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New Books in Israel Studies

271 episodes - English - Latest episode: 19 days ago - ★★★★★ - 5 ratings

Interviews with Scholars of Israel about their New Books
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Episodes

On America’s Blind Spot Towards the Palestinians

March 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

In their handling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the decades, U.S. officials have displayed a “systemic blind spot” by alleviating pressure on the stronger party, Israel, and increasing pressure on the weaker party, the Palestinians, Khaled Elgindy argues in Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). In my conversation with Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, we explore the particular forms that this b...

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

March 09, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutes

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 su...

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

February 14, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutes

How should we think about violent accounts in the Bible? Why did Gandhi urge the Jews to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism during World War II? What is the reality behind buzz-words like asymmetric warfare and collective punishment that come up so often when discussing events in Gaza? What role should global opinion and the hostage crisis play in Israeli strategy? Is there a moral imperative to win? Jewish ethicist Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody discusses these questions and more in this discussion o...

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

January 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

“How has it come to this? How has ‘Zionist’…become the dirtiest word to the international Left?” Susie Linfield poses that ripe question at the outset of her book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019). In the podcast, our discussion focuses on three prominent figures examined in The Lions’ Den: Isaac Deutscher, I.F. Stone, and Fred Halliday. And we explore present-day sentiments about Zionism among the Left amid the Gaza-Israel ...

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

January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Beginning in August 1946, stateless and visaless Jews, most of them survivors of the Nazi death camps, who sought to immigrate to the Land of Israel were intercepted by the Royal Navy and deported to the nearby island of Cyprus, where they were detained in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Despite occupying a dramatic and fateful position in modern history, this saga has remained largely inaccessible due to the widespread dispersal of the primary sources and the linguistic difficulties present...

What Can We Learn From A Pottery Shard? Uncovering the Ancient Past Through Biblical Archeology with Professor Aren Maeir

January 17, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutes

Some people are good at what they do, some are enthusiastic about their work. This guest brings both to bear in his exploration of the ancient past. Today we are privileged to talk with a distinguished figure in the world of archeology whose enthusiasm doesn’t quit. Professor. Aren Maeir is not only an accomplished archaeologist, but he is also a captivating storyteller who brings the past to life through his discoveries. Professor Aren M. Maeir is Director of the Tel es Safi/Gath Archeologic...

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

January 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

American Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel’s existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinians. These now‑forgotten voices, which include an aid‑worker‑turned‑academic with Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti‑Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left‑wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to su...

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

January 15, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutes

October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle." But, ar...

Matthew Levitt, "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" (Yale UP, 2008)

January 14, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutes

The world is reeling from the savage terror attack that brutalized, raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis and civilians from at least 25 other countries, continuing to hold many of them hostage – and from the ongoing war that followed. After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, some thought it would become more moderate. That was wishful thinking. The barbaric massacre of October 7, 2023 made it clear that Hamas is a terrorist group intent on destroying Israel and hoping to spark a regional – and e...

120 A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism

January 04, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutes

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 ...

Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2

December 14, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutes

Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." Listen to episode 1 here. The three discuss the transnational formation of the Jewish far right over the 20th and 21st centuries, the gradual movement of far right actors into the heart of the I...

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

December 09, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes

101 Treasures from the National Library of Israel (Scala Arts, 2022) provides a thematic journey through the rich and diverse collections of the National Library of Israel and the Jewish people worldwide. Selected by the Library's curators and collections experts, this fine-art volume presents 101 of the most precious items in the Library's collections, from 5th century Babylonia to modern-day Tel Aviv, and shares illuminating stories and anecdotes about these significant works and the intrig...

Ibrahim Fraihat and Isak Svensson, "Conflict Mediation in the Arab World" (Syracuse UP, 2023)

December 05, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutes

Today I talked to Isak Svensson (editor) and Laurie Nathan (contributor) about Conflict Mediation in the Arab World (Syracuse UP, 2023), a very important and timely work focusing on mediation in the Arab world. While we focused on the book, we also tried to look how various models discussed in the book may fit the current situation in Israel and Palestine. The Middle East and North Africa region has been plagued with civil wars, international interventions, and increasing militarization, maki...

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

November 26, 2023 09:00 - 27 minutes

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...

