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
Michael Fischbach, "The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left" (Stanford UP, 2019)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesOne of the most divisive international issues in American politics today is over Israel and Palestine. The close ties between Israel and the United States are very strong and see considerable cooperation between the two countries. However, that cooperation is also challenged because of the status of the Palestinian people and growing concern over their human rights. This has led to increasingly bitter criticisms of Israel, on the one hand, and denunciations of Israel’s critics in the United S...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesParadox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt C...
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020)
March 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWaste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an ethnography of Palestinian life under occupation that takes waste infrastructures as a starting point for exploring how Palestinians deal with toxicity and uncertainty, how governance happens under conditions of uncertainty, and how everyday goods circulate in and out of multiple moral economies and waste streams. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, author Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins talks ...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 25, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesHow does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identitie...
Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019)
February 19, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesWith the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Katz tells the inside story of how Israel stopped Syria from becoming a global nuclear nightmare. On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Although Israel often flew into Syria as a...
Nicholas Blincoe, "More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine" (Bold Type Books, 2019)
February 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNicholas 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 th...
Peter Bergamin, "The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology” (I. B. Tauris, 2019)
January 31, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesPeter Bergamin’s, new book, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I. B. Tauris, 2019), is an intellectual biography of one of the most important propagators of the Maximalist Revisionist stream in Zionism ideology. The book positions Ahimeir within the contexts of the Israeli right and the Zionist movement in general, and corrects some common misunderstandings surrounding the man and his ideology. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIf you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the sam...
Joyce Dalsheim, "Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self Determination as Self Elimination" (Oxford UP, 2019)
January 02, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesIn 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 m...
Seyed Ali Alavi, "Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, and Future" (Routledge, 2019)
December 24, 2019 09:00 - 24 minutesIn Iran and Palestine: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2019), Seyed Ali Alavi (SOAS University of London) surveys the history of the relationship between Iran – and especially the Islamic Republic of Iran - with Palestinian organisations and leadership. It also, quite obviously, deals with Iranian views of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinized. To pro...
Julia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)
December 16, 2019 09:00 - 49 minutesAnti-Semitic incidents, ranging from vandalism through murder, are on the rise in Great Britain, and across Europe and North America. Julia Neuberger - Senior Rabbi at West London Synagogue, a member of the House of Lords, chair of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and trustee of Full Fact, an organization dedicated to getting proper information and fair evidence before the public – writes for the contemporary reader who wants clarification of the way this insidious prejudice has reappeared i...
Lyn Julius, "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)
December 09, 2019 09:00 - 41 minutesWho are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? And what lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? This neglected piece of history, as ancient as the Bible, and as modern as today’s news, is urgently relevant today, as minorities continue to face discrimination, persecution, ethnic cleansing and even genocide in parts of the Middle East. Jews live...
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
December 03, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutesWe’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short...
Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019)
November 11, 2019 09:00 - 50 minutesIn Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of gen...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
November 03, 2019 09:00 - 40 minutesAs you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestseller...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesThe things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for ho...
Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, "Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict" (Wasatia Press, 2016)
October 22, 2019 08:00 - 1 hour“Moderation in times of extremism is a revolutionary idea. It is a positive, courageous value, as opposed to a defeatist attitude. It is swimming against the tide, rather than following the crowd on a path obviously leading to the abyss. We need to create our own vision rather than just copy the vision of others.” -Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi In a time when Islam is increasingly identified by violent extremism and hostility towards Christians and Jews, Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi an...
Rachel Werczberger, "Jews In The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel" (Peter Lang, 2016)
October 01, 2019 08:00 - 49 minutesPerhaps there’s something in the air in the Middle East, something that elevates spirituality. The Middle East, particularly Israel, is the legendary home of spiritual searching, of prophecy and religious expression. And in this historical birthplace of monotheism – of Judaism and its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam – religious vitality is as vibrant today as ever. Although traditional forms of religious practice dominate throughout the Middle East, not everyone finds their spirit...
Kfir Cohen Lustig, "Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary" (Verso, 2019)
September 24, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesDifferently than existing accounts that concentrate on Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, Kfir Cohen Lustig's Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019) suggests a new theoretical and historical approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as to the contemporary system of world literature by accounting for the consequences of neoliberal globalization to literary form and its political import. The book proposes th...
Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
August 12, 2019 08:00 - 54 minutesOnce upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met. Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors. Nothing is value-free. In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empiri...
