Wolfgang. “Toward a Unified Theory of Value: From Austrian Economics to Austrian Philosophy.” Paper presented at 19th-20th Century Austrian Thought and its Legacy, November 1-3, 2012, University of Texas at Arlington.

Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio.edu.

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John K. Roth, "Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide" (Cascade Books, 2020)

15 juni 2020 | 75 min

James A. Diamond, "Jewish Theology Unbound" (Oxford UP, 2018)

11 juni 2020 | 65 min

James A. Diamond discusses his new book, Jewish Theology Unbound (Oxford University Press, 2018), with Rachel Adelman. This book challenges the widespread caricature of Judaism as a religion of law as opposed to theology. Broad swaths of rabbinic literature involve not just law but what could be best described as philosophical theology as well. Judaism has never been a dogmatic religion, insisting on a monolithic theology rooted in a uniform metaphysics that would exclude all others. The book engages in close readings of the Bible, classical rabbinic texts, Jewish philosophers, and mystics from the ancient, to the medieval, to the modern period, which communicate a profound Jewish philosophical theology on human nature, God, and the relationship between the two.

It begins with an examination of questioning in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating that what the Bible encourages is independent philosophical inquiry into how to situate oneself in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically. It then explores such themes as the nature of God through the various names by which God is known in the Jewish intellectual tradition, love of others and of God, death, martyrdom, freedom, angels, the philosophical quest, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel, all in light of the Hebrew Bible and the way it is filtered through the rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical traditions. For all intents and purposes the Torah no longer originates in heaven, but flows upstream, so to speak, from the earth, propelled by the interpretive genius of human beings.

Professor James Diamond James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He completed his doctorate in Medieval Jewish Thought ay the University of Toronto and became the international director of the Friedberg Genizah Project He has written extensively on Maimonides (the Rambam).

Rachel Adelman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College in Boston.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

2 juni 2020 | 121 min

Deborah Dash Moore, "Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People" (NYU Press, 2017)

2 juni 2020 | 46 min

Pamela S. Nadell, "America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today" (Norton, 2019)

1 juni 2020 | 55 min

Vanessa Cook, "Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left" (U Penn Press, 2019)

27 maj 2020 | 53 min

Björn Krondorfer, "The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men" (SUNY Press, 2020)

26 maj 2020 | 53 min

Elissa Bemporad, "Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets" (Oxford UP, 2019)

26 maj 2020 | 62 min

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover.

Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with particular vigor.

What happened after the Bolshevik victory is the subject of Elissa Bemporad's new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the National Jewish Book Award (Modern Jewish Thought and Experience). Bemporad probes the underbelly of the "Soviet myth"— that the USSR had eradicated the pogroms, banished the notion of a blood libel to the scrapheap of other opiates for the people, and vanquished antisemitism as part of the regime's broad anti-religious campaign — and discovers that both pogroms and the blood libel had a robust afterlife in the USSR.

As she traces changing attitudes towards Jews in the USSR, Bemporad also examines the uneasy and often ambivalent but mutually dependent, and ever-shifting relationship between the regime and the Jewish population as the Soviet century unfolds. Legacy of Blood looks at the re-emergence of overt antisemitism in the occupied territories of the USSR during World War II and the troubled return of the Jews to mainstream society after the war. The result is a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and eminently readable book that adds much to both Jewish and Russian historical scholarship.

Elissa Bemporad is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History, Queens College of CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, vol I (NYU Press).

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.

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Yaacov Yadgar, "Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

21 maj 2020 | 54 min

Derek Penslar, "Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader" (Yale UP, 2020)

19 maj 2020 | 51 min

Brendan McGeever, "Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

15 maj 2020 | 50 min

Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2020)

5 maj 2020 | 93 min

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

28 april 2020 | 60 min

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Magda Teter, "Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth" (Harvard UP, 2020)

23 april 2020 | 67 min

Maddalena Marinari, "Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965" (UNC Press, 2020)

14 april 2020 | 37 min

Great Books: Amir Eshel on Paul Celan's Poetry

31 mars 2020 | 58 min

Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism: he is the last poet of the era where the poetic "I" could center a subjective vision of the world through language. Celan bears witness to the Holocaust as the irredeemable rupture in European civilization, but he does so in German, the language of the perpetrators who murdered his parents along with millions of others. How do you bear witness to suffering, murder and loss in the language of the murderers? How can poetry account for the inhumanity of the Holocaust without aestheticizing it? How can language prevail when words fail to express what really happened to millions upon millions at the hands of a people who claimed to be the height of civilization?

I spoke with Amir Eshel, a critic and poet who is also Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His books include: Poetic Thinking Today (forthcoming with Stanford University Press in 2019); Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (University of Chicago Press 2013); as editor, The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018), and with Uli Baer, an edited book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen. He's published several books on poetry after the Holocaust and on writings about the Palestinian expulsion. In 2018 Amir published a book with the artist Gerhard Richter, called Zeichnungen/רישומים, a book which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the cycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German.

Eshel first encountered Celan in Hebrew translations before learning German himself. I read Celan in (my native) German but not until I have moved to America and started writing and mostly speaking in English. Amir and I met, in a way, as an Israeli and a German, via Celan's poetry. We talked about the experience of reading Celan, how being estranged by language can come close to grasping another's experience that we will never know, and why poetry never quite lives only in a familiar idiom.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Michael Fischbach, "The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left" (Stanford UP, 2019)

30 mars 2020 | 48 min

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

30 mars 2020 | 53 min

Michael Daise, "Quotations in John: Studies on Jewish Scripture in the Fourth Gospel" (T and T Clark, 2020)

24 mars 2020 | 49 min

Nancy Sinkoff, "From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History" (Wayne State UP, 2020)

17 mars 2020 | 59 min

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.

From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person.

Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.

Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers—New Brunswick.

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Great Books: Hillary Chute on Art Spiegelman's "Maus"

10 mars 2020 | 59 min

Steven Ross and Wolf Gruner, "New Perspectives on Krystallnacht" (Purdue UP, 2019)

5 mars 2020 | 61 min

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)

28 februari 2020 | 50 min

Jaap Doedens, "The Sons of God in Genesis 6:1-4: Analysis and History of Exegesis" (Brill, 2019)

25 februari 2020 | 25 min

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 februari 2020 | 42 min

L. Benjamin Rolsky, "The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left" (Columbia UP, 2019)

21 februari 2020 | 61 min

Randal Schnoor, "Jewish Family: Identity and Self-Formation at Home" (Indiana UP, 2018)

20 februari 2020 | 60 min

Nicholas Blincoe, "More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine" (Bold Type Books, 2019)

19 februari 2020 | 62 min

Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power struggles within the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in world soccer body FIFA. In doing so, Israelis and Palestinians set an example that decades later became a key pillar of the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and 1960s with the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s creation of its own national soccer team that put its fight for independence on the world map. The skeletal facts of Blincoe’s tale have long been known. The significance of Blincoe’s contribution is that he puts flesh on the skeleton by weaving the facts into a meticulously researched and reported, easily accessible narrative in which he brings key players and ideological trends to life. It’s a tale that is all fact but reads like a thriller.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

12 februari 2020 | 50 min

Bari Weiss, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" (Crown, 2019)

12 februari 2020 | 34 min

Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018)

11 februari 2020 | 42 min

Peter Bergamin, "The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology” (I. B. Tauris, 2019)

31 januari 2020 | 38 min

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

30 januari 2020 | 38 min

Emily Colbert Cairns, "Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

23 januari 2020 | 54 min

Wulf Gruner, "The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses" (Berghahn Books, 2019)

23 januari 2020 | 63 min

Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)

20 januari 2020 | 62 min

Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an astonishing 230 hours of interview footage shot in various locations. Commissioned originally by the State of Israel to make a film about the catastrophe, Lanzmann collected these testimonies over a period of several years before beginning the epic task of editing the film. He saved the outtakes as a vital repository of accounts of those who had lived through the Shoah. The footage has since been acquired, preserved, and digitized as an archive by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The chapters of Cazenave’s book explore the film’s conceptualization and production, reframing the final film in terms of all that it left out, to think about what was included in relationship to those stories and scenes excluded for different reasons. Over years from an initial dissertation project to this volume, Cazenave pursued the story of the film and its outtakes through archival research, detective work, and close technical, aesthetic and theoretical consideration. The resulting analysis takes author and reader from consideration of the film/archive in relationship to Holocaust trials (and especially the Eichmann trial of 1961), to issues of gender and the feminine, to the question of rescue and refugees, as well as debates about representation, witnessing, and testimony. The book is a wonderful and complex study that will be of great interest to readers in Holocaust and cinema studies. The magnum opus of a French filmmaker working with a largely French crew, and produced with funding provided in part by the French government, the film also illuminates, in its own ways (including its silences) the difficult French past and politics of Holocaust history and memory.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Benjamin Balint, "Jerusalem: City of the Book" (Yale UP, 2019)

15 januari 2020 | 45 min

Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018)

9 januari 2020 | 72 min

Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

8 januari 2020 | 51 min

David N. Gottlieb, "Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Memory" (Gorgias Press, 2019)

2 januari 2020 | 66 min

Joyce Dalsheim, "Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self Determination as Self Elimination" (Oxford UP, 2019)

2 januari 2020 | 40 min

In Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self Determination as Self Elimination (Oxford University Press, 2019), Joyce Dalsheim considers some of the surprising outcomes of the great Israeli experiment of re-imagining and reconstructing Judaism, Jewishness and the Jewish people as an ethno-national project focused on the state.

Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.

Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.

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Nora Gold, "The Dead Man" (Inanna Publications, 2016)

19 december 2019 | 31 min

An intelligent, middle-aged feminist and pitch-perfect musician cannot recuperate from a brief affair with a narcissistic and possibly psychopathic married but famous music critic. By returning to the scene of the affair and listening to the world around her, Eve begins to recover memories of her past, which help her understand, and therefore move on from, her obsession. The Dead Man (Inanna Publications, 2016) a beautiful tale of love, loss, family, and the music of the world around us.

Nora Gold is the prize-winning author of three books of fiction along with other widely published and praised articles and essays. Since 2000 when she left full-time academia, Gold has been affiliated (first as an Associate Scholar and then for six years as its Writer-in-Residence) with OISE/University of Toronto’s Centre for Women’s Studies in Education. This center closed in 2018, but Gold continues to coordinate the highly regarded reading series that she established there, the Wonderful Women Writers Series, now housed at the Toronto Public Library (Deer Park Branch). Gold is also involved in activism and community work, currently with the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Boston and JSpaceCanada. When she is not writing, editing, or actively trying to make the world a better place, she is listening to music.

If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Ian J. Vaillancourt, "The Multifaceted Saviour of Psalms 110 and 118" (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019)

17 december 2019 | 65 min

How should we understand the appearances of the king in Book V of the Hebrew Psalter? Ever since Gerald H. Wilson’s landmark work, The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (1985), some have interpreted the failure of the Davidic covenant in Psalm 89 as signaling its replacement by a hope in the direct intervention of the LORD—that is, without any further role for a Davidic king. Others, however, insist that Book V marks the return of the king, pointing to a renewed hope in the Davidic covenant. Join us as we speak Ian J. Vaillancourt about his recent monograph, The Multifaceted Saviour of Psalms 110 and 118: A Canonical Exegesis (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019), in which he seeks to demonstrate that Book V focuses Israel’s expectation on an eschatological figure of salvation who encompasses many hoped-for figures across the Old Testament in one person.

Dr. Ian J. Vaillancourt serves as Associate Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Heritage Theological Seminary. He earned a B.Th. from Tyndale College, an M.T.S. from Tyndale Seminary, and a Ph.D. from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is also an ordained pastor in the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptists in Canada and served in senior/teaching pastoral roles for 14 years. He has published articles and book reviews in several academic journals, including The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Westminster Theological Journal, Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament, and The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. Ian is married to Natalie and they have two children: Caleb and Emily. We are featuring his first monograph, on the vision of the Messiah from Psalms 110 and 118.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Julia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)

16 december 2019 | 50 min

Jelena Subotić, "Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism" (Cornell UP, 2019)

12 december 2019 | 50 min

In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.

Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007).

Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado.

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Lyn Julius, "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)

9 december 2019 | 41 min

Lior Sternfeld, "Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran" (Stanford UP, 2019)

3 december 2019 | 49 min

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

3 december 2019 | 58 min

Claudia Moscovici, "Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films" (Hamilton, 2019)

2 december 2019 | 31 min

Claudia Moscovici’s recent book, Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films (Hamilton Books, 2019), is intended for educators and politicians to draw attention to and educate people about the Never Again Education Act.

Moscovici: “Nearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. There have been hundreds of memoirs, histories and novels written about it, yet many fear that this important event may fall into oblivion. As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims, preserve their life stories and hopefully help prevent such catastrophes. These were my main motivations in writing this book, Holocaust Memories, which includes reviews of memoirs, histories, biographies, novels and films about the Holocaust.

It was difficult to choose among the multitude of books on the subject that deserve our attention. I made my selections based partly on the works that are considered to be the most important on the subject; partly on wishing to offer some historical background about the Holocaust in different countries and regions that were occupied by or allied themselves with Nazi Germany, and partly on my personal preferences, interests and knowledge.

