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
Noam Sachs Zion, "Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy" (Jewish Publication Society, 2021)
December 31, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourSanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy (Jewish Publication Society, 2021) draws on two thousand years of rabbinic debates addressing competing aspirations for loving intimacy, passionate sexual union, and sanctity in marriage. What can Judaism contribute to our struggles to nurture love relationships? What halakhic precedents are relevant, and how are rulings changing? The rabbis, of course, seldom agree. Underlying their arguments are perennial debates: What ...
Ann Koffsky, "Kayla and Kugel's Happy Hanhukkah" (Apples and Honey Press, 2020)
December 28, 2021 09:00 - 39 minutesOur current podcast features the picture book Kayla and Kugel's Happy Hanhukkah (Apples and Honey Press, 2020). The author, Ann Koffsky is the author and illustrator of more than thirty books, including Creation Colors, Sarah Builds a School, the Kayla & Kugel series, Judah Maccabee Goes to the Doctor and Shabbat Shalom, Hey. Several of her books have been PJ library selections, and her book Noah’s Swimathon received a Sydney Taylor notable designation from the Association of Jewish Libraries...
Beate Kowalski and Susan E. Docherty, "The Reception of Exodus Motifs in Jewish and Christian Literature: "Let My People Go!" (Brill, 2021)
December 23, 2021 09:00 - 38 minutesThe account of the exodus of Israel out of Egypt led by Moses has shaped the theology and community identity of both Jewish people and Christians across the centuries, blossoming further in later scriptures and religious writings, as well as in art and music. Join us as we speak with Joshua Coutts about the book, Let My People Go: The Reception of Exodus Motifs in Jewish and Christian Literature, published by Brill. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to explore the...
Marcia Pally, "From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
December 21, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourLeonard Cohen's troubled relationship with God is here mapped onto his troubled relationships with sex and politics. Analysing Covenantal theology and its place in Cohen's work, Marcia Pally's From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first to trace a consistent theology across sixty years of Cohen's writing, drawing on his Jewish heritage and its expression in his lyrics and poems. Cohen's commitment to covenant, and hi...
Izabela Wagner, "Bauman: A Biography" (Polity, 2020)
December 17, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesGlobal thinker, public intellectual, and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere. Izabela Wagner's Bauman: A Biography (Polity Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of his life and work. Dr. Wagner, Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas in Wars...
Julian E. Zelizer, "Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement" (Yale UP, 2021)
December 17, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutes“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. In Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale UP, 2021), author Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel’s early years and foundational influenc...
"Bambi" isn't about what you think it's about: Jack Zipes explains
December 15, 2021 09:00 - 39 minutesMost of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This ma...
Jonathan Sacks, "The Koren Standard Tanakh Maalot" (Koren, 2021)
December 14, 2021 09:00 - 48 minutesA decade in development, the new KOREN TANAKH offers an eloquent, faithful, and masterful translation of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings with the renowned Koren Hebrew text. Translation for the Pentateuch and much of the Psalms was accomplished by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Reuven Ziegler, Chairmen of the Editorial Board of Koren Publishers, and Jessica Sacks, Translation Team Manager and niece of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, about the new...
Menachem Kellner, "We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)
December 13, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourMaimonides' Guide of the Perplexed addressed Jews of his day who felt challenged by apparent contradictions between Torah and science. We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other (Academic Studies Press, 2021) uses Maimonides' writings to address Jews of today who are perplexed by apparent contradictions between the morality of the Torah and their conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and are the object of divine concern, that other religions have value, t...
Sonia Gollance, "It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity" (Stanford UP, 2021)
December 07, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourDances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women f...
Noah Isenberg ed., Shelley Frisch, trans., "Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna" (Princeton UP, 2021)
December 01, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutesBefore Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton UP, 2021) brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as Billie) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. Fr...
Rani Jaeger, "Abraham the Hebrew Believer: Secularism and Religion in the Work of Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973)"
December 01, 2021 09:00 - 50 minutesHow can it be that deeply religious poetry is being written by a committed socialist, literary revolutionary and modernist? How sacredness appears in working in the field? How one can pray after the “death of God”? This magical contradiction is being explored and explained in the book Abraham the Hebrew Believer: Secularism and Religion in the work of Abraham Shlonsky (1900-1973). The book is a journey to the world of one of the most creative figures in modern Hebrew culture. Dr. Rani Jaeger ...
