New Books in Israel Studies
274 episodes - English - Latest episode: 27 days ago - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Israel about their New Books
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Episodes
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 minutesIn 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 minutesIn 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 hourMembers 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...
Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesEugene 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 Future of Antisemitism: A Discussion with Dave Rich
April 15, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesFew people would describe themselves as antisemites. And yet many Jews living in Europe and the US believe that they encounter anti-semitism quite frequently – so what accounts for these different perceptions? Owen Bennett Jones discusses antisemitism with Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World and How You Can Change It (Backbite, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a residen...
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, "Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine" (Duke UP, 2023)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Pale...
Amahl Bishara, "Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression" (Stanford UP, 2022)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesPalestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Ex...
Eric Alterman, "We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel" (Basic Book, 2022)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the chall...
Max Kaiser, "Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMax Kaiser's book Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifas...
Sharon Shalom, "From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Ethiopian Jews" (Gefen Books, 2016)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesSome two thousand years ago, a group of Jews settled in Ethiopia and was for millennia cut off from the rest of world Jewry, preserving its heritage with great self-sacrifice. When this community, the Beta Israel, ultimately made its way to Israel to rejoin its brethren in the late twentieth century, a host of complex dilemmas emerged. Should the Beta Israel shed its venerated customs, based on ancient, pre-rabbinic Jewish law, and adopt the rabbinic halakhah of modern-day Jewry? Or is there ...
Digging for Answers: The Archaeology of Jerusalem and the Politics of Archaeology
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKatharina 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 th...
Oren Kessler, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 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 th...
M. M. Silver, "The History of Galilee, 1538-1949" (Lexington Books, 2022)
February 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThis study of Galilee in modern times reaches back to the region's Biblical roots and points to future challenges in the Arab-Jewish conflict, Israel's development, and inter-faith relations. M. M. Silver's The History of Galilee, 1538-1949 ( Lexington Books, 2022) covers an array of subjects, including Kabbalah, the rise of Palestinian nationalism, modern Christian approaches to Galilee's past and present, Zionist pioneering, the roots of the Arab-Jewish dispute, and the conflict's eruption ...
Discordia Revisited: The Concordia Netanyahu Riot of 2002
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour20 years ago at Concordia University in Montreal pro-Palestinian protestors clashed with police over whether Benjamin Netanyahu should be allowed to speak on campus. Windows were smashed, arrests were made, the talk was cancelled. The fallout from that day defined how the school year proceeded, with heated council debates, media stunts, lawsuits, explosions, and a contentious student election. This was captured in the film Discordia (2004), and while the fight had no influence over the confli...
George Anton Kiraz, "Water the Willow Tree: Memoirs of a Bethlehem Boyhood" (Gorgias Press, 2022)
January 29, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesIn Water the Willow Tree: Memoirs of a Bethlehem Boyhood (Gorgias Press, 2022), George A. Kiraz tells the story of a young Palestinian boy growing up in Bethlehem, fascinated with understanding his Syriac roots even as he drew steadily nearer to the day when he would inevitably be transplanted to the United States. George first traces his ancestors’ migration from Upper Mesopotamia—present-day Turkey—to Palestine in the aftermath of the horrific Sayfo genocide of 1915 (known more popularly as...
Kobi Peled, "Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin" (Brill, 2022)
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFor generations, the composition and recitation of poetry has been a key mode of expression among Bedouin populations in the Middle East, reflecting social norms, religious practices, relationships with the natural environment, and tribal histories and politics. In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100...
David Z. Moster, "Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol" (Palgrave Pivot, 2018)
January 11, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesEvery year before the holiday of Sukkot, Jews all around the world purchase an etrog―a lemon-like fruit―to participate in the holiday ritual. In Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol (Palgrave Pivot, 2018), David Z. Moster tracks the etrog from its evolutionary home in Yunnan, China, to the lands of India, Iran, and finally Israel, where it became integral to the Jewish celebration of Sukkot. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and L...
Sarah Imhoff, "The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist" (Duke UP, 2022)
January 11, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke UP, 2022), Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883-1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1919, Sampter packed a trousseau, declared herself "married to Palestine," and immigrated there. Yet Sampter's own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals. Although she identified with ...