The Nazis targeted European Jews as their main victims, so my book focuses primarily on them. At the same time, since the Nazis also targeted other groups they considered dangerous and inferior, I also review books about the sufferings of the Gypsies, the Poles and other groups that fell victim to the Nazi regimes.

In the last part, I review books that discuss other genocides and crimes against humanity, including the Stalinist mass purges, the Cambodian massacres by the Pol Pot regime and the Rwandan genocide. I want to emphasize that history can, indeed, repeat itself, even if in different forms and contexts. Just as the Jews of Europe were not the only targets of genocide, Fascist regimes were not its only perpetrators.”

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C. Browning, P. Hayes, R. Hilberg, "German Railroads, Jewish Souls" (Berghahn Books, 2019)

27 november 2019 | 52 min

Olga Zilberbourg, "Like Water and Other Stories" (WTAW Press, 2019)

25 november 2019 | 56 min

The phenomenon of the Russian emigre writer is nothing new. Exile seems almost as necessary a commodity as ink to many of Russia's most celebrated writers, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Josef Brodsky, and Sergei Dovlatov. For these titans of Russian literature, leaving was a binary choice, for some imposed upon them, for others a wrenching decision. For each, the idea of being "other" and "apart" was a rich lode of material, to be endlessly mined.

A new generation of Russian emigres is blessed — or cursed — with the ease of long-haul flights and frequent flyer miles, Skype and FaceTime, Google translate, and regulations that seem anyway to be more forgiving about former citizens traveling to and fro between their old homes and new. For them, the border has become far more porous than it ever was, and the choices are now more nuanced. However, there are still plenty of cultural minefields to navigate. To this generation that includes writers as disparate as Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn comes Olga Zilberbourg with a new collection of short stories, Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019)

Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg and came of age in that cultural well-spring of literary genius. When perestroika offered the option to emigrate, Zilberbourg's Jewish family considered it long and hard, ultimately choosing to remain in place. Zilberbourg decided to go to school in the United States and ended up staying in the country. She currently teaches comparative literature in San Francisco, and somehow finds time to craft her unique and very compelling short stories.

Perhaps it is the paucity of time that has turned Zilberbourg into a master of the craft of "flash fiction" honed and made famous by the likes of Lydia Davis and Barbara Henning. Some stories in “Like Water” are mere paragraphs or even sentences. One distills the entire work-life balance for women into one cogent — and heartbreaking — sentence. These stories deal with the same kind of issues that Zilberbourg's Russian predecessors grappled with for centuries: the sense of disconnect at the heart of the emigre experience. But she also explores more universal themes such as the challenges of motherhood, the double-edged sword that is the mother-daughter relationship, the pathos of a missed opportunity, and the perennial hit and miss of trying to meld two cultures into a single whole.

Olga Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently makes her home in San Francisco, California. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Feminist Studies, Confrontation, World Literature Today, Tin House's The Open Bar, Narrative Magazine, and other print and online publications. She won the 2017 San Francisco's Litquake Writing Contest and the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize. Follow Olga on Twitter, or visit her website, zilberbourg.com.

Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Western Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. She is currently at work on a historical novel. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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Daniel Schwartz, "Ghetto: The History of a Word" (Harvard UP, 2019)

19 november 2019 | 55 min

David Hayton, "Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier" (Manchester UP, 2019)

14 november 2019 | 78 min

Acclaimed after the Second World War as England's greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with leading figures of his day, including Winston Churchill. Today, Namier is associated with the belief that the thoughts and actions of elites matter most, and with a view of politics in which those who enter public life do so only in pursuit of personal and material advantage. This exaggerated view has made him a hero to social and political conservatives, and a demonic figure to the Left.

Preoccupied by nationalism, empire, and human motivation, Namier also remains famous in academic circles for supposedly declaring that any reference to ideas in political discourse was nothing more than 'flapdoodle'. In this comprehensive biography, the first in over thirty years, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen’s University, Belfast, David Hayton, examines these manifold issues. Based on a vast range of sources, including rich new archival material, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester University Press, 2019) will no doubt prove to be the definitive study for the next generation of scholars. According to acclaimed Professor of History, Michael Bentley, Hayton’s book is: “an important and compelling study. The product of many years of research, this scholarly and well-written biography goes beyond a familiar English environment to expand Namier's significance as a major figure in European and Jewish historiography.”

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs.

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Daniel Reynolds, "Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance" (NYU Press, 2018)

13 november 2019 | 58 min

Carlo Bonomi, "The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I," (Routledge, 2017)

7 november 2019 | 58 min

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

3 november 2019 | 39 min

Samuel Goldman, "God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America" (U Penn Press, 2018)

28 oktober 2019 | 33 min

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 31 min

Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, "Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict" (Wasatia Press, 2016)

22 oktober 2019 | 71 min

Yael Almog, "Secularism and Hermeneutics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

16 oktober 2019 | 60 min

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. She argues that this conception of interpreters as a universal community established biblical readers as a coherent collective.

In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere––while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging.

Yael Almog is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Durham University. Her research focuses on the interdependence of literary theory, literary production, and theology––more specifically, she looks at secularism, Jewish-Christian encounters, the German-Jewish tradition, and Hebrew literature.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Jonathan Robker, "Balaam in Text and Tradition" (Mohr Siebeck, 2019)

14 oktober 2019 | 30 min

Rachel Werczberger, "Jews In The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel" (Peter Lang, 2016)

1 oktober 2019 | 50 min

Jonathan Sarna, "American Judaism: A History" (Yale UP, 2019)

25 september 2019 | 56 min

Mark Roseman, "Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany" (Metropolitan Books, 2019)

20 september 2019 | 65 min

What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by?

Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception. Mark Roseman offers a sophisticated and deeply human exploration of this question in his new book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2019). The book is a careful examination of a small organization called “League: Community for Socialist Life.” Generally referred to by its German shorthand, the Bund was founded in the 1920s to inspire Germans to create a new, more ethical and more communal world. But the emergence of Nazi rule forced the Bund to consider how it could achieve its goals and even survive in a much different political climate than it faced originally. As they did so, its members strove to discern what living their ideals meant in a Nazi world and how to do so safely.

Members of the Bund responded in a complicated, contingent ways. Prominent among them were a variety of attempts to help those suffering around them. These ranged from moments of kindness (offering flowers to Jews whose houses had been wrecked) to efforts to hide Jews from police and deportation for months or years at a time. It’s an extraordinary story that reads like a novel. From it, Roseman draws from it lessons about human behavior and decisions that are rooted in the particular context of the holocaust but ring true in a wide variety of moments and conflicts.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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Evdoxios Doxiadis, "State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

16 september 2019 | 51 min

Jeffrey Saks, "Agnon Library of The Toby Press"

6 september 2019 | 39 min

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine. His knowledge of German literature came from his mother, and his love of the teachings of Maimonides and the Hassidim came from his father. In 1908 he left for Palestine, where, except for an extended stay in Germany from 1912 to 1924, he lived until his death.

Agnon began writing stories when he was quite young. His first major publication, Hakhnasat Kalah (The Bridal Canopy), 1922, re-creates the golden age of Hassidism, and his apocalyptic novel, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest for the Night), 1939, depicts the ruin of Galicia after WWI. Much of Agnon’s other writing is set in Palestine. Israel’s early pioneers are portrayed in his epic Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945, considered his greatest work, and in the surreal stories of Sefer Hamaasim (The Book of Deeds), 1932. Agnon also published work on the Jewish holy days Yamin Noraim (Days of Awe), 1938, on the giving of the Torah, Atem Reitem (Present at Sinai), 1959, and on the gathering of Hassidic lore, Sifreihem Shel Tzadikim (Books of the Righteous) and Sippurei HaBesht (Stories of the Baal Shem Tov), 1960-1961. Considered one of the greatest Hebrew writers, in 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rabbi Jeffrey Saks is the Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem and served as the Series Editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, now complete in 15 volumes. He is the founding director of The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education, in Jerusalem, and its WebYeshiva.org program. Rabbi Saks was recently appointed as Editor of Tradition, the premier journal of Orthodox Jewish thought published in English. After earning his BA, MA, and rabbinic degrees from Yeshiva University, Rabbi Saks moved to Israel and has served on the faculties of several high schools and yeshivot, edited several books, and published widely on Jewish thought, education, and literature. Rabbi Saks lives in Efrat with his wife Ilana Goldstein Saks and their four children.

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Evgeny Finkel, "Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2017)

22 augusti 2019 | 60 min

Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's question with a resounding yes.

Finkel is interested in a very specific question: What made individual Jews choose from a variety of different strategies in responding to the threat posed by German violence. He lays out several possible strategies for survival, ranging from cooperation and collaboration to coping and compliance to evasion and resistance. Each of these strategies offered very real possibilities and risked very real dangers. Jews in every location adopted some combination of these strategies. But the mix of strategies adopted varied widely from place to place.

Finkel's research helps us understand why specific communities tended to employ a distinctive mix of strategies. He argues that the nature of the prewar environment in which Jews lived--the way local governments treated Jews, the degree of assimilation and interaction between Jews and non-Jews, the historical experiences of violence and oppression, all shaped wartime choices. By doing so, he argues, we remember that Jews had choices (even though ones with significant constraints and with limited possible outcomes) and it is important for us to understand how individuals made these choices.

Beyond this, though, FInkel hopes to show that a political science of the Holocaust is not simply possible, but that it offers new and important answers. It's a important and persuasive claim, one that all researchers should wrestle with and respond to.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

12 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Lynn Kaye, "Time In The Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

8 augusti 2019 | 52 min

Markus Zehnder, "New Studies in the Book of Isaiah: Essays in Honor of Hallvard Hagelia" (Gorgias Press, 2014)

2 augusti 2019 | 33 min

Who is the Suffering Servant? The book of Isaiah is one of the most beloved and well-known prophetic books among both Jews and Christians, but its references to the ‘Suffering Servant’ have been a source of controversy in scholarship. In today’s show, we speak with Dr. Markus Zehnder about the book he edited, New Studies in the Book of Isaiah: Essays in Honor of Hallvard Hagelia (Gorgias Press, 2014), which contains twelve articles that shed new light on the Book of Isaiah, covering a wide array of historical, linguistic and theological topics. The collection is marked by a broad diversity in approaches and theological background, and is a useful tool especially for scholars, students, and pastors. In his own contribution to this volume, Zehnder looks at the enigmatic figure of the ‘Servant of the Lord.’ Join as we take a deeper look into the book of Isaiah and the Suffering Servant.

Markus Zehnder is Professor for Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He grew up in Switzerland and is an ordained minister of the Reformed Church of Switzerland. After the completion of his doctorate, he moved to Jerusalem and then to Boston for postdoctoral studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Harvard University. He has held teaching positions in Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and Belgium—including being Chair for the Old Testament Department at The Evangelical Theological Faculty, Leuven. He has a passion to connect the Bible both with personal and societal issues. In addition to many book chapters and edited works, Zehnder has published the following monographs: Umgang mit Fremden in Israel und Assyrien (BWANT 168; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005); Wegmetaphorik im Alten Testament - Eine semantische Untersuchung der alttestamentlichen und altorientalischen Weg-Lexeme mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer metaphorischen Verwendung (BZAW 268; Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1999).

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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David Slucki, "My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons" (Wayne State UP, 2019)

23 juli 2019 | 38 min

Naftali Rothenberg, "Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

19 juli 2019 | 46 min

Liat Steir-Livny, "Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third Generation Survivors in Israel" (Syracuse UP, 2019)

11 juli 2019 | 46 min

Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

10 juli 2019 | 38 min

Lynn Downey, "Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)

9 juli 2019 | 53 min

Miryam Sivan, "Make it Concrete" (Cuidono Press, 2019)

9 juli 2019 | 33 min

Kirsten Fermaglich, "A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America" (NYU Press, 2018)

1 juli 2019 | 62 min

Matilda Rabinowitz, "Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century" (ILR Press, 2017)

13 juni 2019 | 58 min

Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit" (Princeton UP, 2019)

7 juni 2019 | 62 min

Richard Averbeck, "Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research" (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019)

4 juni 2019 | 24 min

Julie Zuckerman, "The Book of Jeremiah" (Press 53, 2019)

27 maj 2019 | 25 min

Jack Wertheimer, "The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice their Religion Today" (Princeton UP, 2018)

6 maj 2019 | 63 min

Adriana X. Jacobs, "Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry" (U Michigan Press, 2018)

2 maj 2019 | 42 min

Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

30 april 2019 | 56 min

Vivi Lachs, "Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914" (Wayne State UP, 2018)

25 april 2019 | 39 min

Todd L. Patterson, "The Plot-structure of Genesis" (Brill, 2018)

23 april 2019 | 42 min

Michael R. Cohen, "Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era" (NYU Press, 2017)

17 april 2019 | 47 min

Pamela S. Nadell, "America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today" (Norton, 2019)

16 april 2019 | 54 min

Paul K.-K. Cho, "Myth, History, and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

15 april 2019 | 35 min

Mickey and Dick Flacks, "Making History/Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America" (Rutgers UP, 2018)

10 april 2019 | 79 min

Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, “Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés” (Bloomsbury, 2017)

3 april 2019 | 46 min

Deborah E. Lipstadt, "Antisemitism: Here and Now" (Schocken, 2019)

28 mars 2019 | 54 min

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

19 mars 2019 | 32 min

Amit Pinchevski, "Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma" (Oxford UP, 2019)

13 mars 2019 | 49 min

What does it mean to consider trauma and media from the perspective of technology and not from that of the subject of trauma, the clinician or the witness? In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford University Press, 2019), Amit Pinchevski carries out this thought experiment to great effect. By bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, this book reveals the technical operations that inform the understanding of traumatic impact on bodies and minds. Under consideration is not the way trauma and traumatic memory figure in the media (film, television, photography and other popular culture portrayals of traumatic experience), but rather media as partaking in the very construction of the traumatic itself.