Liat Steir-Livny, "Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third Generation Survivors in Israel" (Syracuse UP, 2019)
July 11, 2019 08:00 - 45 minutesThe Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocaust survivors were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. They grew up in a society which acts out the trauma and since the 1990s they have related to the Holocaust in a range of cultural fields. Remaking Holocaust Memory aims to paint the first comprehensive portrait of third-generation Ho...
Miryam Sivan, "Make it Concrete" (Cuidono Press, 2019)
July 09, 2019 08:00 - 34 minutesFor twenty years, 47-year-old Isabel Toledo has been ghostwriting the stories of Holocaust survivors. It's the mid 1990's, Isabel is divorced from the father of her three children and in precarious relationships with three different men. Now, for the first time since she began ghosting, she’s having trouble finishing a book. This Holocaust survivor’s story brings up the angst she feels about not knowing how her own mother survived the war. And how much of Isabel’s inability to love just one m...
Adriana X. Jacobs, "Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry" (U Michigan Press, 2018)
May 02, 2019 10:00 - 41 minutesIn Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry(University of Michigan Press, 2018), Adriana X. Jacobs offers a translation-centered reading of twentieth-century modern Hebrew poetry. Through close readings of poems by Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel, Jacobs shows how an intertwined poetics and praxis of translation shaped the work of these poets and became synonymous with the act of writing itself. Yaron Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Reader...
Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili, "Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors" (Columbia UP, 2018)
April 29, 2019 10:00 - 58 minutesIn the post–Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups. In their book Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia UP, 2018), Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they term triadic ...
Deborah E. Lipstadt, "Antisemitism: Here and Now" (Schocken, 2019)
March 28, 2019 10:00 - 53 minutesOver the past decade, and especially in the last several years, anti-Semitic crimes have increased significantly. According to FBI Statistics, hate crimes against Jews in the US spiked 37% between 2016 and 2017. We are witnessing similar trends in Canada, where anti-Semitic crimes increased by 60% since last year, according to Statistics Canada. Why is it that anti-Semitism continues to thrive? Why won’t this irrational hatred die? What factors contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism? Deborah...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
March 19, 2019 10:00 - 32 minutesIn the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments ...
Amit Pinchevski, "Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma" (Oxford UP, 2019)
March 13, 2019 10:00 - 50 minutesWhat 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 considerati...
Oded Nir, "Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction" (SUNY Press, 2018)
February 22, 2019 11:00 - 47 minutesSignatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new understanding on Israeli literature and literary history. Using Marxist theorization of the relation between literary form and social form, Oded Nir goes beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism, that focuses on the relation of literature to national ideology. Instead, Nir demonstrates how the engagement with national ideology in Israeli literature probes the...
Michael Fischbach, "Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color" (Stanford UP, 2018)
January 04, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourThe Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the great animating foreign policy issues of the twenty-first century, one that provokes fierce divisions across the world. In the United States, the issue has become increasingly politicized in recent decades. While the conflict is not a strict binary issue, varying degrees and kinds of support for the Palestinians has become increasingly normalized among certain groups in the United States. One group that tends to profess sympathy with and support ...
Suzanne Schneider, "Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2018)
December 31, 2018 11:00 - 51 minutesThe history of Palestine is overly political; most studies, especially of the Mandate period, when the British effectively colonized Palestine, focus on the political actors. In Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2018), Suzanne Schneider produces a social and cultural study that does not ignore the political actors, walking us through how religion was used by the British in educational settings in attempts to quell nationalis...
Seth Anziska, "Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo" (Princeton UP, 2018)
December 17, 2018 11:00 - 52 minutesThe question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo(Princeton University Press, 2018) redefines our understanding of the peace process and its ultimate failure: forty years after the Camp David Accords, the Palestinian people remain without a state. The book walks us through the Camp David Accords, Israel’s 1982 war with L...
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
December 06, 2018 13:04 - 1 hourMcKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the...
Smadar Lavie, “Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition)” (U Nebraska Press, 2018)
October 23, 2018 10:00 - 39 minutesIn Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in Israel. She suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. In this revised and updated edition Lavie connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War...
