New Books in Jewish Studies
1,034 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★ - 67 ratingsInterview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
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Episodes
Chris Webb, "The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance" (Ibidem Verlag, 2017)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Sobibor Death Camp was the second extermination camp built by the Nazis as part of the secretive Operation Reinhardt--with intent to carry out the mass murder of Polish Jewry. Following the construction of the extermination camp at Belzec in south-eastern Poland from November 1941 to March 1942, the Nazis planned a second extermination camp at Sobibor, and the third and deadliest camp was built near the remote village of Treblinka. Sobibor was similarly designed as the first camp in Belze...
Steven Nadler, "Spinoza: A Life" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesBaruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. This new edition of Steven Nadler's Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge UP, 2022), winner of the Koret Je...
John Tolan, "England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesIn 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise. In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. Jo...
On the History and Evolution of Zionism
April 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOn today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism. Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volum...
Robert Rozett and Iael Nidam-Orvieto, "After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation" (Yad Vashem, 2016)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesAfter So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation (Yad Vashem, 2016) comprises letters written by survivors and liberating soliders in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, reflecting their extreme mixed emotions. The survivors express their sigh of relief at liberation intertwined with the anguish of irreparable loss, and even utterances of hope for a better tomorrow. The letters articulate the first signs of life after liberation, giving moving accounts of suffering, loss a...
Stuart Halpern and Jacob Kupietzky, "The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada" (Maggid, 2024)
April 19, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesIn The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada (Maggid, 2024) you will find, alongside the traditional Haggada text, how American abolitionists and artists, pilgrims and presidents, rabbis and revolutionaries, jazz critics and generals found inspiration in the Exodus story. From Sojourner Truth to the struggle to free Soviet Jewry, Harriet Tubman to Harry Truman, Mark Twain to Martin Luther King Jr., the Jewish story of redemption has inspired Americans of all backgrounds, from the country’s i...
Debby Koren, "Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
April 18, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesDebby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligator...
Kerry Wallach, "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit" (Penn State UP, 2024)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGraphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit's life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after ar...
Steven Ujifusa, "The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I" (HarperCollins, 2023)
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOver thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg. This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing di...
Jae Hee Han, "Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the topic, he interrogates how these communities used discourses of prophethood and revelation to negotiate their place in the world. Han tracks the shifting contours of p...
Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, "Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture" (Syracuse UP, 2018)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British ...
Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France an...
Gustavo Guzmán, "Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen" (Brill, 2022)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the fa...
Sandra Fox, "The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America" (Stanford UP, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up a...
Michael LeFebvre, "Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesScholars of biblical law widely hold that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have been never tested. Join us as we speak with Michael LeFebvre about his book, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written L...
Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the ...
Chiara Renzo, "Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity" (Routledge, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesChiara Renzo's book Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity (Routledge, 2023) focuses on the experiences of thousands of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who lived in refugee camps in Italy between the liberation of the southern regions in 1943 and the early 1950s, waiting for their resettlement outside of Europe. It explores the Jewish DPs' daily life in the refugee camps and what this experience of displacement meant to them. This book sheds light on th...
Jehanne Dubrow, "Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 24 minutesWhat happens when beauty intersects with horror? In Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity (U New Mexico Press, 2023), Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through ...
Kira Sirote, "Haftorah Unrolled: Weekly Insights from the Prophets" (2018)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesHaftorah Unrolled explores the weekly readings from the Prophets (known as the "haftorah") and their connections to the corresponding Torah portions. Sirote offers insights and explanations to help readers appreciate the depth and meaning in these readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
Shoshanna Lockshin and Efrayim Unterman, "The Devash Megillat Esther" (Hadar Press, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Devash Megillat Esther (Hadar Press, 2024) includes the full Hebrew Megillah text, an original kid-friendly English translation, and carefully selected commentaries from 2,000 years of Jewish tradition brought to life in newly accessible ways. Devash unlocks sophisticated texts for learners of all ages and backgrounds, encouraging deep questioning and growth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwo...
Yaacov Nir, "Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949)" (Cambridge Scholars, 2024)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourYaacov Nir's Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949) (Cambridge Scholars, 2024) explores the nature of the severe conflict over immigration to Palestine during the post-Second World War period, and the British policy of deportation to Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949). It considers the perspective of actors such as the British Foreign Office, dominated by stubborn Ernest Bevin, and the Colonial Office, the Palestinian Jewish community and it...