Hadassah Lieberman, "Hadassah: An American Story" (Brandeis UP, 2021)
November 29, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourBorn in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston University in government and dramatics and an MA in international relations and American government from Northeastern University. She built a career devoted largely to public health that has included positions at Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the National Research Council. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Joe Lieberman, a U...
Annegret Oehme, "The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations" (Brill, 2021)
November 26, 2021 09:00 - 57 minutesThis volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptatio...
Grant T. Harward, "Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2021)
November 26, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourWhat motivated conscripted soldiers to fight in the Romanian Army during the Second World War? Why did they obey orders, take risks, and sometimes deliberately sacrifice their lives for the mission? What made soldiers murder, rape, and pillage, massacring Jews en masse during Operation Barbarossa? Grant Harward’s ground-breaking book Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2021) combines military history, social history, and histories of the Holocaust to offer...
Dana Mack, "All Things That Deserve to Perish: A Novel of Wilhelmine Germany" (2020)
November 22, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesDespite all the attention paid to the two world wars of the twentieth century, not a great deal of historical fiction focuses on the period that preceded them. Dana Mack’s debut novel, All Things That Deserve to Perish, is an exception. Through its depictions of Berlin high society, the Junkers from the agricultural estates of old Prussia, and interfaith marriages, the novel explores the fraught transition to a modern, commercial economy that simultaneously promoted and complicated relations ...
Matthew Levering, "Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism" (Cascade Books, 2021)
November 19, 2021 09:00 - 21 minutesWhat does it mean to be the people of God? Is it possible for Jewish and Christian people to engage in fruitful dialogue about their faiths, with integrity and mutual respect? Despite, or perhaps because of, the bitterly tragic history between them, especially of the ill-treatment of Jewish people under the false guise of Christianity, ongoing efforts toward charitable understanding and friendship are to be especially treasured. Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dial...
Anders Persson, "EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesNearly 50 years since the European Foreign Ministers issued their first declaration on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 1971, the European Union continues to have close political and economic ties with the region. Based exclusively on primary sources, Anders Persson's EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019 (Edinburgh UP, 2020) offers an up-to-date overview of the European Union’s involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict since 1967. This study uses an innovative conc...
David Barak-Gorodetsky, "Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode, I interview David Barak-Gorodetzky about his new book, Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist (U Nebraska Press, 2021). This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes—the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor—offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism—especially his championing of a binational state—against all odds. Like a prophet unab...
Daniel C. Matt, "The Zohar" (Stanford UP, 2018)
November 17, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourEmerging some seven hundred years ago in Spain, the Zohar is considered 'the great medieval compendium of mysticism, myth, and esoteric teaching' and perhaps 'the highest expression of Jewish literary imagination in the Middle Ages' (from Arthur Green's Introduction, vol. 1, pg. xxxi). The twelve volume English translation and encyclopedic commentary on the Zohar: Pritzker Edition by Stanford University Press has become the authoritative and standard version for the English-speaking world--an...
Yair Wallach, "A City in Fragments: Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem" (Stanford UP, 2020)
November 15, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fr...
Andrea Gondos, "Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity" (SUNY Press, 2020)
November 04, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutesLong before Kabbalah books lined multiple books shelves in bookstores, Jewish educators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thought of copious ways of making Kabbalah more accessible for readers who were not acquainted with this lore. The book, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020), introduces the reader to an early seventeenth-century rabbi, Yissachar Baer, who lived and worked in Prague. Each of his four works seeks...
Amy Sodaro, "Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence" (Rutgers UP, 2018)
November 04, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourToday, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. In Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Amy Sodaro documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to...
Aubrey L. Glazer, "Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide" (Academic Studies Press, 2013)
November 03, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesAubrey L. Glazer's Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013) immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic Hebrew poet, serving as a gateway into the poet’s quest for mystical union known as devekut. This journey oscillates across subtle degrees of devekut―causing an entranced experience for the Hebrew poet, who is reaching but not reaching, hovering but not hovering, touching but not touching in a stat...
