New Books in Jewish Studies
1,034 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★ - 67 ratingsInterview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
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Episodes
Charles Dellheim, "Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern" (Brandeis UP, 2021)
April 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSince the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Brandeis UP, 2021), Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place - and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors wh...
Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
April 14, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Agnon’s act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and the Holy Land (to say nothing of the later State of Israel) are often two-faced in Agnon’s Hebrew ...
Michael Carasik, "The Commentators' Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqra'ot Gedolot" (Jewish Publication Society, 2018)
April 13, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesThe biblical commentaries known as Miqra’ot Gedolot have inspired and educated generations of Hebrew readers. Now, with the five volumes of the acclaimed English edition of Miqra’ot Gedolot, The Commentators' Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—the voices of Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides, Rashbam, Abarbanel, Kimhi, and other medieval Bible commentators come alive, speaking in a contemporary English translation annotated and explicated for lay readers. Join us as we speak wit...
Anthony Shaw and Giora Goodman, "Hollywood and Israel: A History" (Columbia UP, 2022)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesFrom Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry...
Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, "American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York" (Princeton UP, 2021)
April 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton University Press, 2022), Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers tell the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews created a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power...
On Leaving Hasidism
March 31, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesShulem Deen is a writer, journalist, and author of the award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return. He is a regular contributor to the Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to tho...
Andrew Lawler, "Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City" (Doubleday, 2021)
March 28, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesUnder Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City (Doubleday, 2021) takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist. In 1863, a French sena...
Martin Shuster, "How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism" (Indiana UP, 2021)
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesWhat can the history of Jewish philosophy teach us about modern life? In How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism (Indiana UP, 2021), Martin Shuster, an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College, explores the history of Jewish philosophy to examine how key thinkers have understood the world. Using a phenomenological approach, the book brings thinkers including Levinas, Maimonides, Adorno, and Cavell into dialogue with a huge r...
Elisheva Carlebach and Deborah Dash Moore, "The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (6): Confronting Modernity, 1750-1880" (Yale UP, 2019)
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6: Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880 (Yale University Press, 2019), covers a period in which every aspect of Jewish life underwent the most profound changes to have occurred since antiquity. Organized by genre, this extensive yet accessible volume surveys Jewish cultural production and intellectual innovation during these dramatic years, particularly in literature, the visual and performing arts, and intellectual culture. Interviewee...
Ken Krimstein, "When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
March 22, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesWhen I Grow Up, the latest graphic nonfiction narrative from New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, is based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teenagers. These autobiographies, submitted in a writing contest, were hidden away at the outbreak of World War II, and were only discovered seven decades later. In When I Grow Up, the author brings these stories, their authors, and their entire world, to life. David Gottlieb is the ...
Dan Grunfeld, "By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream" (Triumph Books, 2022)
March 21, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesWhen Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and exec...
Helene Meyers, "Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesMovie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Rutgers University Press, 2021) focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, pla...
Brett Kahr, "Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis" (Confer Books, 2022)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn his latest book Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Confer Books, 2021), Professor Brett Kahr has used his remarkable skills as experienced psychotherapist and rigorous historian to tell a meticulously researched, deeply engaging tale of the trials and tribulations of Sigmund Freud's life. Kahr has taken an unflinching look at the darkest hours of this remarkable man, such as the Spanish flu of 1918, the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938 and a long struggle ...
Jeffery D. Long and Michael G. Long, "Nonviolence in the World's Religions: A Concise Introduction" (Routledge, 2021)
March 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourJeffery D. Long and Michael G. Long's Nonviolence in the World's Religions: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2021) introduces the reader to the complex relationship between religion and nonviolence. The meanings of both religion and nonviolence are explored through engagement with nonviolence in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Jain, and Pacific Island religious traditions. This is the ideal introduction to the relationship between religion and violence for underg...
Racheli Haliva, "Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020)
March 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourTo date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar’s thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that covers Polqar’s thought in its entirety. Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020) aims to fill this lacuna by tracing and contextualizing both Polqar’s Islamic sources (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes) and his Jewish sources (Maimonides and Isaac Albalag). The study brings to light three of Polqar...
Jadwiga Biskupska, "Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSurvivors tells the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. As the epicenter of Polish resistance, Warsaw was subjected to violent persecution, the ghettoization of the city's Jewish community, the suppression of multiple uprisings, and an avalanche of restrictions that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed countless lives. In Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge UP, 2022), Jadwiga Biskupska traces how Nazi Germany set out to dismantle the Polish nation an...
Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, "The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture" (Harvard UP, 2021)
March 03, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural histories, as well as the underappreciated contest between them, from which the Bible arose. Recen...
Brian Ogren, "Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World" (NYU Press, 2021)
March 03, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesIn his fascinating survey Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World (NYU Press, 2021), Brian Ogren explores the use of Jewish esoteric thought in colonial America by Quaker theologian George Keith, Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, the first Hebrew instructor at Harvard Judah Monis, and the seventh president of Yale Ezra Stiles, in shaping new Protestant American religious sensibilities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg...