Pinchevski conducts an erudite and innovative exploration through a series of case studies: the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD. Each of these cases makes a compelling argument about how media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Transmitted Wounds takes us from mid-twentieth century to our current moment, moving us from an analogue world of trauma to the digital ecosystem that promises to transcend trauma all together. This temporal set-up demands ethical considerations of past and current systems of memory, witnessing and therapy, which Pinchevski does exceptionally well.

Transmitted Wounds offers fresh and thought-provoking contributions to the fields of trauma and memory, media theory, and the history of science and technology. It will also be of relevance to theoreticians and practitioners interested in digital culture and digital humanities.

Amit Pinchevski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne University Press 2005) and coeditor of two books, Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Ethics of Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His research interests are in philosophy and theory of communication and media.

Tal Zalmanovich is a cultural historian of modern Britain. She’s a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il

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Joyce Antler, "Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement" (NYU Press, 2018)

6 mars 2019 | 52 min

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

26 februari 2019 | 61 min

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Daniel Unowsky, “The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia” (Stanford UP, 2018)

19 februari 2019 | 62 min

Samuel Hayim Brody, "Martin Buber's Theopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2018)

18 februari 2019 | 40 min

Kevin Ingram, "Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad Blood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez" (Palgrave, 2018)

7 februari 2019 | 34 min

Aimée Israel-Pelletier, "On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt" (Indiana UP, 2017)

28 januari 2019 | 35 min

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

6 december 2018 | 64 min

Michael Brenner, “A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society” (Indiana UP, 2018)

12 november 2018 | 34 min

M. L. Rozenblit and J. Karp, “World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America” (Berghahn, 2017)

30 oktober 2018 | 53 min

Naomi Seidman, “The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature” (Stanford UP, 2016)

29 oktober 2018 | 41 min

Shannon Fogg, “Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947” (Oxford UP, 2017)

25 oktober 2018 | 60 min

David E. Fishman, “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis” (ForeEdge, 2017)

23 oktober 2018 | 33 min

Smadar Lavie, “Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition)” (U Nebraska Press, 2018)

23 oktober 2018 | 39 min

Raz Segal, “Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945” (Stanford UP, 2016)

17 oktober 2018 | 77 min

Rachel Harris, “Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema” (Wayne State UP, 2017)

10 oktober 2018 | 49 min

Adam D. Hensley, “Covenant Relationships and the Editing of the Hebrew Psalter” (T&T Clark, 2018)

27 september 2018 | 50 min

Mary Fulbrook, “Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice” (Oxford UP, 2018)

27 september 2018 | 58 min

Robert D. Miller II, “Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith” (Gorgias Press, 2012)

26 september 2018 | 26 min

Luis Cortest, “Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas” (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

18 september 2018 | 56 min

Scott Spector, “Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories” (Indiana UP, 2017)

12 september 2018 | 72 min

Ludivine Broch, “Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

6 september 2018 | 62 min

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year.

In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide during the Second World War.

In the chapters of Ordinary Workers, readers will find a rich history of the social and political consciousness of railway workers in France that reaches back to the nineteenth century. Considering Vichy a turning point for cheminot political engagement and activism, the book accords an important place to the question of the resistance of railway workers to the transport of French Jews and other victims during the war. Ordinary Workers also shows that questions of integrity and commitment were paramount for this distinct labour group of thousands of men (and very few women) whose sense of professional identity was intimately tied up with the trains and rail lines they served. Their increased resistance during the Occupation included theft and protest. Sabotage, however, remained an extreme action for these workers who loved their machines and held colleague and passenger safety as high priorities.

Drawing on a range of materials, including company archives, memoirs and postwar testimonies, as well as interviews the author conducted with cheminots throughout France, Ordinary Workers poses serious questions about the beliefs, everyday lives, and actions of a professional group whose experiences, choices, and stories connected French national spaces and politics during a most difficult period of the nation’s history.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Samira Mehta, “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States” (UNC Press, 2018)

29 augusti 2018 | 58 min

Simon Levis Sullam, “The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy” (Princeton UP, 2018)

28 augusti 2018 | 66 min

Olga Borovaya, “The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers” (Indiana UP, 2017)

24 augusti 2018 | 70 min

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than scholars have previously thought. Borovaya makes her argument by focusing on the 16th-century vernacular literature of Moses Almosnino, a writer who was famous not only among Ottoman Sephardim, but also Jews and Christians throughout Europe.

According to Borovaya, most scholars of Ladino literature of have placed the birth of genre in the 18th century, largely due to a false belief that works of high-culture were not composed in Ladino. She works against the assumption that Ladino was only used in popular, “folksy” writing, and the flawed categorization of high register Sephardi literature—like that of Moses Almosnino—as “Spanish” or “Castilian.” This tendency, Borovaya argues, wrongly implies that texts aimed at an educated audience were never written in the Ladino.

Through in depth discussions of Almosnino’s epistles, chronicles, and travelogues, Borovaya convincingly shows that his vernacular literature belongs to the Ladino corpus. His work was widely read among Sephardi intellectuals from the 16th to 20th centuries, meaning that Ladino was indeed a language educated used in material written for the educated elite, and not just the popular masses. Ladino, Borovaya tells us, was similar to other languages (including Yiddish) in that it had multiple functional styles.

Dr. Olga Borovaya is a Visiting Scholar at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (IUP).

Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Eve Krakowski, “Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture” (Princeton UP, 2017)

9 augusti 2018 | 56 min

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research.

Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Shachar M. Pinsker, “A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture” (NYU Press, 2018)

6 augusti 2018 | 50 min

Eran Kaplan, “Beyond Post-Zionism” (SUNY Press, 2015)

25 juli 2018 | 39 min

Jay Geller, “Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews” (Fordham UP, 2017)

24 juli 2018 | 41 min

Mirjam Zadoff, “Werner Scholem: A German Life” (U Penn Press, 2018)

23 juli 2018 | 29 min

Eliyahu Stern, “Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s” (Yale UP, 2018)

18 juli 2018 | 54 min

Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish history. In it, Professor Eliyahu Stern recontextualizes a group of Jewish thinkers who sought to understand the ways in which Jewish identity could be interpreted not in terms of law, tradition, and ritual practice, but, after an engagement with the thought of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, in terms of land, labor, and bodies. “Jewish materialists” asked what it meant to be a Jew in a period when rabbinic authority waned, and the physical pressures of poverty and anti-semitism dominated daily life, a time when to be religious was an economic choice.

The central chapters of the book focus on several different forms of materialism – what Stern terms social, scientific, and practical materialisms – best captured in the works of figures such as Rabbi Joseph Sossnitz, Moses Leib Lilienblum, and Marxists Aaron Shmuel Lieberman and Isaac Kaminer. Using vast archival sources, Stern builds out this new framework and uncovers the ways in which, without an understanding of their materialist context these thinkers have been misrepresented by their biographers and in their collected works, often as a result of their posthumous adoption by competing ideologies.

Rather than framing this narrative as a lachrymose story of secularism, the inevitable rejection of religion, Jewish Materialism highlights how this group of thinkers found renewed meaning in the Bible and Kabbalah, and it discovers a Jewish genealogy that took notions physicality and social justice seriously. The consequences of this intellectual revolution foreshadows with profound effect the competitive marketplace of Jewish political ideologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only did they leave a legacy of distinctly Jewish materialist thought, but a reinterpretation of the Jewish intellectual tradition as well. After reading this book it is hard not to see the events of the 20th Century in a new and richer light, and to ask, what are the stakes of Jewish identity?

Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History at Yale University.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He often describes himself as a young Hannibal Buress.

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Robert D. Miller II, “The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations: An Old Testament Myth, Its Origins, and Its Afterlives” (Eisenbrauns, 2018)

21 juni 2018 | 30 min

Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

20 juni 2018 | 98 min

Yaron Peleg, “Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television” (University of Texas Press, 2016)

12 juni 2018 | 48 min

Bruno Chaouat, “Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism” (Liverpool University Press, 2017)

11 juni 2018 | 72 min

Rebecca Erbelding, “Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe” (Doubleday, 2018)

31 maj 2018 | 61 min

Anika Walke, “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia” (Oxford UP, 2015)

24 maj 2018 | 63 min

Stephan Resch, “Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke” (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017)

24 maj 2018 | 40 min

Shira Klein, “Italy’s Jews From Emancipation to Fascism” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

21 maj 2018 | 57 min

Barry Wimpfheimer, “The Talmud: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2018)

10 maj 2018 | 54 min

Mira Beth Wasserman, “Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities” (U Penn Press, 2017)

2 maj 2018 | 45 min

Erica Lehrer, “Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places” (Indiana UP, 2013)

1 maj 2018 | 69 min

Michael Brenner, “In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea” (Princeton UP, 2018)

30 april 2018 | 32 min

Michal Kravel-Tovi, “When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel” (Columbia UP, 2017)

25 april 2018 | 41 min

Joshua Parens, “Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy” (U Rochester Press, 2016)

13 april 2018 | 42 min

In today’s episode, I am joined by Joshua Parens to discuss his innovative and engaging book Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy (University of Rochester Press, 2016). While one may easily confuse the book with something narrow or parochial—who is Leo Strauss and of what relevance is medieval political philosophy?—our discussion proved to be anything but. In arguing against the commonly held belief that Medieval Philosophy was simply a synthesis of Greek thought with the Bible, Parens reads the works of Alfarabi and Maimonides, two of the most influential pre-modern philosophers, through the works of Leo Strauss, the foremost political thinker of the 20th century. This subtle layering makes for an exciting braided text, cross-pollination between epochs that contextualizes these thinkers on their own terms as well as genealogically.

For Parens, the “theological-political problem” at the core of Leo Strauss’ work is neither strictly one of reason or of revelation but rather at the heart of metaphysics—of being and the relationship between morality and philosophy. In working out Strauss’ unfolding thinking on this problem the reader is guided through competing visions of the study of medieval philosophy and the manner in which Strauss re-centered the work of political thought from a scholastic setting to that of the Islamic world. At its heart lies the question of what Leo Strauss means by “political philosophy,” and thereby a long history from Plato through Maimonides and Alfarabi to the present day.

Joshua Parens is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas. He edits the series Rochester Studies in Medieval Political Thought.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes, shipwrecked, from a desert island somewhere in the Mediterranean.

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Kevin Simpson, “Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)

12 april 2018 | 59 min

Mira Balberg, “Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature” (U California Press, 2017)

5 april 2018 | 54 min

Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (NYU Press, 2017)

2 april 2018 | 32 min

Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015)

30 mars 2018 | 32 min

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative (3). Khmelnytsky’s seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is—depending on your point-of-view—an event of national liberation, treacherous factionalism, murderous pogrom, or personal vendetta, (again) with plenty of overlap. And the image of the Cossack warrior, the free horseman on the open steppe, serves as many narratives, right up to the present day with Mr. Putin’s twenty-first century Ukrainian land grab. On today’s podcast, Professor Glaser speaks about this remarkable figure and the issues at stake.

Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, and also Director of the Jewish Studies Program at UCSD. Dr. Glaser is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russias Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (2012), and editor, with David Weintraub, of Protelpen: Americas Rebel Yiddish Poets (2012). She has also written a number of scholarly and popular articles including a recent piece for the New York times about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.

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Kerry Wallach, “Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany” (U Michigan Press, 2017)

29 mars 2018 | 41 min

Chad Alan Goldberg, “Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought” (U Chicago Press, 2017

27 mars 2018 | 53 min

Bonnie Anderson, “The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer” (Oxford UP, 2017)

26 mars 2018 | 48 min

Motti Inbari, “Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

23 mars 2018 | 49 min

Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender” (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018)

20 mars 2018 | 89 min

Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure, its leadership and perhaps most controversially, the role of women in the movement. Unlike other historians who have attributed the rise of Hasidism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to either social, political, or economic crises, Rapoport-Albert refuses to ignore the spiritual dimensions and efforts on the part Hasidism to renew religious practice. While others see a strict periodization in which there was a self-conscious founding and institutionalization, here we are given the sense of an organic pietistic movement informed by the Kabbalistic tradition but open to society rather than ascetic, and nurtured by a productive opposition. Moreover, rather than conceding to the common characterization of Hasidism as a folkish and populist movement, Hasidic Studies complicates this picture by uncovering a Hasidism that was shaped around its charismatic leaders. Throughout, the question of sources plays a central role, and rather than ignore as biased the attempts of Hasidim to write their own history, Rapoport-Albert excavates from these documents crucial evidence embedded unconsciously or matter-of-factly.