Gil Hovav, "Candies from Heaven" (Green Bean Books, 2023)
January 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour"Uncle Aron's compliments, which hadn't changed since the days of the Bible, didn't sound so great. One time, he told my mother that she was 'awesome like an army with flags.' Another time, he informed her that 'your nose is like the tower of Lebanon." Meet the village it took to raise Gil Hovav - colorful aunts and uncles hailing from one of the most respected lineages in the Jewish world (Hovav is the great-grandson of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the reviver of the Hebrew language). This book inclu...
Lior Lehrs, "Unofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes" (Manchester UP, 2022)
January 08, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesUnofficial Peace Diplomacy: Private Peace Entrepreneurs in Conflict Resolution Processes (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Lior Lehrs analyses the international phenomenon of private peace entrepreneurs. These are private citizens with no official authority who initiate channels of communication with official representatives from the other side of a conflict in order to promote a conflict resolution process. Dr. Lehrs combines theoretical discussion with historical analysis, examinin...
Bordering the Bedouin
January 07, 2023 21:00 - 1 hourContemporary issues like the refugee crisis, climate refugees, and global restrictions on movement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into stark relief the extent to which our movements, lives, and worldviews are governed by national borders and boundary-making. But these borders and their associated militarization and security infrastructures are a recent phenomenon, the legacy of 20th-century wars and colonialism. Modern borders are also often the result of complex, disputed negot...
Ron Kronish, "Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" (2022)
December 27, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesRabbi Ron Kronish spent thirty years directing the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), an interfaith organization devoted to promoting dialogue in Israel. Utilizing the tools of interfaith dialogue, the ICCI became a “council of organizations…as a tool in peacebuilding throughout the 1990’s, until 2015.” (From the introduction.) In Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2022), Kronish interviews six diverse individuals wh...
Ruth Tsoffar, "Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture" (Routledge, 2019)
December 25, 2022 05:00 - 1 hourIn her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like: How can we explai...
Munira Khayyat, "A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon" (U California Press, 2022)
December 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhat worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispeci...
Frederic C. Hof, "Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace" (USIP, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourReaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace (USIP, 2022) is an insider’s account of secret negotiations to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal―negotiations that came tantalizingly close to success. Ambassador Frederic Hof, who spearheaded the US-mediated discussions in 2009-11, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, where President Assad and Prime Minister Netanyahu inched toward a deal to return Israeli-occupied...
Nadim Bawalsa, "Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948" (Stanford UP, 2022)
December 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourTens of thousands of Palestinians migrated to the Americas in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. By 1936, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians lived outside geographic Palestine. Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948 (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first book to explore the history of Palestinian immigration to Latin America, the struggles Palestinian migrants faced to secure Palestinian citizenship in the interwar period, a...
Shaul Bartal and Nesya Rubinstein-Shemer, "Hamas and Ideology: Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qara?awi on the Jews, Zionism and Israel" (Routledge, 2017)
December 04, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutesSheikh 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: S...
Fida Jiryis, "The Cage" (Pardes, 2022)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesHa-Kluv (The Cage) is a Hebrew anthology of selected short stories by Fida Jiryis, which she originally published in Arabic. The stories speak of the life of Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. Through these snapshots of daily life, the book attempts to portray the complex realities of living on both sides of the divide, examining issues of politics, identity, gender, poverty, and the human toll exacted by the Israeli occupation. Fida Jiryis is a Palestinian writer and editor who has...
Mark D. Calder, "Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice" (Gorgias Press, 2017)
November 16, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourMark D. Calder's Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice (Gorgias Press, 2017) is anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decisively influenced by their eucharistic ritual. This ritual connects being siryāni to a redeemed co...
Sustainable Agriculture in the Global South: A Religious Response to the Global Food Crisis
October 25, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesMicha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engaged in Tikkun Olam – fixing the world – locally and globally. Tevel B’Zedek provides community development support for sustainable agriculture in remote rural areas. Odenheimer is an activist and former journalist who reported from worldwide locations including Somalia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. Born in California and educated at Yale,...
Salim Tamari, "Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine" (U California Press, 2022)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCamera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (U California Press, 2022) is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the ...
Eran Kaplan, "Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
October 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEran Kaplan's book Projecting the Nation: History and Ideology on the Israeli Screen (Rutgers UP, 2020) is a wide-ranging history of over seven decades of Israeli cinema. The only book in English to offer this type of historical scope was Ella Shohat's Israeli Cinema: East West and the Politics of Representation from 1989. Since 1989, however, Israeli cinema and Israeli society have undergone some crucial transformations and, moreover, Shohat's book offered a single framework through which to...