Gardner Thompson, "Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel" (Saqi, 2020)
March 02, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesIn Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2020), Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain’s role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two dec...
Kei Hiruta, "Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity" (Princeton UP, 2021)
February 28, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesTwo of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented "everything that I detest most," while Arendt met Berlin's hostility with indifference and suspicion. Written in a lively style, and filled with drama, traged...
Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane, "The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto" (Routledge, 2020)
February 28, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesIn her new book, The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto (Routledge, 2020), Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane uses previously unexplored personal accounts and archival documentation in order to examine life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. The book covers an important aspect of the experience of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, one that has long stood in the shadow of the hegemonic story r...
Joanna Sliwa, "Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
February 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourJewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust (Rutgers UP, 2021) is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children's experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously. Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family...
Erica Brown, "Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile" (Maggid, 2020)
February 25, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesThe Biblical Book of Esther reads like a classic fable, a drama of actors who are recognizable archetypes. There is Esther, the beautiful orphan who becomes queen, Ahasuerus, the buffoon king, Haman, the prototype of evil, and Mordecai, the wise, courageous, and loyal hero. The Book of Esther takes us to the heart of destiny’s moments: a beautiful but unlikely queen evolves into a Jewish leader. A wise and trusted courtier expands his platform of influence, and a vulnerable minority facing de...
Jon Butler, "God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan" (Harvard UP, 2020)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 195...
Allison Schachter, "Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesIn Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 (Northwestern UP, 2021), Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging. Born in the former Russian and Austro‑Hungarian Empires and writing from their ...
Haim Jachter, "Bridging Traditions: Demystifying Differences Between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews" (Maggid, 2022)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesAs the rabbi of a Sephardic synagogue for over twenty years who is himself of Ashkenazic descent and trained in Ashkenazic yeshivot, Rabbi Haim Jachter has a unique vantage point from which to observe the differences in customs and halachot between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In Bridging Traditions: Demystifying Differences Between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews (Maggid, 2022), Rabbi Jachter applies his wide-ranging expertise to explaining an encyclopedic array of divergences between Ashkenazic ...
Exploring Autonomy: A History of Jewish Self-Governance in Eastern Europe
February 23, 2022 09:00 - 20 minutesThe emergence of self-government in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe has been a slow process, often encouraged by invitations of existing regimes and sometimes to escape state persecution. Nonetheless, the Jewish community has succeeded in establishing its autonomy as well as maintain a certain degree of control over its traditions. In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, trace...
Catherine Ehrlich, "Irma's Passport: One Woman, Two World Wars, and a Legacy of Courage" (She Writes Press, 2021)
February 21, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesIn Irma's Passport: One Woman, Two World Wars, and a Legacy of Courage (She Writes Press, 2021), Catherine Ehrlich explores her Austrian grandparents’ influential lives at the crossroads of German and Jewish national movements. Weaving her grandmother Irma’s spellbinding memoirs into her narrative, she profiles a charismatic woman who confronts history with courage and rebuilds lives—for herself and Europe’s dispossessed. Starting out in Bohemia’s picturesque countryside, Irma studies languag...
Markus Zehnder, "The Bible and Immigration: A Critical and Empirical Reassessment" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
February 17, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesQuestions relating to immigration are among the most heated topics on both sides of the Atlantic. Western societies have changed dramatically because of large-scale immigration in the last decades. Christians are also engaged in the discussion, attempting to find direction from the biblical texts. Overwhelmingly, persons in leading positions (both in the secular world and in churches and faith-based organizations) support the concept of “welcoming the stranger.” The Bible is seen by them as u...
Michael Marmur and David Ellenson, "American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement, and Belief" (Brandeis UP, 2020)
February 16, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesMordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization was first published in 1934. The editors of American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement, and Belief (Brandeis UP, 2020), a collection of readings, some essays, some chapters from books, see Kaplan’s work as a foundational moment in Jewish thought in America, and so they take their cue from that historical moment. The seventy-nine selections in this book cover a wide range of authors and subjects, providing the reader with sn...
Manoela Carpenedo, "Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus: Judaizing Evangelicals in Brazil" (Oxford UP, 2021)
February 15, 2022 05:00 - 1 hourAn unexpected fusion of two major western religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, has been developing in many parts of the world. Contemporary Christian movements are not only adopting Jewish symbols and aesthetics but also promoting Jewish practices, rituals, and lifestyles. Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus: Judaizing Evangelicals in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2021), is the first in-depth ethnography to investigate this growing worldwide religious tendency in the global Sout...
Federica Francesconi, "Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
February 14, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesIn her recent book on the Jewish community of Modena in Italy, Federica Francesconi tells a tale of contradictions. Segregated to the city’s ghetto in the 17th century, the Jewish merchants of the city nonetheless possessed an enormous presence in its economic, governmental and cultural milieu. By the start of the 19th century, these merchants even took center stage in Modena’s political scene following Napoleon’s conquest of Italy and the subsequent abolition of the ghettos themselves. How d...