The second half of the book attacks the apologetic representations of Hasidism as either egalitarian or proto-feminist – as giving women a new sense of “spiritual agency”—by showing them to be excluded from leadership as a rule and a family life divorced from traditional structures. Often Hasidism has been cast as a continuation of early modern heretical movements, particularly the messianic movement that arose around Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Rapoport-Albert argues that Hasidism was in fact a retreat towards stricter traditional values, particularly regarding the prominent position given to women in the Sabbatean movement and its sexual mores.

In Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbtai Zevi 1666 – 1816, a study of the life and afterlife of the messianic movement that arose around the messianic figure of Sabbtai Zevi, Rapoport-Albert sees female spirituality as its hallmark. Here women act as a key to the movement as a whole and in understanding its relationship to normative Judaism. The book suggests a movement with a feminist-like agenda in which women play an integral part of the messianic community—as leaders, prophets, and spiritual activists—in its reading into the nature of heresy, mysticism, and community in the early modern period.

The two books are intertwined, not only thematically and as foils to one another, but by a methodological sophistication and sensitivity as well; Professor Rapoport-Albert presents a perspective deeply embedded in primary sources, that shines new light on modern Jewish history.

Ada Rapoport-Albert is Emerita Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he sometimes wonders about the nature of political structures in the local cat community.

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Eric T. Jennings, “Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus from the French Caribbean” (Harvard UP, 2018)

19 mars 2018 | 55 min

Adriana M. Brodsky, “Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960” (Indiana UP, 2016)

14 mars 2018 | 61 min

Yair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” (Princeton UP, 2017)

12 mars 2018 | 53 min

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well.

While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany.

Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 .

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon.

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Vivian Liska, “German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy” (Indiana UP, 2016)

9 mars 2018 | 28 min

Cynthia Baker, “Jew” (Rutgers UP, 2017)

7 mars 2018 | 69 min

David Weinstein, “The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jewish Life in Performance and Politics” (Brandeis UP, 2017)

5 mars 2018 | 61 min

Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image” (Princeton UP, 2012)

2 mars 2018 | 60 min

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expressed a powerful self-definition that echoes to the present day, where biographies, plays, “guides”, and academic works continue to abound.

In place of a simplistic origin story or master narrative of a modernity that begins with Spinoza, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton University Press, 2012), tells the story of how Spinoza came to be understood as a cultural hero, a reception history of his image at many crucial junctures in Modern Jewish history. Rather than probing his philosophy or strictly philosophic influence, Schwartz studies a malleable “Spinoza” as a symbol that captures the ways in which Jews have sought to understand and define themselves. Beginning in 17th-century Amsterdam before moving to 18th-century Berlin, 19th-century Eastern Europe, and Israel and America in the 20th century, The First Modern Jew is a chronological narrative of modern Jewish history that moves seamlessly between a larger thematic thread and local histories of both the famous (Moses Mendelssohn, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Bashevis Singer) and the forgotten (Berthold Auerbach, Salomon Rubin, and Yosef Klausner). In so doing, it probes the porous boundary between history and memory: the history of Spinoza and the history of the memory of Spinoza. And thereby we can see Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” both because he was often projected as such and because he was a means by which people have asked the quintessential modern question: what does it mean to be me?

Professor Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program at George Washington University.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is a crypto-Spinozist and his hero is Blinky the Ghost.

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Ian Black, “Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)

2 mars 2018 | 43 min

David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2018)

22 februari 2018 | 74 min

Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us, or the latest episode of HBO’s High Maintenance, in addition to many popular memoirs, online forums, there is a new fascination with Hasidism. In a sense, this discourse centers around questions of religion and state, community and family, and “traditional life” in a modern context—larger themes that touch some of our most pressing problems.

Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018) is the result of a monumental collaborative effort by seven scholars over the course of four years to compose the first total history of Hasidism. The team included David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodzinski. It shows the ways in which this movement, in its many distinct flavors, was fluid enough to adapt to its many geographies and new social, cultural, and political contexts. The book is structured chronologically in three sections (the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries), and tracks the movement as it unfolded, covering its origins and early figures, growth and variation, institutionalization, decay and destruction during the Holocaust, and subsequent resurrection in post-war Israel and America. Particular attention is paid to the social history of the local communities that arose around charismatic leaders (Rebbes and Tsadikim) and their courts, as well as Hasidic beliefs and practices.

In today’s episode I had the opportunity to speak with Professor David Biale about the book and the research effort behind it. We discussed the theology, praxis, family life and communal structures of many Hasidic dynasties, and their relationship with the “outside world.” The volume is a treasure trove of stories and histories, filled with fascinating figures and political intrigues, that covers not only Hasidism but modern Jewish history more generally. Provocatively, we are left wondering: is piety compatible with modern life?

David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of many other acclaimed books including Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought also published by Princeton University Press and a forthcoming biography of Gershom Scholem in the Jewish Lives series by Yale University Press.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is currently inventing a squirrel internet.

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Sara Hirschhorn, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement” (Harvard UP, 2017)

20 februari 2018 | 29 min

Jeffrey Shandler, “Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices” (Stanford UP, 2017)

19 februari 2018 | 55 min

Alfred Ivry, “Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide” (University of Chicago, 2016)

13 februari 2018 | 65 min

Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing, it stands as a monument to both The Guide and to a career spent studying it. The book begins with an introduction that outlines its main arguments and method, and with chapters on Maimonides biography and intellectual context. It then divides the Guide into eight thematic sub-sections and provides a paraphrase and analysis of each in turn; it tackles the way Maimonides read the bible, synthesized physics and metaphysics, and espoused a new understanding of the Jewish tradition. The sections cover Maimonides’ philosophy of language and anti-anthropomorphic reading of the bible, his opposition to Kalām (Islamic theology) and theory of creation, and his theories of prophecy, metaphysics, providence and theodicy. The work ends with chapters on the Law, on politics, and True Knowledge.

Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was born in Cordoba, Spain and lived his mature life in Fustat, Egypt, he was a Jewish communal leader and legal scholar, physician and philosopher. The Guide is his philosophic masterwork, undoubtably one of the most influential and perplexing works of any faith written in the Middle Ages. Tucked away in Professor Ivry’s analysis is a rich reflection on Maimonides’ intellectual milieu and a genealogy sourced in both the Jewish tradition and Greek thought. Uniquely, he uses Maimonides’ biography and psychology as analytical tools and sees the book as a reflection of a Maimonides’ torn in his loyalties, seeking guidance as much as offering it, as a “mature spiritual and intellectual autobiography.” While others may read The Guide strictly as a work of exegesis or politics, Professor Ivry takes Maimonides’ metaphysical claims seriously, and sees him as neither a total skeptic nor a strictly orthodox thinker. Rather, this commentary understands The Guide in the mode of a confession, as a tool to tease out and come to terms with the eternal tensions between Reason and Revelation, and to see “Maimonides [as] indebted to a philosophical tradition that contradicted his inherent faith.” Rarely has a summa, the mature reflections of a career steeped in philosophic thought, been made so accessible.

Alfred Ivry is emeritus professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies as well as in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is renowned worldwide as both a scholar and a teacher, combining rich philological skills with a deep knowledge of Classical and Medieval philosophy; his career is now in its sixth decade.

Moses Lapin is a perplexed graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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Leon Wiener Dow, “The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)

9 februari 2018 | 51 min

Benjamin R. Gampel, “Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

6 februari 2018 | 72 min

Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and duration of this period mark it as the most devastating attack on the Jews of pre-modern Christian Europe. While many historians have written studies about 1391-92 from isolated perspectives, in the face of an overwhelming number of local archives found throughout the peninsula, and the complexity of those sources, a unified narrative has, until now, remained a desideratum. In this methodological tour-de-force, Professor Gampel tells the story of Spanish Jewry and their relationship to royal power by reading state records and the almost daily correspondence of the royal family against the grain, telling the story of the subjects of these sources imbedded in the thick context of their composers.

The book is divided into two sections that mirror its title. The first is a detailed study of the violence of 1391-92 arranged according to the geographic regions of the peninsula—the Kingdoms of Castile, Valencia, and Aragon, Catalonia and the island of Majorca. Using a rich array of archival sources and in dialogue with contemporary historiography, Professor Gampel painstakingly sets out the limits of what we can know about the riots, both of the victims and the perpetrators, detailing each episode chronologically, in order to form a picture of the period as a whole. Central to the book is the question of how and why those tasked with protecting the Jewish communities failed to do so. To this end the second section is centered around three members of the Aragonese royal family—King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti—and their response to the violence as it unfolded. Here we see the Jewish community as one of many competing interests the royal family faced, and thereby can better appreciate the contingencies of history. The two sections together provide both a deep macro and micro study of this crucial time in Jewish and Spanish history, exposing us not only to the story and context of the too often voiceless victims, but the lives of those in power as well. Its a narrative of tragic violence and the failure of the Royal Alliance, grounded in extensive historical research stripped of none of its drama.

Professor Benjamin R. Gampel is the the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You can hear more from him in his video lecture series on the history, society, and culture of medieval Sephardic Jewry.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friends call him young Farabi.

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Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (Simon and Schuster, 2018)

30 januari 2018 | 66 min

Noam Zadoff, “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back” (Brandeis UP, 2018)

23 januari 2018 | 74 min

Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth—with his arrival in Jerusalem in 1923. Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis University Press, 2018) situates Scholem’s thought in the context of his biography, by skillfully reading Scholem’s self-fashioning against the grain and together with materials held in his archive. With particular focus on his conflicted and shifting relationship to Germany and German thought and language, Zadoff contributes to the ever-growing scholarship about Scholem.

Zadoff moves beyond Scholem’s early ambivalence towards German culture as he sought a Jewish future in Israel during the inter-war years. Despite his early rejection of Jewish-German assimilation and his idiosyncratic Zionist dreams, we find that not only was his world-view framed in reference to Germany—of his youth, the Holocaust, and the after-war years—but this relationship becomes a barometer to understand his evolving thought.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on Scholem’s early period in Jerusalem, his political activities there, relationship to the Hebrew Language, and to the Hebrew University. The next section is about Scholem’s response to the Holocaust and his pivotal role in collecting and reclaiming manuscripts and books that were looted from the Jewish communities of Europe. The last, and perhaps most revealing section, focuses on Scholem’s “return to Germany,” during the last part of his life, particularly his involvement in the Eranos seminars. Zadoff begins the book by asking how the images of Scholem in Israel and Germany could be of the same person, at home he was known as a fiery intellectual, demanding German teacher, and scholar of the kabbalah, while in Germany he was a literary personality and a nostalgic link to German culture of the pre-War years. At its conclusion, we are left with a well argued narrative that does not strip its subject of its complexity.

Noam Zadoff is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and of History, and the Director of Olamot Center at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an avid lepidopterist.

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Ella Shohat, “On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements” (Pluto Press, 2017)

16 januari 2018 | 51 min

Eddy Portnoy, “Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press” (Stanford UP, 2017)

16 januari 2018 | 37 min

Amos Goldberg, “Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust” (Indiana UP, 2017)

10 januari 2018 | 75 min

Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen, “Recharging Judaism” (CCAR, 2017)

1 januari 2018 | 55 min

Jessica Marglin, “Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco” (Yale UP, 2016)

24 december 2017 | 53 min

Jack Jacobs, ed. “Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender” (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

18 december 2017 | 37 min

Lars Rensmann, “The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism” (SUNY Press, 2017)

11 december 2017 | 61 min

David Jacobson, “The Charm of Wise Hesitancy: Talmudic Stories in Contemporary Israeli Culture” (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

28 november 2017 | 38 min

Benjamin Brown, “The Haredim: A Guide to Their Beliefs and Sectors” (Am-Oved, 2017)

16 november 2017 | 39 min

George Kiraz on Gorgias Press (NBn, 2017)

2 november 2017 | 21 min

Adi Gordon, “Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn” (Brandeis UP, 2017)

31 oktober 2017 | 88 min

Mark Dapin, “Jewish Anzacs: Jews in the Australian Military” (New South Press, 2017)

27 oktober 2017 | 19 min

James L. Kugel, “The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

23 oktober 2017 | 48 min

Ronnie Perelis, “Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith” (Indiana UP, 2016)

18 oktober 2017 | 54 min

Marion Deshmukh, “Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany” (Routledge, 2015)

17 oktober 2017 | 68 min

David L. Weddle, “Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (NYU Press, 2017)

16 oktober 2017 | 39 min

David C. Mitchell, “Messiah ben Joseph” (Campbell Publications, 2016)

12 oktober 2017 | 21 min

Yakov M. Rabkin, “What Is Modern Israel?” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016)

4 oktober 2017 | 44 min

Barry W. Holtz, “Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud” (Yale UP, 2017)

26 september 2017 | 53 min

Rachel Seelig, “Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933” (U. Michigan Press, 2016)

25 september 2017 | 34 min

Henri Lustiger-Thaler and Habbo Knoch, eds., “Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory” (Wayne State UP, 2017)

20 september 2017 | 39 min

Hanna Tervanotko, “Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature” (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016)

29 augusti 2017 | 40 min

In Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature (Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 2016) Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary character in ancient Jewish texts, taking into account all the references to this figure preserved in ancient Jewish literature from the exilic period to the early second century C.E.: Exodus 15:20-21; Deuteronomy 24:8-9; Numbers 12:1-15; 20:1; 26:59; 1 Chronicles 5:29; Micah 6:4, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q365 6 II, 1-7; 4Q377 2 I, 9; 4Q543 1 I, 6 = 4Q545 1 I, 5; 4Q546 12, 4; 4Q547 4 I, 10; 4Q549 2, 8), Jubilees 47:4; Ezekiel the Tragedian 18; Demetrius Chronographer frag. 3; texts by Philo of Alexandria: De vita contemplativa 87; Legum allegoriae 1.76; 2.66-67; 3.103; De agricultura 80-81; Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 9:10; 20:8, and finally texts by Josephus: Antiquitates judaicae 2.221; 3.54; 3.105; 4.78.