Jan Rybak, "Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914-1920" (Oxford UP, 2021)
November 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourJan Rybak's Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914-1920 (Oxford UP, 2021) examines Zionist activism in East-Central Europe during the years of war, occupation, revolution, the collapse of empires, and the formation of nation states in the years 1914 to 1920. Against the backdrop of the Great War—its brutal aftermath and consequent violence—the day-to-day encounters between Zionist activists and the Jewish communities in the region gave the movemen...
Jason Gile, "Ezekiel and the World of Deuteronomy" (T&T Clark, 2021)
October 29, 2021 08:00 - 30 minutesDid the ideas of Deuteronomy influence the prophecies of Ezekiel? Jason Gile says Yes. His recent monograph argues that Deuteronomy's ideas influenced Ezekiel's response to the crisis surrounding the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile in significant ways, shaping how he saw Israel's past history of rebellion against Yahweh, present situation of divine judgment, and future hope of restoration. Tune in as we speak with Jason Gile about his recent book, Ezekiel and the World of Deuterono...
Meni Even-Israel, "The Steinsaltz Tanya V3: Sha'ar Hayihud Veha'emuna and Iggeret Hateshuva" (Maggid, 2021)
October 27, 2021 08:00 - 44 minutesThe Tanya, a hugely influential 18thcentury work of Hasidic philosophy and spirituality, is at the foundation of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, indeed, written by the movement’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812). Join us as we discuss volume 3 of The Steinsaltz Tanya, featuring the late Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s translation and commentary of two self-contained sections of the Tanya: Sha’ar HaYihud VeHa’emuna or ‘The Gate of Unity and Faith,’ and Iggeret HaTeshuvaor ...
Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)
October 26, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesIntroduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the sons of immigrants from Eastern Europe. They based their hero’s origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In following decades Superman’s mostly Jewish w...
Caroline A. Kita, "Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater" (Indiana UP, 2019)
October 26, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesDuring the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Carolin...
Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)
October 25, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I interview Ethan Kleinberg, professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University, about his new book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought, recently published by Stanford University Press. In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importanc...
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, "A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg" (Yale UP, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. In A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (Ya...
Dov Zakheim, "The Prince and the Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince" (Maggid, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesRabbi Judah the Prince transformed the Mishnah into a text, and now Dov Zakheim, culling from a fascinating array of sources, has brought to life the story and historical times of Judah the Prince, offering us a portrait of one of the seminal figures of early Judaism. Join us as we talk with Dov Zakheim about his recent work, The Prince and The Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince, published under the Maggid imprint of Koren Publishers. Dov Zakheim holds a BA from Columbia U...
Eliyana R. Adler, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2020)
October 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 1940 and 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. In Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2020), Eliyana Adler provides the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. Eliyana Adler i...
Mikhael Manekin, "The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power" (Evrit, 2021)
October 13, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesIn The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power (Evrit, 2021), Mikhael Manekin argues that modern Jewish nationalism--widespread today among secular as well as religious Israeli-Jews--is incompatible with traditional Jewish ethics. Manekin, an Orthodox religious Jew and anti-Occupation activist, draws on traditional texts, as well as his own family history, in an attempt to reconcile a religious ethical system created in the diaspora with the political reality of a modern n...
Yakov Nagen, "The Soul of the Mishna" (Maggid, 2021)
October 12, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesAs the foundational text of the Oral Torah in Judaism, the Mishnah is generally analyzed to understand Jewish law and the workings of the halakhic system. But Yakov Nagen, in looking at over two hundred mishnayot, identifies fascinating literary devices employed by the Sages to convey a deeper meaning, even the Mishnah's 'inner spirit.' Join us as we talk with Yakov Nagen about his work, The Soul of the Mishna. Yakov Nagen is a senior rabbi at the Otniel Yeshiva in Israel, where he teaches Ta...
John-Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944" (Ibidem Press, 2021)
October 12, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourOne quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. John-Paul Himka's Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944 (Ibidem Press, 2021) delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia--UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish...
Jeffrey Veidlinger, "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
October 12, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesBetween 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid worker...
Shay Hazkani, "Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War" (Stanford UP, 2021)
September 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home, writing about everything from daily life to nationalism, colonialism, race, and the character o...
Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020)
September 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhat claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans? Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how ...