Reeva Spector Simon, "The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II" (Routledge, 2019)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 22 minutesIncorporating published and archival material, Reeva Spector Simon's book The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II (Routledge, 2019) fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran. Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war:...
Andreas Hackl, "The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv" (Indiana UP, 2022)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe 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 c...
Dario Miccoli, "A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Indiana UP, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourA Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were alread...
Corinne E. Blackmer, "Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism" (Wayne State UP, 2022)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesWhy do some scholars sacrifice truth and logic to political ideology and peer acceptance? With courage and intellectual integrity, queer scholar-activist Corinne Blackmer stages a pointed critique of scholars whose anti-Israel bias pervades their activism as well as their academic work. In contrast to the posturing that characterizes her colleagues’ work, this work demonstrates true scholarship and makes an important contribution to the field of Israel studies. In Queering Anti-Zionism: Acade...
Tamar Biala, "Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash" (Brandeis UP, 2022)
September 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovati...
Tilde Rosmer, "The Islamic Movement in Israel" (U Texas Press, 2022)
September 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSince its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to a countrywide sociopolitical movement with representation in the Israeli legislature. But how did it get here? How does it differ from other Islamic movements in the region? Particularly, what are the differences and connections – if any – with Hamas? And why does its membership continue to ...
Matthew Teller, "Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City" (Other Press, 2022)
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesJerusalem’s Old City is normally understood to be split into four quarters: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter. Those designations can be found on maps, on guidebooks, on news articles, and countless other pieces of writing about the city. But as Matthew Teller points out in his latest book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City (Profile Books / Other Press, 2022): the idea of the “four quarters” is entirely a nineteen...
Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
August 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 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 t...
Kareem Rabie, "Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank" (Duke UP, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Duke UP, 2021), Kareem Rabie examines how the conference an...
Addressing Hunger, Food Insecurity--Local Solutions to a Global Problem
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesWe live in a time of food paradox. In a world of historically unprecedented abundance, many don’t have enough to eat. Life-limiting obesity coexists with malnutrition - at the same time, sometimes in the very same place. Food is the complex and critical subject that we will talk about today with Joseph Gitler who works to address the issue at a local, concrete level. He feeds the hungry. Back in 2003 Joseph Gitler was moved to act when he saw significant food waste in Israel at a time of risi...
Philip Hollander, "From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature" (Indiana UP, 2019)
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 2 hoursIn From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature (Indiana UP, 2019), Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S...
Yael Halevi-Wise, "The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua" (Penn State UP, 2020)
August 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourOnce referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel's leading novelist. Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua's artistic gr...
Matthew Mark Silver, "The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades" (Lexington Books, 2021)
August 13, 2022 04:00 - 1 hourGalilee, the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its greatest triumphs. Matthew Silver's two volumes--The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades (Lexington Books, 2021), and The History of Galilee, 1538-1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War (Lexington Books, 2022)--chronicle the fascinating history of the Galilee region in a tour de force that includes int...
Robert W. Tomlinson, "The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy: The Case of the Yom Kippur War" (Lexington, 2022)
July 27, 2022 08:00 - 33 minutesHow do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in which the United States military systematically examined the lessons of Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and applied those lessons towards major doctrinal and equipment changes. The book relies heavily on Paul Senge’s model of learning organizations outlined in his seminal work,...
Giore Etzion, "The Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew" (Routledge, 2019)
July 22, 2022 08:00 - 23 minutesThinking about learning Modern Hebrew, but waiting for the perfect grammar? The Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew by Giore Etzion is an integrated language course adopting an eclectic approach. The course contains 90 lessons combining authentic texts, grammar explanations, and exercises with audiovisual materials on the companion website with links to Israeli websites, videos, and music. Tune in as we speak with Giore Etzion about the second edition of his Modern Hebrew course. ...
Yehudah Mirsky, "Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAvraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intell...
Matt Reingold, "Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis" (Lexington, 2022)
July 11, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesReenvisioning 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 th...
On Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"
July 08, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesIn this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. The focus of this episode is Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The session begins with historian Anthony Grafton, whose father, a journalist, once wrote about Arendt. The second speaker is Dr. Rony Brauman, the co-directed The Specialist: ...