These texts demonstrate that the picture of Miriam preserved in the ancient Jewish texts is richer than the Hebrew Bible suggests. The results provide a contradictory image of Miriam. On the one hand she becomes a tool of Levitical politics, whereas on the other she continues to enjoy a freer role. People continued to interpret earlier literary traditions in light of new situations, and interpretations varied in different contexts. Second, in light of poststructuralist literary studies that treat texts as reflections of specific social situations, Tervanotko argues that the treatment of Miriam in ancient Jewish literature reflects mostly a reality in which women had little space as active agents. Despite the general tendency to allow women only little room, the references to Miriam suggest that at least some prominent women may have enjoyed occasional freedom.

Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN.

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Maurice Samuels, “The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

14 augusti 2017 | 25 min

Elias Sacks, “Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism” (Indiana UP, 2016)

31 juli 2017 | 38 min

Pekka Pitkanen, “A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual and Colonialism” (Routledge, 2017)

26 juli 2017 | 62 min

Gerben Zaagsma, “Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

24 juli 2017 | 33 min

Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar” (SUNY Press, 2015)

13 juli 2017 | 35 min

David I. Shyovitz, “A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural” (U. Penn Press, 2017)

26 juni 2017 | 37 min

Andrew Sloin, “The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power” (Indiana UP, 2017)

19 juni 2017 | 61 min

Sarah Imhoff, “Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism” (Indiana UP, 2017)

31 maj 2017 | 42 min

Nir Baram, “A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank” (Text Publishing Company, 2017)

30 maj 2017 | 26 min

Amir Engel, “Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

15 maj 2017 | 39 min

Leonard Barkan, “Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

8 maj 2017 | 40 min

Maya Barzilai, “Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters” (NYU Press, 2016)

1 maj 2017 | 29 min

William Kolbrener, “The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition” (Indiana UP, 2016)

24 april 2017 | 33 min

S. Brent Plate ed., “Key Terms in Material Religion” (Bloomsbury, 2015)

24 april 2017 | 51 min

In recent years, several scholars of religion have moved away from the examination of discursive textual domains or the meaning of ritual practices towards analyzing the material worlds in which these practices and beliefs exists. S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, has been one of the forerunners of this turn and provides an accessible staring point for novices in Key Terms in Material Religion (Bloomsbury, 2015). The collected set of short essays explores new perspectives on a number of familiar themes that have been historically important within the study of religion, such as belief, magic, fetish, words, sacred, or ritual. The volume also reveals the dominant themes in the field of material religion, such as objects, senses, time and space, and new horizons like sound, smell, and taste. Overall, the authors begin from the perspective that material forms shape how we understand the world and solidify identities through physical performance. In our conversations we discussed the long history of the collection and its beginnings in the Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, the selection of terms, what we privilege when thinking about material aspects of religion, creative ways to use the text in the classroom, material aesthetics, urban space and religion in the city, prayer as a site of materiality, exhibiting religion in museums, and where young scholars might take new research in material religion.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Lewis Glinert, “The Story of Hebrew” (Princeton UP, 2017)

11 april 2017 | 35 min

Rhiannon Graybill, “Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets” (Oxford UP, 2016)

7 april 2017 | 35 min

Benjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday” (NYRB Classics, 2016)

7 april 2017 | 72 min

Yuval Harari, “Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah” (Wayne State UP, 2017)

27 mars 2017 | 37 min

Sarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016)

20 mars 2017 | 33 min

Julia Alekseyeva, “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution” (Microcosm Publishing, 2017)

14 mars 2017 | 53 min

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in the wake of the events at Chernobyl. Lola has gone through the Bolshevik revolution, the Civil War, the Stalinist purges, deportation to Kazakhstan, and the Chernobyl disaster and these are her real-life memoirs that lay the foundation for the novel. The chapters telling Lola’s story are alternated with shorter interludes from the contemporary life of the second protagonist, Julia, a representative of the generation of millennials, who are struggling to come to terms with their idealistic views on life and politics amidst the changing world order.

Alekseyeva, who is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, works on avant-garde cinema in the USSR, Japan, and France, and her academic interest in visual narrative techniques has deeply affected her work on the graphic novel. The story-telling in Soviet Daughter is rich and intense, and also full of supplementary comments and explanations of various aspects of Soviet everyday life; however, the novel is very easy to read and grasps the readers attention from the very first pages. To this, the sincerity of Alekseyeva’s intonation contributes greatly. She does not shy away from being very honest about issues such as inter-generational misunderstanding, conflicts within family, and difficulties of the migrant experience yet at the same time she persistently maintains the tactful balance between a personal story-telling and a nearly academic inquiry into the experience of several generations of Soviet Jewish immigrants in America.

The precursors of Alekseyeva’s novel are works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Another major influence on Alekseyeva is actually Vladimir Mayakovsky, especially his work in Okna ROSTA. Soviet Daughter does, in fact, open by a quote from Mayakovsky.

Julia Alekseyeva’s novel will be of much interest both to the broad readers audience, and also to the scholars of Soviet history, Jewish identity, and immigration. Into all of these themes it provides a fascinating insight.

Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura.

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Jordan D. Rosenblum, “The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

9 mars 2017 | 48 min

Deborah Lipstadt, “Holocaust: An American Understanding” (Rutgers UP, 2016)

6 mars 2017 | 39 min

Elana Shapira, “Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna” (Brandeis UP, 2016)

2 mars 2017 | 47 min

Benjamin Schreier, “The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History” (NYU Press, 2015)

27 februari 2017 | 47 min

What is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects. This is one of the central concerns for Benjamin Schreier, Associate Professor at Penn State University, in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015). He calls for a critical study of identity and identification within his field, which should have broader applications in other identity-based investigations. Schreier provides a comprehensive and productive reevaluation of approaches to identity, which explores the meaning and power of the uses of identity in literary products. He puts his new approach into action through a rereading of key works and authors from an established Jewish American literary canon. On the other end of the spectrum, he tests the boundaries of the deployment of Jewishness when it does not align with the dominant assumptions in Jewish American literary study.

In our conversation we discussed the place of Jewish American Literary studies within adjacent fields, the dominant scholarly practices of this field, racialized nationalist grounds of Jewishness, Abraham Cahan’s spectral Jew, the New York Intellectuals, the anxiety of Jewish identity in Philip Roth’s work, the irrepresentation of identity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and how to think about identity as an analytical category.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Mark Glickman, “Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books” (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016)

17 februari 2017 | 36 min

Ferenc Laczo, “Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929-1948” (Brill, 2016)

15 februari 2017 | 65 min

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience. But the actual history of Hungary and the Holocaust remains opaque.

Ferenc Laczo aims to change this. Laczo, an associate professor of history at Maastricht University, has produced a fascinating examination of a series of dialogues unfamiliar to most historians. His new book Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History (Brill, 2016) examines the Jewish community in Hungary and how their ideas of themselves and their place in Hungary changed during the war. He begins in the 1930s, with Jewish thinkers wrestling with traditional questions of identity and inclusion in the context of authoritarian government in Hungary and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He then moves to a close reading of memories of the Holocaust in Hungary, taking advantage of sources unknown or unusable by scholars without Magyar. He concludes with a fascinating explanation of attempts in 1946 and 1947 by Jewish survivors in Hungary to explain and understand what they had just witnessed and experienced. The latter chapter alone offers a new perspective on immediate responses to the Holocaust.

This book alone won’t satisfy your desire for a thorough understanding of Hungary and the Holocaust. For that, you’ll need to read the works of Randolph Braham, Tim Cole, Zoltan Vagi, Laszlo Csosz and others. But you’ll almost certainly understand the experience the efforts of Jewish thinkers to understand their own lives much better than you did before you read the book.

Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UNs debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994.

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Noah Lederman, “A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)

1 februari 2017 | 33 min

Ellen Eisenberg, “The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII” (Lexington Books, 2008)

27 januari 2017 | 81 min

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Pacific West is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history. As the United States waged war against fascism, it removed tens of thousands of American citizens and their families from their homes. The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (Lexington Books, 2008) invites us into a community in the middle of that contradiction. American Jews knew too well the dangers of prejudice but remained firmly committed to the fight against Nazism, at any cost.

Professor Ellen Eisenberg invites us into the complexity of Jewish response to Japanese incarceration. In doing so, she parses the tense and near universal silence that Jewish institutions kept as their Japanese neighbor disappeared. This silence, she proposes, reflected not indifference but a struggle to reconcile opposition to bigotry with an unwillingness to risk speaking out. But she also tells other stories at the margins of that silence. Jewish civic leaders, academics, and Rabbis who raised their voices in resistance. And one Jewish institution that chose a different path, and in doing so providing the federal administration propaganda to support the incarceration policy.

Professor Eisenberg paints in great detail the larger context of the Western ethnic landscape and argues that Jewish responses to Japanese incarceration were linked to, and help to illuminate the identity of western Jews both as Westerners and as Jews.

Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and teaches Jewish literature to high school students after school. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com.

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Dovid Katz, “Yiddish and Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

18 januari 2017 | 53 min

Ellie Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford UP, 2016)

10 januari 2017 | 40 min

David W. Stowe, “Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137” (Oxford UP, 2016)

29 december 2016 | 45 min

Sharon Rotbard, “White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa” (MIT Press, 2015)

26 december 2016 | 40 min

Eva Mroczek, “The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity” (Oxford UP, 2016)

23 december 2016 | 52 min

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, Bible and a bibliographic one, book. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2016) suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged.

In many Jewish texts, there is an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writings found in multiple locations that is only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes such as David are imagined not simply as scriptural authors, but as multidimensional characters who come to be known as great writers who are honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts such as the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of the material that we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner.

Using familiar sources such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, Eva Mroczek tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in the Bible. In listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature rife with their own metaphors and narratives about writing The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity is already making its mark on the study of Jewish Antiquity and biblical studies broadly conceived. A panel of scholars recently convened at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting to discuss the impact of the work on the study of Second Temple literature. And It was announced just this week that Dr. Mroczek’s work was awarded the prestigious Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. The accolade if given by the University of Heidelberg.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Mroczek and welcoming her to the New Books Network.

Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN.

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Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor, “Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine” (Brandeis UP, 2016)

23 december 2016 | 49 min

Devin Naar, “Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece” (Stanford UP, 2016)

19 december 2016 | 46 min

Dov Weiss, “Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

12 december 2016 | 59 min

Bryan K. Roby, “The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966” (Syracuse UP, 2015)

14 november 2016 | 27 min

Jennifer Glaser, “Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination” (Rutgers UP, 2016)

7 november 2016 | 26 min

Jeffrey Gurock, “The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community” (NYU Press, 2016)

31 oktober 2016 | 38 min

Fred Amram, “We’re in America Now: A Survivor’s Stories” (Holy Cow! Press, 2016)

14 oktober 2016 | 33 min

Alisa Solomon, “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof” (Metropolitan, 2013)

3 oktober 2016 | 46 min

Jan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust” (Wayne State UP, 2015)

26 september 2016 | 40 min

Carsten Schapkow, “Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation” (Lexington Books, 2015)

19 september 2016 | 52 min

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

19 september 2016 | 39 min

Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

12 september 2016 | 24 min

Adam Rovner, “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel” (New York UP, 2014)

5 september 2016 | 31 min

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, “The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition” (Oxford UP, 2015)

29 augusti 2016 | 31 min

Jonathan Garb, “Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

22 augusti 2016 | 30 min

Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

15 augusti 2016 | 21 min

Robert O’Kell, “Disraeli: The Romance of Politics” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)

11 augusti 2016 | 76 min

Dov Waxman, “Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel” (Princeton UP, 2016)

8 augusti 2016 | 32 min

Michael Lesher, “Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in the Orthodox Jewish Communities” (McFarland, 2014)

3 augusti 2016 | 69 min

Jack Jacobs, “The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

2 augusti 2016 | 48 min

Diana L. Linden, “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene” (Wayne State UP, 2015)

28 juli 2016 | 30 min

Josh Lambert, “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture” (NYU Press, 2014)

18 juli 2016 | 34 min

Daniel Jutte, “The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800” (Yale UP, 2015)

12 juli 2016 | 33 min

Adam Mendelsohn, “The Rag Race” (NYU Press, 2015)

5 juli 2016 | 30 min

Ethan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015)

28 juni 2016 | 59 min

Michael Barnett, “The Star and the Stripes” (Princeton UP, 2016)