Rachel Harris, “Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema” (Wayne State UP, 2017)
October 10, 2018 10:00 - 48 minutesIn her new book, Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State University Press 2017), Rachel Harris presents one of the first comprehensive studies of the place and role of women in Israeli cinema and Israeli society more widely. Looking at a variety of films from the early days of Israeli cinema until today, Harris examines some of the particular challenges women in Israel face, including military service, ethnic and national discrimination (Mizrahi, Arab) and issues of la...
Gary Fields, “Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror” (U California Press, 2017)
August 16, 2018 10:00 - 54 minutesInspired by the usage of the term ‘enclosure’ to describe the Separation Wall in Israel-Palestine on a visit he made to the West Bank, Gary Fields in Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (University of California Press, 2017) draws upon the past to speak to the Palestinian present and explain Palestinian dispossession. We talk through why Fields thinks it is necessary to use a long lens to think about the discourses framing the conflict in Israel/Palestine, specifically th...
Eran Kaplan, “Beyond Post-Zionism” (SUNY Press, 2015)
July 25, 2018 10:00 - 38 minutesIn Beyond Post-Zionism (SUNY Press, 2015), Eran Kaplan locates the post-Zionist debates, which have brought into question some of the core tenets of Zionist ideology, within the context of the changes that Israeli society and culture have undergone over the past three decades. Beyond Post Zionism also explores some of the key post-Zionist arguments—that Zionism at its core was a colonialist and orientalist movement—by offering a new analysis of key Zionist and Israeli texts from a perspectiv...
Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions” (OR Books, 2018)
July 19, 2018 10:00 - 38 minutesJamie Stern-Weiner’s new edited volume, Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions (OR Books, 2018) seeks to clarify what it would take to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, to assess the prospects of doing so, and to illuminate the future possibilities for the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies
Guy Laron, “The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East” (Yale UP, 2017)
July 16, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesThe title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, through his research Laron has provided a new lens by which to understand the war. Using a holistic perspective that situates the war in the context of the Cold War and the economic development of the non-western world,...
Guy Burton, “Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947” (Lexington Books, 2018)
June 18, 2018 10:00 - 32 minutesIn Rising Powers and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1947 (Lexington Books, 2018), Guy Burton, who teaches politics and international relations at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, studies how five rising powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a group that is sometimes called the BRICS countries—have approached the conflict since it first became internationalized in 1947. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. Hi...
Yaron Peleg, “Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television” (University of Texas Press, 2016)
June 12, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesAs part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. In his new book Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and T...
Michael Brenner, “In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea” (Princeton UP, 2018)
April 30, 2018 10:00 - 31 minutesIn his new book, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), Professor Michael Brenner, a historian of Jews and of Israel who teaches both at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at American University in Washington, DC, offers a history of the Zionist idea, and the debates over its embodiment in 70 years of Israeli statehood. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign...
Michal Kravel-Tovi, “When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel” (Columbia UP, 2017)
April 25, 2018 10:00 - 40 minutesIn When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017), Michal Kravel Tovi, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, offers an intimate, insightful ethnography of the current field of Jewish conversion in Israel. It highlights the complex and often conflicted nature of an intimate, individual religious performance that is at once and the same time also one of the most pressing political issue...
Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender” (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018)
March 20, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourHasidic 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 spi...
Ian Black, “Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)
March 02, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesIn Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on a range of sources, the book aims to offer a balanced and clear narrative of a history that has become infamously contested. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at t...
Maha Nassar, “Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
March 01, 2018 11:00 - 48 minutesThe study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the larger context of Palestinian citizens of Israel, those Palestinians who stayed behind after the 1948 war simultaneously created the state of Israel and created refugees out o...
David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
February 22, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourWho, 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 ...
Sara Hirschhorn, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement” (Harvard UP, 2017)
February 20, 2018 11:00 - 29 minutesWho are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Harvard University Press, 2017). By analyzing archival documents along with periodicals, internet sources, and a wealth of self-conducted interviews, Hirschhorn concludes that many American-Israeli settlers are not the me...
Noam Zadoff, “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back” (Brandeis UP, 2018)
January 23, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourNoam 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 toget...
Ella Shohat, “On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements” (Pluto Press, 2017)
January 16, 2018 17:28 - 50 minutesSpanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material...
Jack Jacobs, ed. “Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender” (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
December 18, 2017 11:00 - 37 minutesIn Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has assembled a hugely impressive selection of scholars to delve into varied topics related to Jews and Leftists politics. The volume is characterised by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities and sheds considerable light on contentious themes. Max Kaiser is ...