Kristin Swenson, "A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible" (Oxford UP, 2021)
September 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Bible is not only a book but also a collection of books. It has many authors but also at the same time many editors. It has not only been translated from one language to another but also translated with different doctrinal and methodological frameworks. It is not only a product of history but also a product of conglomeration of cultures, religions, beliefs, and practices. It is read with intense devotion by hundreds of millions of people, stands as authoritative for Judaism and Christiani...
Rachel Rojanski, "Yiddish in Israel: A History" (Indiana UP, 2020)
September 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourYiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in I...
Emmanuel Navon, "The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
September 16, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesThe first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the...
Shlomit Naim Naor, "The Things We Are Not Talking About" (2020)
September 13, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesShlomit Naim Naor’s poetry is a unique voice in Israel. She is inviting the readers to delve deeper and engage in a dialogue with the Jewish religion and texts which are relevant to the most banal, everyday life. In her poetry, Naim Naor searches for places to which the Divine is NOT welcome, like abortions or the Oncology Department. She openly speaks about the (un)meaningful lives of single (religious) women and more. In her sensitive way she shares with us her personal journey as an Orthod...
Ori Yehudai, "Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 09, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourOri Yehudai's erudite examination of Jewish emigration from Israel in the early years of the state presents a fascinating study of the lived experiences of Israeli refugees from Israel. This book makes a precious contribution to the migration history of Israel. The story of Israel's foundation has often been told from the perspective of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II (Cambridge UP, 2020) turns this histor...
Sarah Bunin Benor et al., "Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
September 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEach summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni (Rutgers University Press,...
A. J. Culp, "Memoir of Moses: The Literary Creation of Covenantal Memory in Deuteronomy" (Fortress, 2019)
September 01, 2021 08:00 - 13 minutesMemory plays a central role in the book of Deuteronomy, meant to shape Israel’s life as a nation in the land. In Memoir of Moses: The Literary Creation of Covenantal Memory in Deuteronomy (Fortress, 2019), A.J. Culp explores the role of Deuteronomy as the chief memory producer of Israel’s covenant with the Lord God—instead of a product of memory from ancient Israel. A.J. Culp is lecturer in Old Testament and biblical languages at Malyon Theological College and honorary research fellow at the ...
Danny Adeno Abebe, "From Africa To Zion" (Miskal, 2021)
August 31, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesIn 1984, in an unprecedented act of brotherhood, Israel airlifted thousands of persecuted and starving Ethiopian Jews from Africa to Israel. They had been waiting in Ethiopia for millennia, sustained by the hope to return home to the Holy Land. Among the refugees was an 8-year-old boy, Danny Adeno Abebe. Now an Israeli journalist, Abebe tells the story of his family and his village, and the journey they traveled from Ethiopia through Sudan to Israel, and the even longer distance from a rural ...
Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards" (Cherry Orchard, 2021)
August 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHelene Jowhara-Piner has produced a masterpiece of culinary history. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards (Cherry Orchard, 2021) recreates and reconstructs recipes of Sephardic Jews consumed during the Inquisition, the Renaissance and medieval Spain and North Africa into meals that anyone can prepare with ease in their own kitchen. Recipes from Turkey to Mexico, Brazil to Spain, are offered accompanied by anecdotes explain...
Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. "The Essential Talmud" (Maggid, 2010)
August 27, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesThe Talmud ‘is the central pillar supporting the entire spiritual and intellectual edifice of Jewish life’—so wrote Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. Not only did Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz publish an English translation and commentary of the entire Talmud in 42 volumes, The Noé Edition Koren Talmud Bavli, he also published a guide for studying the Talmud, titled The Essential Talmud, and a Reference Guide to the Talmud, and Talmudic Images, which presents the life and historical context of 13 ke...
David J. Goldberg, “Rabbi With A Cause: Israel and Identity” (Open Agenda, 2021)
August 27, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourRabbi With A Cause: Israel and Identity is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and David J. Goldberg (1939-2019), former Senior Rabbi Emeritus of London’s Liberal Jewish Synagogue and author and columnist. This wide-ranging conversation is based on Goldberg’s book, This Is Not The Way: Jews, Judaism and Israel, which boldly explores a number of themes that interweave religion, politics, culture and identity in a way that is relevant to all of us, regardless of our c...