27 juni 2016 | 34 min

Sven-Erik Rose, “Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848” (Brandeis UP, 2014)

20 juni 2016 | 33 min

Kenyon Zimmer, “Immigrants Against the State” (U of Illinois Press, 2015)

16 juni 2016 | 40 min

Saskia Coenen Snyder, “Building a Public Judaism” (Harvard UP, 2013)

13 juni 2016 | 31 min

Jon D. Levenson, “The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism” (Princeton UP, 2016)

9 juni 2016 | 31 min

Daniel Tilles, “British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940” (Bloomsburg, 2015)

6 juni 2016 | 33 min

Dianne Ashton, “Hanukkah in America: A History” (New York UP, 2013)

31 maj 2016 | 36 min

Adam Ferziger, “Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism” (Wayne State UP, 2015)

28 maj 2016 | 36 min

Todd Endelman, “Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History” (Princeton UP, 2015)

23 maj 2016 | 40 min

Irene L. Gendzier, “Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2015)

18 maj 2016 | 39 min

Mel Scult, “The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan” (Indiana UP, 2013)

16 maj 2016 | 30 min

Lynn Davidman, “Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews” (Oxford University Press, 2015)

12 maj 2016 | 34 min

Robert Holub, “Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism” (Princeton UP, 2016)

9 maj 2016 | 35 min

Ingrid Carlberg, “Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography” (MacLehose Press, 2016)

4 maj 2016 | 34 min

Gary A. Anderson, “Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition” (Yale University Press, 2013)

2 maj 2016 | 26 min

John M. Efron, “German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic” (Princeton UP, 2016)

29 april 2016 | 45 min

Hillel Cohen, “Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929” (Brandeis UP, 2015)

27 april 2016 | 35 min

Roger Horowitz, “Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food” (Columbia UP, 2016)

21 april 2016 | 32 min

Stern, et al., “The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee” (Penn State UP, 2015)

20 april 2016 | 61 min

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappenheim in a matter-of-fact tone, as though by an ethnographer, the testimony also becomes a primary source for Jewish ritual practice during this period in German lands. It also speaks to Christian understanding of Jewish ritual and tradition.Read the essays in this special volume for the thoughtful questions that the experts raise and address. Turn the pages of the Haggadah to experience its beauty.

During the interview we also discussed The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, 2011), edited by David Stern. This elegant reproduction of the most beautiful haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington reflects the work of the late 15th century southern German illustrator Joel ben Simeon. The illuminations that adorn the text are an ethnographers dream: they evidence the home ritual practices of the era and place. When the book was displayed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, objects from the Museums collection that are reflected on the pages of the haggadah accompanied the display. Essays by David Stern and art historian Katrin Kogman-Apel accompany the text of the Passover haggadah, providing a history of the haggadah for interested readers.

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Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination” (Columbia UP, 2016)

18 april 2016 | 31 min

Daniel M. Horwitz, “A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader” (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016)

12 april 2016 | 62 min

Ever wonder what Kabbalah is really about? Or how you might have a close relationship with God? Is cleaving to God an expectation that might have been medieval but no longer is sought? Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Horwitz ‘s new book A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016) answers these questions and many more in an easily readable, even entertaining, highly authentic and scholarly manner.

Divided into seven parts and twenty-eight concise chapters, with each chapter an ideal length to readily understand the topic, this book is perfect for the student of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as well as the casual reader eager to transform his/her spiritual options.

Praised by critics as “a gateway into the world of Jewish spirituality . . . An important resource, very well done” and “carefully thought out and well researched, making a very complicated subject quite accessible,” Daniel Horwitz’s new book describes five major types of Jewish mysticism and includes a brief chronology of its development, with a timeline. Beginning with the Bible’s prophets, he moves through early mystical movements up through current expressions of Deveikut, or cleaving to God. Kabbalah and the ten sephirot are described and explained. The words and teachings about mysticism and exaltation of twentieth century giant Abraham Joshua Heschel are shared. Humor is part of the telling of stories by Horwitz, and clarity and understanding emerge. In fact, the book is like a private class or conversation with this compassionate, brilliant teacher: he sits across from you as you read a vital text and then he explains to you what it means and the context in which you want to understand it.

The book has received very favorable reviews. Among them, see here. A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader is available via Amazon.com, Jewish Publication Society, and your independent bookseller

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Susannah Drake, “Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

11 april 2016 | 33 min

Marc B. Shapiro, “Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History” (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015)

3 april 2016 | 35 min

Brennan W. Breed, “Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History” (Indiana UP, 2014)

1 april 2016 | 59 min

Modern Biblical Studies usually begins from an assumption that there is an established original text and clear exegetical genres that extend from the original. Reception History is structured around the premise that they are investigating how individuals and communities have interpreted and deployed the original in later contexts. But what if there is no original text? What if the border between origins and receptions are unable to be clearly drawn? If this is the case, isn’t all of biblical studies reception history? Brennan W. Breed, Assistant Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, asks these provocative questions in Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Indiana University Press, 2014). After wrestling with questions of origins, borders, contexts, authors, and audiences, he offers a new general theory of reception history. He argues that instead of trying to contain texts and return them to their original context, we should understand them as mobile or nomadic. That would mean text’s significance are produced through movement and variation of interpretation. Of course, some readings have a stronger set of textual resources to justify an interpretive perspective. However, Breed argues that we should not prioritize the earliest applications of texts as the ‘true’ meaning. Breed’s nomadic reception history is illustrated through an analysis of Job 19:25-27 across time and space. From this example, we witness the broad spectrum of interpretations and how the text transforms across its historical and temporal trajectory. Breed’s theoretically rich and engaging methodology will be useful to anyone interested in how texts are interpreted and deployed in social life.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Suzanne Brown-Fleming, “Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)

31 mars 2016 | 44 min

Caroline E. Light, “That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South” (NYU Press, 2014)

29 mars 2016 | 29 min

David A. Lambert, “How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture” (Oxford UP, 2016)

28 mars 2016 | 33 min

Tahneer Oksman, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” (Columbia UP, 2016)

24 mars 2016 | 29 min

Mariah Adin, “The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s” (Praeger, 2014)

24 mars 2016 | 68 min

Daniella Doron, “Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation” (Indiana UP, 2015)

21 mars 2016 | 33 min

Joshua Zimmerman, “The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

18 mars 2016 | 109 min

Dan J. Puckett, “In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust” (U of Alabama Press, 2014)

14 mars 2016 | 35 min

Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition” (Yale UP, 2015)

6 mars 2016 | 34 min

Theodore Sasson, “The New American Zionism” (NYU Press, 2014)

29 februari 2016 | 35 min

Jason Mokhtarian, “Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran” (U of California Press, 2015)

22 februari 2016 | 33 min

Shai Held, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (Indiana UP, 2013)

16 februari 2016 | 31 min

Aviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)

16 februari 2016 | 59 min

Keren R. McGinity, “Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood” (Indiana UP, 2014)

8 februari 2016 | 32 min

Yael Raviv, “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel” (University of Nebraska Press, 2015)

17 december 2015 | 43 min

Ted Merwin, “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli” (NYU Press, 2015)

14 december 2015 | 32 min

Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature” (NYU Press, 2013)

14 december 2015 | 30 min

Kim Wunschmann, “Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps” (Harvard University Press 2015)

12 december 2015 | 33 min

Maud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

11 december 2015 | 32 min

Erica Weiss, “Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

10 december 2015 | 30 min

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” (UNC Press, 2015)

9 december 2015 | 31 min

Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film” (Penn State UP, 2015)

8 december 2015 | 31 min

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014)

7 december 2015 | 44 min

Leah Garrett, “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel” (Northwestern UP, 2015)

3 december 2015 | 65 min

Glenn Dynner, “Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland” (Oxford UP, 2014)

1 december 2015 | 33 min

Marjorie Feld, “Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

23 november 2015 | 32 min

Ilan Zvi Baron, “Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique” (Edinburgh UP, 2015)

19 november 2015 | 32 min

Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Definition of Anti-Semitism” (Oxford UP, 2015)

12 november 2015 | 33 min

Richard H. King, “Arendt and America” (U of Chicago, 2015)

8 november 2015 | 71 min

Aaron W. Hughes, “Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism” (Oxford UP, 2014)

5 november 2015 | 33 min

Cecile E. Kuznitz, “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

29 oktober 2015 | 33 min

Jeffery S. Gurock, “The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967” (Rutgers UP, 2015)

22 oktober 2015 | 58 min

Jon Birger, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game” (Workman Publishing Company, 2015)

15 oktober 2015 | 30 min

Lila Corwin Berman, “Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit” (U of Chicago, 2015)

8 oktober 2015 | 34 min

Derek J. Penslar, “Jews and the Military: A History” (Princeton UP, 2015)

1 oktober 2015 | 31 min

Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)

24 september 2015 | 33 min

Michael L. Satlow, “How the Bible Became Holy” (Yale UP, 2014)

17 september 2015 | 33 min

Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948” (Yale UP, 2014)

10 september 2015 | 33 min

Jeffrey S. Shoulson, “Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

3 september 2015 | 31 min

Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., “The Jewish Study Bible” (Oxford UP, 2014)

2 september 2015 | 61 min

Lisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015)

3 augusti 2015 | 36 min

John H. Walton, “The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate” (IVP Academic, 2015)

24 juli 2015 | 57 min

Mark S. Wagner, “Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen” (Indiana UP, 2015)

20 juni 2015 | 57 min

Shulem Deen, “All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir” (Graywolf Press, 2015)

14 juni 2015 | 76 min

Winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice

At fourteen, young Shulem Deen, a Hassid in Boro Park, New York, lost his loving father. How was he to deal with the enormous gap in his life that his father’s early death left? He embraced -and was embraced by – a pious spiritual community, the Skverer Hassidim, who had their own town, New Square, New York. In this discreet town of approximately 12,000, only 30 miles north of New York city, the Skverer Hassidim could control everything, or nearly so. So began Deen’s immersion in the life of the Skverer Hassidim, an Eastern European Hassidic group transplanted to the New World — without change!

For a time, Deen’s new life worked. He studied, married, had children—but this thinking, questioning young man soon learned that there was no room for questions that challenged accepted norms of the community. How he navigated the need to be honest with himself with the demands of family he loved makes for a page-turning memoir.

This well-written book takes the reader through little-known aspects of a Hassidic community, both its strengths and vulnerabilities. At once a wealth of psychological, sociological, and just plain interesting episodes as Deen grows and matures, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2015) rewards the reader with distinctive insights into the ultra-religious world of the Hassidim.

Shulem Deen’s popular memoir about his life in an insular Hassidic community breaks new ground, written as it is from a male perspective. Having left New Square, Deen founded and edits Unpious, Voices of the Hassidic Friend, an online journal. He is on the board of Footsteps, an important New York-based group that helps people who choose to transition out of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world. Shulem writes for The Forward, Tabletmag, and other publications. His memoir has been hailed in newspapers and magazines as diverse as The Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. He speaks regularly to audiences in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere about his life and memoir.

Read this compelling account of a young man’s immersion in an embracing spiritual community and his struggle to be true to himself and his loved ones.

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Lital Levy, “Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine” (Princeton UP, 2014)

6 april 2015 | 58 min

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a highly contentious political environment, the two languages have been identified with opposing national movements – Hebrew associated with Jews and Arabic with Palestinians. Lital Levy’s book destabilizes this categorization. Highlighting the space between these two languages, Levy asks not what it means to be Israeli or Palestinian, but rather how crossing the bridge between the two remakes Israeli and Palestinian cultures.

Focusing on the work of Middle Eastern Jews writing in Arabic and various kinds of Hebrews, and Palestinians writing in Hebrew, Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014) reveals a literary world in which Arabic and Hebrew have a symbiotic relationship. Through her analysis of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, Levy shows us how writers bring Arabic and Hebrew into conversation with one another in illuminating, and often subversive, ways. These writers use the language of the “other” to question “othering” and insist that literature interrogate simplistic identity classifications. Jews writing in Arabic or mizrahi registers of Hebrew cannot but challenge a nationalist project that depends, in part, on the nationalization of Hebrew. Likewise, Palestinians writing in Hebrew use the power of language to disrupt Zionism, which excludes them as non-Jews, from within. Bring the work of several generations of authors to light, Poetic Trespass call on readers to use the power of literature to question our own assumptions and to rethink the static categories of Arab and Jew.

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Emily Alice Katz, “Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967” (SUNY Press, 2015)

26 mars 2015 | 54 min

Hasia Diner, “Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way” (Yale University Press, 2015).

10 mars 2015 | 52 min

Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (Yale UP, 2014)

2 mars 2015 | 53 min

Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of FÃ¼rth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square.Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Dachau.There is a good deal of symbolic violence, too.The synagogue and all its contents are vandalized and then destroyed.The Torah scrolls are rolled out, stamped on, and set ablaze.