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

November 22, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutes

On today’s episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward magazine, about the situation in Israel and Gaza. She notes that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, shattered the paradigm of how Israel and even the Arab world understood what Hamas was all about. The result has been a deep sense of shock and mourning among Israelis for those who have lost loved ones or had them taken hostage. At the same time, some J...

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

November 21, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutes

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....

Shay Rabineau, "Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails" (Indiana UP, 2023)

November 12, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutes

Israel has one of the most extensive and highly developed hiking trail systems of any country in the world. Millions of hikers use the trails every year during holiday breaks, on mandatory school trips, and for recreational hikes.  Shay Rabineau's Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails (Indiana UP, 2023) offers the first scholarly exploration of this unique trail system. Featuring more than ten thousand kilometers of trails, marked with hundreds of thousands of colored blazes, t...

Steven Simon, "Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East" (Penguin, 2023)

November 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour

A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin, 2023) is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when Americ...

Hamas, Iran and Israel: The Perils of Overreaction

November 06, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes

In this episode of International Horizons, Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Center, discusses the possible trajectories of the Israel-Palestine conflict with RBI director John Torpey. Clarke introduces the linkages of Hamas with Iran and the way in which the Iranian government backs a number of different proxy groups in the Middle East. He argues that Hamas miscalculated the attack on Israel and that Israel’s overreaction (backed by the U.S.) is very dangerous, threatening a w...

On Wars: A Discussion with Michael Mann

October 31, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutes

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are the product of miscalculations by over-confident rulers with little regard for their own people,...

Nick Riemer, "Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

October 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

The academic boycott of Israel, a branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is one of the richest—and most divisive—topics in the politics of knowledge today. In Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Nick Riemer addresses the most fundamental questions raised by the call to sever ties with Israeli universities, and offers fresh arguments for doing so. More than a narrow st...

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

October 26, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutes

In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: “After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘T...

Itamar Rabinovich, "Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs and the Region" (Brookings Institution Press, 2023)

October 25, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutes

Navigating through the intricate web of Middle Eastern geopolitics, few are better equipped to provide insights than Itamar Rabinovich in his compelling book, Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, The Arabs, and the Region 1948-2022 (Brookings Institution Press, 2023). In this update to his earlier work, The Lingering Conflict published by Brookings in 2012, Rabinovich delves deeper, and informs readers on the recent twists and turns of the Middle East conflict. With a storied career as both an academ...

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF)'s Ethical Code

October 24, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutes

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 abducte...

Noa Shaindlinger, "Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

October 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Noa Shaindlinger's Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hop (Edinburgh UP, 2023) explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state ‘buried’ histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archiva...

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

October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

In her book, Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023), Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicates the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora from the vantage point of the putative homeland, engaging both diasporic and Zionist models simultaneously through language, geography, and...

The Unquiet Legacy of Jewish Radical Meir Kahane

October 19, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutes

In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021). A visiting professor of modern Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, Magid also is rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Sea View, N.Y. Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s, was assassinated in New York in 1990 yet, as Magid told me, ...

The Gaza War in Military-Historical Perspective

October 16, 2023 08:00 - 19 minutes

In this interview military historian Jeremy Black examines ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip in historical perspective. Black is the author of Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).  Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow 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 writt...

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

September 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Rachel Elior's book The Unknown History of Jewish Women: On Learning and Illiteracy, On Slavery and Liberty (de Gruyter, 2023) is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy.  The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge ...

Vincent Lemire, "In the Shadow of the Wall: The Life and Death of Jerusalem's Maghrebi Quarter, 1187-1967" (Stanford UP, 2023)

September 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

The Maghrebi Quarter of Jerusalem long sat in the shadow of the Western Wall, the last vestige of the Second Temple. Three days after the June '67 War, Israeli forces razed the Quarter, its narrow alleys widened and homes removed, to create the Western Wall Plaza. With In the Shadow of the Wall: The Life and Death of Jerusalem's Maghrebi Quarter, 1187-1967 (Stanford UP, 2023), Vincent Lemire offers the first history of the Maghrebi Quarter—spanning 800 years from its founding by Saladin in 11...

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

September 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2023) represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri’s ten most compelling war stories and poetry. His war stories are unique, and different from his Hebrew writer contemporaries in that they mix the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism. These stories and poems reflect like no other the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier’s experience of the most vicious and shocking war the world h...

A Better Way to Buy Books

September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutes

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...

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

August 13, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutes

Gadi Sagiv's book Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves. In ancient...