Rachel Blumenthal, "Right to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964" (Lexington, 2021)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesRight to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964 (Lexington, 2021) examines the early years of the Claims Conference, the organization which lobbies for and distributes reparations to Holocaust survivors, and its operations as a nongovernmental actor promoting reparative justice in global politics. Rachel Blumenthal traces the founding of the organization by one person, and its continued campaign for the payment of compensation to survivors after Israel left the ...
Rachel Gordan, "Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American ...
Dan Stone, "The Holocaust: An Unfinished History" (Mariner Books, 2023)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked. Spanning the entirety of the Holocaust and across the world, this sweeping history deepens our understanding. Dan Stone reveals how the idea of 'industrial murder' is incomplete: many were killed where they lived in the most brutal of ways. He outlines the depth of collaboration across Europe, arguing persuasively that we need to stop thinking of the Hol...
Stephanie Chasin, "British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists f...
Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWorld War II and the Holocaust have been the subject of many remarkable stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is unique. It tells the previously unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a courageous Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Nazi occupiers. Assuming the identity of a Polish aristocrat, Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg (born Pepi Spinne...
Robin Baker, "Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges" (Brill, 2016)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 25 minutesIn Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges (Brill, 2016), Robin Baker provides a masterly reappraisal of Israel's experience during its Settlement of Canaan as narrated in the Book of Judges, which, he argues, subtly encrypts a grim forewarning of Judah's future. In its extensive treatment of otherness, the Book of Judges also explores the meaning of God’s covenant with Israel. Join us as we speak with Robin Baker about his monograph on the Book of Judg...
Julie Kalman, "The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World During the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesOn July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and...
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 minutesIn 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...
The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesNYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race. They discuss the foun...
Leona Toker, "Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading" (Indiana UP, 2019)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDevoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include...
Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, "The Jewish Annotated New Testament" (Oxford UP, 2017)
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFirst published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford UP, 2017) was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the New Testament. For Christian readers ...
Roman Dziarski, "How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family" (Academic Studies, 2024)
March 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination. Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic...
Yaniv Feller, "The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
March 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2024) discusses the life and work of Leo Baeck (1873–1956) the rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust. The Jewish Imperial Imagination shows the myriad ways in which the German imperial enterprise left its imprint on his religious and political thought, and on modern Judaism more generally. This book is the first to explore Baeck's religious thought as politica...
Maxine Lowy, "Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that ...
Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, "The Holocaust in Croatia" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Holocaust in Croatia (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity ...
Marcia Bricker Halperin, "Kibbitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow's Cafeteria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesIn the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class a...
Bojan Aleksov, "Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945" (Brill, 2023)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill, 2...
Till Van Rahden, "Multiplicity: Jewish History and the Ambivalences of Universalism" (Hamburger Editionen, 2022)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesSince the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the dis...
Raanan Rein, "Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJuan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century. Recovering the silenced voices of J...
Safwat Marzouk, "Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015)
February 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAppealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. As Marzouk explains in Egypt as a M...
Mara Josi, "Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature" (Legenda, 2023)
February 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Mara Josi about her new book Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature (Legenda, 2023). Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina. From December 1944, literary texts of this ...
Daphna Sharfman, "Jerusalem in the Second World War" (Routledge, 2024)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDaphna Sharfman's book Jerusalem in the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem, offeri...
Jewish War Ethics, Ancient to Contemporary: A Conversation with Rabbi Shlomo Brody
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesHow 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...
Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019)
February 12, 2024 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...
George Eisen, "A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust" (Purdue UP, 2022)
February 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourMost accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty tho...
More on "Cleanliness" (nekiyut)
February 08, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesOn this week's episode, Modya and David discuss the Torah portion of Mishpatim (Ex. 21:1-24:18) through the lens of the character trait of nekiyut, or cleanliness. In this Torah portion, the divine articulation of detailed laws helps to establish a culture in which physical, spiritual, and moral cleanliness are upheld on an individual and collective basis. What does this mean for how we, today, confront temptation, cultivate care for our physical selves, and support collective efforts toward ...
Dallas Michelbacher, "Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940-1944" (Indiana UP, 2020)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBetween Romania's entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the c...
Serhiy Bilenky, "Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesWhen the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today. Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empi...
Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesFacing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother surviv...