Book burning was a common ritual during the Third Reich but Confino ponders: why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?Historians’ standard explanations for the Holocaust – racial ideology, administrative, technologically-driven processes of extermination, the brutalization of war, and the dynamics of competition between Stalin and Hitler — cannot fully account for why this foundational text of European-Christian civilization was desecrated and set on fire repeatedly in Germany in the years leading up to World War II. Nor can such explanations render or lend insight into the hatred, murderous resentment, and sadism expressed by Germans toward their Jewish neighbors during this time.A number of groups were persecuted under National Socialism but Jews were special, contradictory figures, and both inferiority and awesome powers were attributed to them.Confino ask how Nazis fantasized about Jews — the place the Jew came to occupy in the Nazi imagination – and seeks to show the ways such fantasies set the context for and enabled mass deportations and death camps.

The answers provided in Confino’s book unfold within an apparent paradox.On the one hand, the Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jews from the story of Aryan origins — to expunge Jewish memory, sever the tie between Judaism and Christianity, and take the place of the Jews in historical time.This is why some burned the Torah and even attempted to excise all references to Jews in the New Testament. Others, however, especially in the years after Kristallnacht, became obsessed with preserving synagogues and all sorts of books and judaica in museums – with making Jews the objects of commemoration and rewriting their past.Since Nazis linked the murder of the Jews to redemption and strove to weave their victory over Jewish influence into a narrative of a new Aryan civilization, Confino argues that the impulse to commemorate Jews while simultaneously destroying Jewish life is not as paradoxical as it might initially seem.

A World Without Jews pays careful attention to the imaginings as well as emotions of both Germans and Jews, tracing outbursts of obscene violence to unbearable intimacies.Through contemporaries’ diaries, letters, and photographs Confino attempts to get at the feelings and sensibilities undergirding ritual mockery and guilt-driven denials and to capture what many conventional social and political histories miss: that communities are built (and destroyed) not only on beliefs, narratives, and economies but affects, too.

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Timothy Michael Law, “When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible” (Oxford UP, 2013)

10 december 2014 | 59 min

Yaacov Ariel, “An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews” (NYU Press, 2013)

4 december 2014 | 34 min

Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014)

7 oktober 2014 | 62 min

Rebecca Rossen, “Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance” (Oxford UP, 2014)

13 september 2014 | 47 min

Matthew Hedstrom, “The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century” Oxford University Press, 2012

8 augusti 2014 | 59 min

Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014)

28 juli 2014 | 54 min

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift. It is safe to say that his voice is singular in its mellifluousness and its range.

I first encountered his writing at one of my dearest friend’s, and any second now new NBiP host and psychoanalyst Anne Wennerstrand’s wedding. Her husband, (doyen of the world of choreography), Doug Elkins, insisted I read a snippet from Phillip’s book, On Monogamy, before they slipped on their rings. This request placed the thinking of Phillips squarely into my casually bridesmaided lap. That Elkins, a dancer with what we then called “downtown” street credibility knew from Adam Phillips perhaps 15 years ago says something; and it says something about Phillips and his reach.

In Phillips’ most recent book, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale UP, 2014), we encounter the biography of a man who thought the entire genre of biography was nothing but bunk. And yet, in this biography of Freud we also encounter a writer who seeks to show respect for Freud’s dis-ease if not utter disrespect for the attempt to write the story of his life. As such, the book illustrates Phillips’ clinical acumen as much as his mind, his writing mien, and the life of his subject. Demonstrating great caution, going up to the lip of certain facts without speculating unduly, like a savvy but sensitive psychoanalyst, Phillips offers the world a book that, like a true tree of life, grows in many directions at once. As no doubt it will be read by people unfamiliar with “the talking cure” it carries a heavy burden in a day and age that prefers writing/texting/emailing to talking a deux, forget entering into an analysis!

Embedded within the text we find a vast exploration of the difference between “telling one’s story” (on Oprah or in a blog as is de rigeur in the culture of confession du moment) and speaking in the analytic dyad. Ultimately, as compared with what real truths might be uttered in a psychoanalysis, indeed the facts of biography look paltry. And furthermore, as this is a book that plays hardball with commonplace conceptions of knowledge, data, and truth, as compared with the exploration of unruly desire and its vicissitudes, we find ourselves returned to Freud who told us that the truths we create for the public work well to hide the real thing, the kinds of archaic truths spoken solely within the confines of a psychoanalytic setting.

Phillips brings back the primacy of the sexual to Freud, and hence to psychoanalysis. Bring on the alleluia chorus and enjoy the interview!!

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Ronen Shamir, “Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine” (Stanford UP, 2013)

23 juli 2014 | 72 min

Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” (Stanford UP, 2014)

15 juli 2014 | 78 min

Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014)

13 juli 2014 | 67 min

There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo. We know when and where the notion of “Blood Libel,” as this myth is conventionally called, appeared (12th-century England), but we don’t know why. Indeed, given the utter absurdity of the charge (Jews, of course, are forbidden to eat, drink, or consume blood in any way, shape, or form), it may be impossible for a rational mind to grasp. Even the Christian Church was vexed and, therefore, repeatedly condemned Blood Libels over the centuries that followed its appearance. Official religious disapproval–together with what might generically called “Enlightenment”–had some effect. By the late nineteenth century at the latest, clerical and civil authorities–not to mention “right-thinking people” everywhere–understood Blood Libel to be nothing but a sick fantasy.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, however, Blood Libel enjoyed a kind of renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in the Russian Empire. And it was here that the most infamous and egregious Blood Libel of modern times occurred, the “Beilis case.” In his fascinating (and terrifying) book A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (Schocken, 2014), Edmund Levin takes us into the complicated, contradictory world of late imperial Russia. He introduces us to radical anti-semites, Russian nationalists, inveterate criminals, well-meaning investigators, corrupt police officers, unscrupulous reporters, sycophantic courtiers, underhanded politicians, drunk ‘witnesses,’ pseudo-scientists, delusional quacks, and, of course, poor Mendel Beilis and his family. As Levin shows, the Beilis case was a farce from the beginning and everyone involved knew it. But it went on nonetheless. How, one wonders, could this have happened in a putatively “modern” state? Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

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Mark Levene, “The Crisis of Genocide” (Oxford University Press, 2014)

3 juni 2014 | 74 min

Donna-Lee Frieze, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” (Yale UP, 2013)

1 maj 2014 | 38 min

It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things.

In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation for the depth and insights of his research. Genocide scholars talk about their field experiencing a ‘return to Lemkin’

It seems an appropriate time, then, to reexamine Lemkin’s ideas and career. We’re doing so in a special, two-part series of interviews with scholars who have edited and published Lemkin’s writings. Earlier this month, I posted an interview with Steve Jacobs, who carefully edited and annotated an edition of Lemkin’s writings about the history and nature of genocide, simply titled Lemkin on Genocide.

This time, I talked with Donna-Lee Frieze, who has meticulously edited Lemkin’s unpublished autobiography Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (Yale University Press, 2013). The book gives us a new appreciation for Lemkin’s work. It offers us a deeper insight into who he was and how he fit into his times. And it shows how his experiences shaped his lifelong crusade to create an framework within international law that would protect persecuted ethnic and religious groups.

One brief note about the sound. We taped this interview in what was late winter in Wichita. Bizarrely enough, New York that day was evidently much warmer than Wichita. Donna accordingly taped this interview sitting next to an open window. Occasionally, you can hear the passing traffic in the background. If you’re not in New York, consider this local color. If you are, feel free to brag that spring comes early in your town. You don’t get that chance often.

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Laura Silver, “Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food” (Brandeis University Press, 2014)

26 april 2014 | 53 min

Steven L. Jacobs, “Lemkin on Genocide” (Lexington Books, 2012)

12 april 2014 | 61 min

Nathan Schneider. “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” (University of California Press, 2013)

7 april 2014 | 59 min

Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide” (Harvard UP, 2013)

14 mars 2014 | 70 min

Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

15 februari 2014 | 77 min

Olga Gershenson, “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe” (Rutgers UP, 2013)

5 februari 2014 | 73 min

Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films -largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson‘s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013). As she ventures across three continents to uncover the stories behind these films, we follow her adventures, eager to learn what happened, why, when – and what comes next. This page-turning exploration begins with the first-ever films made about the Nazi threat to Jewish life in the 1930s – artistically successful movies released to crowded theaters in the USSR, Europe, and the US. The power of film being what it is, some 1930s viewers learned the lesson of Nazi hatred and fled to safety when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941.

Immediately after the war, Soviet filmmakers again broke new ground when in 1945 they portrayed the Holocaust in “The Unvanquished.” The war just over, Soviet censors, Gershenson discovered, had no set policy and hardly knew how Stalin wanted them to respond. But the respected filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein supported the film, a movie featuring Jewish victims filmed on site in Kiev; it became one of the few Soviet movies that identified the Holocaust with Jews. Thereafter, the Holocaust would be a universal problem sans Jews that occurred anywhere but in the USSR.

Among the stories that Gershenson relates, she raises the curtain on “Ordinary Fascism,” a blockbuster when it was released in the USSR in 1966. The three-hour black-and-white documentary montage, narrated by its famous director Mikhail Romm, apparently drew 20 million Soviets to cinemas before it was withdrawn. Gershenson describes Ordinary Fascism as “a real breakthrough,” “stunning,” and an explosion.” Romm’s irreverent, casual commentary to Nazi newsreels, footage, photos, and art explored the psychology of Nazism – and, viewers recognized, made Soviets reflect on themselves. Why did Soviet censors refuse to permit a book on the subject to be released? Censors explained that a film would be seen once and forgotten. A book, on the other hand, would start people thinking!

As Gershenson explains: “Half of all Holocaust victims…were killed on Soviet soil, mostly in swift machine-gun executions. And yet, watching popular Holocaust movies…the impression is that Holocaust victims were mainly Polish and German Jews killed in concentration camps.” Her stories explain why Soviet filmmakers almost never shared the Soviet Holocaust experience on the screen.

Gershenson’s book has a partner website. Here you can find video clips of featured films, with subtitles.

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Waitman Beorn, “Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus” (Harvard UP, 2013)

10 januari 2014 | 79 min

Leora Batnitzky, “How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought” (Princeton UP, 2011)

8 januari 2014 | 35 min

Jeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013)

8 november 2013 | 46 min

Elaine R. Glickman, “The Messiah and the Jews” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013)

30 oktober 2013 | 52 min

“The conviction that the Messiah is coming is a promise of meaning. It is a source of consolation. It is a wellspring of creativity. It is reconciliation between what is and what should be. And it is perhaps our most powerful statement of faith–in God, in humanity and in ourselves.”

–The Messiah and the Jews, Chapter 1: The Messiah is Coming

Written for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike, Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman‘s The Messiah and the Jews: Three Thousand Years of Tradition, Belief and Hope (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013) makes the 3000-year-old Jewish view of the messiah accessible and relevant to today’s reader. Nearly unknown today, the Jewish concept of the Messiah–the promise of redemption–among Judaism’s gifts to the world -includes vivid accounts of the end of days, warriors, apocalypse, even the female heroine Hephzibah, mother of the messiah according to one rare but very important account.

Rabbi Glickman shares the Jewish tradition of the messiah in a very readable book that includes many memorable descriptions that enrich the reader’s appreciation of Jewish tradition – explanations of traditions that readers may have experienced without having previously known of their relationship with Jewish yearning for the coming of the messiah. The book concludes with the concept that we can “make the vision of the universe redeemed a reality and provide a foretaste of redemption in our lives today. I recommend this book highly.

Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman brings together, and to life, this three-thousand-year-old tradition. She explores for the English-language reader an astonishing range of primary and secondary sources many not accessible in English, explaining in an informative and even inspirational manner these teachings’ significance for Jews of the past, while at the same time she infuses them with new meaning for the modern reader, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

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Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “The Devil That Never Dies” (Little, Brown and Co., 2013)

22 oktober 2013 | 63 min

Dan Stone, “Histories of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2010)

3 oktober 2013 | 62 min

Anne-Marie O’Connor, “The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (Knopf, 2012)

12 juli 2013 | 62 min

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she directed that the portraits and landscapes that she and her husband had in their home be given to the Austrian Gallery. But after Adele died, life changed for Jews in Vienna: in 1938, the Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s henchmen commandeered Adele’s home and helped themselves to paintings and other works of art. Her family survived, barely. When the war ended, Austria kept the Klimts. When the battle to recover the Klimt portrait resumed in Los Angles in the 1990s, O’Connor interviewed Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who spearheaded the family’s legal case. Working with Altmann was attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer and passionate advocate in the battle to recover the painting. Listen to this interview for further details of The Lady in Gold and read the book to learn more.

(See the Artsy page on Klimt; it’s terrific.)