Zahi Zalloua, "Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

August 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle. Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a...

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

August 08, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutes

In The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism (Pickwick, 2023)., a wide range of scholars write on the question of the promises of God to Israel. These essays put forward the position that unconditional promises were given to Israel, which have not been fulfilled in the church or any other entity. At the consummation, there will be a continuing role for the Jewish people, realized through their national and territorial hope of a restored-redeemed Israel.  Join us as we sp...

Yoni Furas, "Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History Under the Mandate" (Oxford UP, 2020)

August 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Through the story of education and the teaching of history in Mandate Palestine, Yoni Furas reframes our understanding of the Palestinian and Zionist national movements. Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History Under the Mandate (Oxford UP, 2020) argues that Palestinian and Hebrew pedagogy could only be truly understood through an analysis of the conscious or unconscious dialogue between them. The conflict over Palestine, the study shows, shaped the way Arabs and Zionists thought, t...

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

August 03, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutes

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 d...

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

July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 Poli...

Leslie Turnberg, "Mandate: The Palestine Crucible, 1919-1939" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2021)

July 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

The twenty years between the World Wars saw remarkable changes in the Middle East. In Palestine, Britain struggled to maintain its Mandatory Authority as Arabs and Jews fought not only each other but the British Government too. Failing to satisfy either side Britain was stuck in the middle, and separating the warring parties was a distraction they hardly needed.  In Mandate: The Palestine Crucible, 1919-1939 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2021), Turnberg explores why the British Government maintained ...

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

July 07, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutes

Daniel Boyarin's new book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023) is a provocative anti-Zionist manifesto pleading for a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood and sketching an alternative vision for a Jewish future beyond the nation-state: the Diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the "nation" and the "state," only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.  Professor emeritus of Talmudic c...

Anne Irfan, "Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System" (Columbia UP, 2023)

June 24, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutes

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide quasi-state services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugee communities in the Middle East today. Refuge a...

Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)

June 18, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutes

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 th...

Gabriel Schwake, "Dwelling on the Green Line" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

June 17, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutes

Today I talked to Gabriel Schwake about his book Dwelling on the Green Line (Cambridge UP, 2022). Concealed within the walls of settlements along the Green-Line, the border between Israel and the occupied West-Bank, is a complex history of territoriality, privatisation and multifaceted class dynamics. Since the late 1970s, the state aimed to expand the heavily populated coastal area eastwards into the occupied Palestinian territories, granting favoured groups of individuals, developers and en...

Housing Insecurity and Homelessness: A Nonprofit Approach

June 14, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutes

The problem of housing insecurity and homelessness consumes the resources of many of the world’s major cities. Homelessness undermines urban cultures, exacerbates social and health problems for those directly affected, and reduces the quality of life of city dwellers generally. Short of homelessness, many people experience the problem of home insecurity, in which they are forced by circumstances to move frequently, or when they cannot maintain or repair their housing. Today’s guest talks with...

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)

June 08, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutes

Drawing on Henrietta Szold's letters and diary, extensive research, and historical sources of that time in Germany and Palestine, the book is a powerful narrative and spellbinding rescue story that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspirational chapters in Jewish history. Szold was seventy-three, founder of Hadassah, the Jewish Zionist women's organization, when she was appointed to direct Youth Aliyah, and over the next decade transported over 20,000 Jewish children from Nazi E...

Randy Grigsby, "A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019)

June 06, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutes

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 t...

Hilary Frances Aked, "Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity" (Verso, 2023)

May 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Is there such a thing as “the Israel lobby,” and how powerful is it really? Hilary Frances Aked's book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (Verso, 2023) provides a forensically researched account of the activities of Israel's advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid. The book traces the history and changing fortunes of key actors within the British Zionist movement in the context of the Israeli government's contemporary effort...

Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)

May 17, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutes

In 1948, Israel’s founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering. Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of ...

Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)

May 03, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutes

In the race to discover real solutions for the conflicts that plague contemporary society, it is essential that we look to precedent. Many of today's conflicts involve ethno-religious tensions that modern wisdom alone is ill-equipped to resolve. In Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (Oxford UP, 2021), Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth asks us to consider ancient religious and traditional cultural solutions to such present-day issues. Roth presents thirty-six case studies featu...

Awad Halabi, "Palestinian Rituals of Identity: The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948" (U Texas Press, 2023)

April 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Members of Palestine's Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses's tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystica...

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