Yakov Nagen, "Be, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality Between East and West" (Maggid, 2019)
February 09, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutesBe, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality Between East and West (Maggid, 2019) presents a Jewish approach to transforming the way we see and live our lives. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Yakov Nagen about how he uses the weekly parasha as a springboard to converse with both Eastern spirituality and Western thinking, creating a synthesis that unifies "being" and "doing." Thought-provoking and original, this work draws on wisdom from the Bible, Talmud, Kabbala, as well as philosophy, poetry, lite...
Patrick Hicks, "In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program" (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2020)
February 08, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesIn the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they’ll be forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. El...
Ola Hnatiuk, "Courage and Fear" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019)
February 08, 2022 05:00 - 1 hourLemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv… The city, which is located in the western part of Ukraine, evokes a highly entangled past that contains references to a number of nations, ethnicities, empires, states, and communities. They have their own (hi)story and they claim their right to make this story visible. Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019) focuses on the crossroads of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian dwellers that happened to share one geographical space that, ho...
Susan Gilson Miller, "Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2021)
February 03, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhen France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a highly regarded Casablancan Jewish lawyer, quickly claimed a role of rescuer and almost single-handedly organized a sweeping program of wartime refugee relief. But for all her remarkable achievements, Benatar's story has never been told. I...
Rich Brownstein, "Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide" (McFarland, 2021)
February 01, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesHolocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends—and many others—with a comprehensive guide ...
Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, "American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York" (Princeton UP, 2022)
February 01, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSettled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a...
Mir Yarfitz, "Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina" (Rutgers UP, 2019)
January 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourImpure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (Rutgers UP, 2019) investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jews displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitutio...
The 15 Best Films about the Holocaust
January 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn this special follow-up episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again speak with Rich Brownstein, author of Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021). In this interview, Rich lists the 15 greatest holocaust films from his long-time study. He uses the categories he developed for his book and chooses 3 films from each group. I hope our conversation is both interesting and informative! Joel Tscherne is an Adju...
Andrew Porwancher, "The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton" (Princeton UP, 2021)
January 26, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesIn The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton UP, 2021), Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, P...
Samuel J. Spinner, "Jewish Primitivism" (Stanford UP, 2021)
January 26, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAround the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and ...
Karen Rostoger-Gruber, "The Family (and Frog! ) Haggadah" (Behrman House, 2017)
January 25, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesI talked with Karen Rostoger-Gruber and her sidekick, Maria (Karen is a ventriloquist) on her career and writing process and celebrated her Passover hagaddah (prayer book) with an amphibian twist: The Family (and Frog!) Haggadah (Behrman House, 2017). Take a traditional Haggadah text, and add vibrant and historical artworks, engaging activities, and compelling thought questions and activities to it. Then add a hopping, wise-cracking frog to its pages, and you'll get the Family [and Frog!] Hag...
Jason Lustig, "A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 24, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesHow do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an authentic Jewish culture. Indeed, b...
Yakir Englander, "The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesHow does Ultra-Orthodox Jewish literature describe the male body? What does the body represent? What is the ideal male body? In The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology, published in 2021 by Pickwick Publications, Yakir Englander presents a philosophical-theological exploration of the different images of the male body in Ultra-Orthodox literature since the holocaust. The body is not incidental to this community but is the axis by which it tries to understand its meaning and its role in...
Marc Caplan, "Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism" (Indiana UP, 2021)
January 13, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (Indiana UP, 2021), Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish li...
Anat Plocker, "The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties" (Indiana UP, 2022)
January 12, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties (Indiana University Press, 2022), Anat Plocker examines the campaign of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that swept through Poland in 1967 and 1968, in the wake of the Six-Day War. Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this anti-Semitic campaign was motivated by Polish fears of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, ...
Melissa Stoller, "Sadie’s Shabbat Stories" (Spork, 2020)
January 11, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesToday I talked to Melissa Stoller about her book Sadie’s Shabbat Stories (Spork, 2020). Sadie loves listening to Nana's tales, especially about the traveling candlesticks, kiddush cup, and challah cover they use every Friday night. Will Sadie ever be able to tell her own special Shabbat stories, just like Nana? Based on true stories in the Author Melissa Stoller's family, this book celebrates family history and connections. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, em...
Gideon Sapir and Daniel Statman, "State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical-Legal Inquiry" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
January 11, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesMahatma Gandhi said, “Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either.” The relationship between religion and state presents complex challenges to liberal democracies around the world. In this work, Gideon Sapir and David Statman Propose a comprehensive theory about state and religion relations, providing tools to think systematically about questions in this field Use a clear philosophical underpinning for its analysis Offer a detailed case study of the arr...
Stephanie M. Pridgeon, "Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
January 05, 2022 09:00 - 2 hoursStephanie M. Pridgeon's book Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film (U Toronto Press, 2020) examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following ques...