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Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)

18 juni 2013 | 64 min

Richard Rashke, “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals” (Delphinium, 2013)

19 april 2013 | 81 min

Melissa R. Klapper, “Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940” (NYU Press, 2013)

18 mars 2013 | 58 min

Donald Bloxham, “The Final Solution: A Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2009)

12 februari 2013 | 73 min

Gil Troy, “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism” (Oxford UP, 2012)

18 januari 2013 | 56 min

Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin, “El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel” (Basic Books, 2012)

14 december 2012 | 58 min

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After” (Columbia UP, 2005)

8 november 2012 | 70 min

Peter Beinart, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books, 2012)

13 juni 2012 | 47 min

Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)

7 mars 2012 | 60 min

Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa” (Indiana UP, 2011)

9 december 2011 | 61 min

Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams” (W.W. Norton, 2011)

22 augusti 2011 | 59 min

Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, “This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (Wiley, 2011)

10 juni 2011 | 45 min

David Shneer, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust” (Rutgers UP, 2010)

29 april 2011 | 70 min

Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2010)

10 mars 2011 | 76 min

For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meaning gained currency in English only in the nineteenth century. In a way, that’s not surprising: the nineteenth century was the era of high-nationalism and, as we’ve said, every “nation” had to have an essence that distinguished it from all others. That essence came to be called “culture.” This nation-culture equivalency, however, presented some nationalists with a problem, particularly if their “nation” had what looked to be several cultures. Jews are the archetypal example. They were spread all over the place, spoke many languages, and practiced many customs. There was nothing to unite them except Judaism–itself hardly unified. If you believed in a Jewish nation, then you had to believe that there could be a “Jewish culture.” But what would it be? In his fascinating new book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2010), Kenneth Moss explores the ways in which Eastern European Jewish culture-builders attempted to answer this question in the Russian Revolutionary era. As Ken points out, there was no simple answer. Rather, there were a lot of competing answers (Yiddishist, Hebraist, Socialist, etc.). But there was also a lot of deep, deep thought about what it meant to build and have a culture. These thinkers knew what we have forgotten, namely, that all cultures are made. They knew this because they were making one. Whether we admit it or not, we are too…

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Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton UP, 2010)

25 juni 2010 | 70 min

I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this, but just imagine what would happen if you started a water-cooler chat with “Hey, what do you think of capitalism and the Jews?” Not pretty. So, being a bit curious, I wanted to know who would write a book with said title and what they could possibly say that wouldn’t get people calling for their head. Well, here’s what I found out. The book was written by Jerry Muller who, I can tell you with all earnestness, is a very bright fellow, an excellent (and witty) writer, and someone with a load of interesting things to say about capitalism and Jews. Don’t worry, it’s not what you think. Muller’s book is no spittle-encrusted diatribe against greedy, hook-nosed, money-lenders. But neither is it the kind of book that ignores the (too often considered embarrassing or offensive) facts, the central one here being that Jews are, as Muller well puts it, good at capitalism. There is no Judeophobia or Judeophilia to be found in these pages. Rather, there is a fascinating, meditative, and enlightening account of the historical relationship of capitalism and the Jews, predominately in Europe over the last thousand or so years. This book is full of cool-headed, convincing arguments about controversial, oft-asked historical questions: Why are Jews good at capitalism? What made European Jews different from other diaspora communities? What role did the Jews play in the evolution of capitalism? What attracted some Jews to socialism? Why do we think–wrongly as it turns out–that there was an affinity between Jews and communism? How did Jews themselves react to the strong association between capitalism and their faith? How did Christians react to the same association?

If you read this book, and I hope you do, you will be able to sensibly answer all these question. And really, you have no reason not to read it because it is a model of brevity. It’s rare that you find so much packed into so few pages. But that’s what you’d expect, I suppose, out of a very bright fellow, excellent writer, and someone with a load of interesting things to say…

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Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)

17 juni 2010 | 61 min

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out.

France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides–the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals–used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting.

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Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009)

26 mars 2010 | 64 min

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope, the professions were not for him. He loved the American folk legend Woody Guthrie (of “This Land is Your Land” fame). In fact, he wanted to become the next Woodie Guthrie. So he more or less left his Jewish roots, changed his name to Bob Dylan, and immersed himself in American folk music.

Most Americans know this story and others like it. In fact, it seems like a peculiarly American story. But, as you will read in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s fascinating The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (Yale, 2009), it’s not. It can be found in–of all places–Ukraine. The story of the Jews in Ukraine is not exactly a happy one (cf. “pogroms”). The relationship between Jews and Ukrainians has always, it seems, been one of mutual mistrust. Therefore it is all the more surprising to find a tradition of Jewish literati who devoted themselves body and soul to the cause of Ukrainian culture and the foundation of a Ukrainian state. But that is in fact what Yohanan has uncovered. The Anti-Imperial Choice discusses five Jewish-born authors who “adopted” (so to say) the Ukrainian movement in favor of the dominant imperial culture (Russian, German, etc.). They were a minority (Jews) and they elected to affiliate with a minority (Ukrainians). Yohanan does a masterful job of describing the ways in which these authors fused Jewishness and Ukrainianess into a significant literary canon in the Ukrainian language. Remarkable and food for thought indeed.

Let me also add that the book is wonderfully written. It is always amazing to me to see someone write with this level of mastery in a second language. Actually, I think English is Yohanan’s fourth or fifth language (which makes it that much more amazing…).

By the way, it’s our 100th show! Thanks to everyone who’s supported NBH. Please become a fan of the show on Facebook if you haven’t already.

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Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009)

23 januari 2010 | 72 min

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic.

The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form: did German culture produce the Nazis or did Nazis produce German (or rather “Nazi”) culture. In his eye-opening book Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard, 2009), Alan Steinweis succeeds in shedding new light on this subject by carefully studying an old topic–the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938, aka, “Kristallnacht.” He shows that it is difficult to argue that the Nazis alone prosecuted the attack. It would be much more reasonable to say that they “provoked” it or, even better, “unleashed” it. Steinweis points out that what might be called “spontaneous” (or at least not party-directed) assaults on Jews had been occurring with some frequency over the years preceding the Kristallnacht. The Nazis my have facilitated these spasms, but they did not create the paranoia that drove them–that, it seems, was a element of German culture. Importantly, the Nazi leaders–and above all Hitler and Goebbels–knew that all they needed to do was give the word and the anti-Semetic pressure building up within the German public would be released. In November 1936, Herschel Grynspan’s assassination of a low-level German diplomat gave them the pretext they needed to give that word. They did, and the floodgates of Judophobia opened.

The Nazis didn’t create violent German anti-Semitism; they reflected it and took advantage of it. As H.L. Menchen might have said, the Germans got the government they wanted and deserved to get it good and hard.

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Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009)

20 november 2009 | 69 min

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain “elements” needed to be sent for re-education (the Kulaks), others to build new socialist cities (Magnitogorsk), and still others back to where–ethnically speaking–they “belonged” (Baltic Germans). Thus when the Germans attacked, the Bolsheviks were ready to move their “assets” out of the way.

Sort of. In To the Tashkent Station. Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell UP, 2009), Rebecca Manley does a fine job of telling the tale of how they evacuated millions of people as the Germans advanced in 1941 and 1942. Though the Party had plans (the Bolsheviks were great planners…), everything did not, as the Russians say, go po planu. As the enemy advance, threatened people did what threatened people always do–they ran off (or, as the Soviet authorities said, “self-evacuated.”). The Party was not really in a position to control this mass exodus as many members of the Party itself had hit the road. Of course some Soviet citizens stayed put, comforting themselves with the (false) hope that the Nazis were really only after the Jews and Communists. But most didn’t, particularly if they had sufficient blat (“pull”) to get a train ticket to a place like Tashkent. Under Communism, everyone is equal. In the real world, everyone isn’t, as many Soviet citizens found out. Some were allowed to leave, others weren’t. Some were given shelter, others weren’t. Some were fed, others weren’t. In this time of crisis, all of the dirty secrets of Communism were revealed. This is not to say, of course, that it wasn’t a heroic effort. It was, and a largely successful one. The Party managed to save much of its human and physical capital, and this fact contributed mightily to its eventual triumph in the war. Moreover, it saved millions of Jews from certain death, a fact that deserves to be acknowledged more often than it is. There are, then, many reasons to be thankful the Soviets bugged out as fast as they did. And there are also many reasons to be thankful Rebecca Manley has told us the story of how they did it.

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Tony Michels, “Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York” (Harvard UP, 2005)

10 april 2009 | 65 min

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived in New York were apolitical, or rather feared politics having come from a regime that punished open political activity (Tsarist Russia). These immigrants, then, learned socialism on American shores. Their teachers were Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia who themselves had fled Tsarist oppression in the 1880s. These Russian Jews were radicals, but not necessarily socialists. So, interestingly, they learned socialism–or at least a new brand of socialism–on American shores as well. But who taught the Russian Jews socialism? Tony has the answer: German socialists who had immigrated to the Lower East Side (a.k.a Kleindeutschland) in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. So the chain of transmission begins in Germany with the rise of the German Socialist Democratic Party (1860s), moves to New York with the immigration of German socialists to the Lower East Side (1870s), picks up after the arrival and conversion of the Russian Jewish radicals to German-style populist socialism (1880s), and ends with the flowing of the Yiddish labor movement in New York (1890s-1900s). What a story! Along the way Tony introduces us to a huge cast of colorful characters, explains the origin of the modern Yiddish literary language, gives us a peek at the lively Yiddish periodical press, and shows us Jewish socialists fighting for the rights of workers along side their gentile brothers and sisters. Misconceptions are destroyed, myths exploded, and stereotypes dashed. Read all about it!

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Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008)

7 februari 2009 | 79 min

Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007)

30 januari 2009 | 51 min

New Books in Jewish Studies

Avsnitt

Ewa Herbst, "Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Nicholas de Lange, "Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism" (Mohr Siebeck, 2016)

Ezra Glinter, "Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah" (Yale UP, 2024)

Dave Margoshes, "A Simple Carpenter" (Radiant Press, 2024)

Semmy Stalhammer, "Codename Barber: My Father’s Story" (Albert Bonniers Publishers, 2007)

Elisabeth Åsbrink "And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War" (Other Press, 2020)

Tobias Brinkmann, "Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2924)

Yonatan Y. Brafman, "Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Adi Nester, "Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Krista N. Dalton, "How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024)

Yitzhak Conforti, "Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

David Kraemer, "Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Derek J. Penslar, "Zionism: An Emotional State" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi: "The Kabbalistic Tree of Life" and "The Anointed"

Yosie Levine, "Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate" (Littman Library, 2024)

Marc Katz, "Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Michael A. Meyer, "Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler" (CCAR Press, 2025)

Joanna Rubin Dranger, "Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir" (Ten Speed Graphic, 2025)

Marc Shapiro, "Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook" (Littman Library, 2025)

Victoria Khiterer, "Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration" (Purdue UP, 2025)

Paul R. Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovskiĭ-Shtern, "Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

Katerina Kralova, "Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-46" (Brandeis UP, 2025)

Chris Webb and Artur Hojan, "The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance" (Ibidem Press, 2019)

Nechama Birnbaum, "The Redhead of Auschwitz: A True Story" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2021)

Lucy Adlington, "The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive" (HarperCollins, 2021)

Hasia R. Diner, "Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)

Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner, "Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts" (Eerdmans, 2025)

Monika Amsler, "The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Asa Simon Mittman, "Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England" (Penn State UP, 2024)

Jerome Gellman, "The Problem of God in Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019)

Ulf Zander, "Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy" (Lund UP, 2024)

Nora Gold, "18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages" (Cherry Orchard, 2023)

Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann, "Oberbrechen: a German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Haggadah Roundup

Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard, "Spanish National Identity, Colonial Power, and the Portrayal of Muslims and Jews During the Rif War (1909-27)" (Boydell & Brewer, 2021)

Enrico Fink, ed., "Shirat Hayam: The Song of the Sea" (Centro Primo Levi, 2023)

Andrew J. Viterbi, "Reflections of an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur" (Centro Primo Levi, 2016)

Karen A. Frenkel, "Family Treasures: Lost & Found" (Post Hill Press, 2025)

Orit Rozin, "Emotions of Conflict, Israel 1949-1967" (Oxford UP, 2024)

"Queer Jews, Queer Muslims" with Adi Saleem and Shanon Shah

Eli Rubin, "Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2025)

My First Tanakh Stories Set (4vs.): Avraham, Miriam, Eliyahu, Ruth

Dariel U. González García, "Dos miradas: Israel and Judaism in Puerto Rico" (2024)

Jeremy Brown, "The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Yaron Ayalon, "Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy" (Brill, 2024)

Hannan Hever, "Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Mikhail Goldis, "Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Lucy Adlington, "Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust" (HarperCollins, 2025)

Joanne Miyang Cho, et al., "German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930-1950" (Routledge, 2025)

Thomas P. Bernstein, "Holocaust: German History and Our Half-Jewish Family" (Cherry Orchard, 2024)

"T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism" (T&T Clark, 2019)

Ofra Amihay, "The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel" (Syracuse UP, 2022)

Kobi Kabalek, "Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

Laurel Leff, "Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-And-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe" (Yale UP, 2019)

Simon Rabinovitch, "Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History" (Yale UP, 2024)

Ariel Evan Mayse, "Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Moshe Tzvi Wieder, "Siddur from Its Sources" (Wieder Press, 2023)

Ken Frieden, "Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction" (Syracuse UP, 2016)

Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)

Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920" (Edwin Mellen, 2015)

Irina Rebrova, "Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus" (de Gruyter, 2020)

Bernard McGinn, "Modern Mystics: An Introduction" (Herder & Herder, 2023)

Blanche Bendahan, "Mazaltob: A Novel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Malka Z. Simkovich, "Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity" (Eisenbrauns, 2024)

Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)

Amit Levy, "A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Stephanie M. Pridgeon, "Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Jay Prosser, "Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns" (Black Spring Press, 2024)

Saulius Suziedelis, "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)

Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

Angela Roskop Erisman, "The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)