New Books in Jewish Studies
1,034 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★ - 67 ratingsInterview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Naphtaly Shem-Tov, "Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation" (Routledge, 2021)
August 25, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourNaphtaly Shem-Tov's book Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation (Routledge, 2021) introduces readers to the stagecraft produced by Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) directors and artists. Describing the work of Yemenite, Iraqi, Moroccan and other minorities whose trauma was represented on Israeli stages, dramaturgy known to local Israeli audiences is made known to readers through this monograph. This book draws on the theoretical insights Israeli directors who theorized their phi...
Stanley Mirvis, "The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" (Yale UP, 2020)
August 23, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourStanley Mirvis' The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition (Yale University Press, 2020) offers an in-depth look at the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica and their connections to broader European and Atlantic trade networks. Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspor...
Ilana Maymind, "Exile and Otherness: The Ethics of Shinran and Maimonides" (Lexington Books, 2020)
August 13, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Exile and Otherness: The Ethics of Shinran and Maimonides (Lexington Books, 2020), Ilana Maymind argues that Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of True Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu), and Maimonides (1138–1204), a Jewish philosopher, Torah scholar, and physician, were both deeply affected by their conditions of exile as shown in the construction of their ethics. By juxtaposing the exilic experiences of two contemporaries who are geographically and culturally separated and yet share some o...
Eliza Ablovatski, "Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, o...
Daniel A. Klein (trans.), "Shadal on Leviticus" (Kodesh Press, 2020)
August 10, 2021 08:00 - 37 minutesSamuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known by his Hebrew acronym Shadal, was the leading Italian Jewish scholar of the 19th century. A linguist, educator, and religious thinker, he devoted his talents above all to the interpretation of the Bible. As a master of Hebrew grammar and usage, he focused on the plain meaning of the text. Although he was a devout believer in the divinity, unity, and antiquity of the Torah, Shadal approached the text in a remarkably free spirit of inquiry, drawing upon ...
Mika Ahuvia, "On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture" (U California Press, 2021)
August 09, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesAngelic beings can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, and by late antiquity the archangels Michael and Gabriel were as familiar as the patriarchs and matriarchs, guardian angels were as present as one’s shadow, and praise of the seraphim was as sacred as the Shema prayer. Mika Ahuvia recovers once-commonplace beliefs about the divine realm and demonstrates that angels were foundational to ancient Judaism. Ancient Jewish practice centered on humans' relationships with invisible beings who a...
Elizabeth Anthony, "The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust" (Wayne State UP, 2021)
August 08, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourMost often our engagement with the Holocaust is a process of wrestling with the absence of presence and the presence of absence. This is right and important and necessary. But Elizabeth Anthony's new book The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust (Wayne State UP, 2021) reminds us that the story of the Holocaust is also the story of return, of resurfacing, of presence itself. Anthony studies the return of Viennese Jews to Vienna after the end of the Second World War. She star...
Leonard J. Greenspoon, "Olam Ha-zeh V'olam Ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice" (Purdue UP, 2017)
August 04, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesOlam Ha-zeh V'olam Ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice (Purdue UP, 2017), for which Professor Greenspoon served as the editor, explores Jewish notions and conceptions of the afterlife and how it compares to our live on this earth. Covering sources from Apocryphal literature from 400BCE to 200CE to modern thinkers like Mendelssohn and Levinas, Olam ha-zeh and Olam ha-ba provides an interdisciplinary view of the subject and helps readers understand the diverse ...
Robin Derricourt, "Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions" ( Manchester UP, 2021)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesWhat do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread? Robin Derricourt considers the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism and working backwards through Islam, Christianity and Judaism to Zoroastrianism, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions ( Manchester UP, 2021) opens up the condition...
Moshe Halbertal, "Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism" (Yale UP, 2020)
July 27, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutesRabbi Moses ben Nahman (1194–1270), known in English as Nahmanides and by the acronym the Ramban, was one of the most creative kabbalists, one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters, and one of the greatest Talmudic scholars the Jewish tradition has ever produced. Join us as we talk with Moshe Halbertal about his recent book: Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism (Yale UP, 2020), where he provides a broad, systematic account of Nahmanides’s thought, exploring his conception of halakha...
Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 16, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesThe identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (U Ch...
Yael Ziegler, "Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World" (Koren Publishers, 2021)
July 14, 2021 08:00 - 32 minutesThe Biblical book of Lamentations contains a whirlwind of emotional responses to tragedy and suffering—expressing anger, doubt, and confusion—and yet its central message is one of deep hope and trust in God’s goodness. Join us as we speak with Dr. Yael Ziegler about her recently published commentary, Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World. We will also touch on her previous commentary, Ruth: From Alienation to Monarchy. Dr. Yael Ziegler is an assistant professor of Bible at Herzog Academic ...
David Arnovitz, "Samuel: The Making of the Monarchy, Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel" (Koren Publishers, 2021)
July 14, 2021 08:00 - 18 minutesSamuel: The Making of the Monarchy, a volume of The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel with Koren Publishers, offers an innovative and refreshing approach to the Hebrew Bible. By fusing extraordinary findings by modern scholars on the ancient Near East with the original Hebrew text and a brand new English translation, The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel clarifies and explains the Biblical narrative, laws, events, and prophecies in context with the milieu in which it took place. The Koren T...
Under the Arch of Titus: A Gateway to the Jewish Community
July 14, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutesIn this episode, Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, Israel, discusses his new book Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome—and Back, published in Brill’s Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online collection. He explores how the Arch has been a symbol of subjugation as well as empowerment for both Jewish and Christian cultures as they evolved across centuries; how it is a door to the story of the Jewish community’s resilience; how it has inspi...
Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, "Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews" (North Atlantic Books, 2021)
July 09, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourUntil now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews (North Atlantic Books, 2021) rediscovers the forgotten legacy of the Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, from their beginnings in the Middle Ages through the modern era. Including the first materia medica of 26 plants and herbs essential to Ashkenazi folk medic...
Leonard Greenspoon, "Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
July 09, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn his book Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Leonard Greenspoon is the first to examine thoroughly Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation. Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, lingui...
Michael Fishbane, "Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 09, 2021 04:00 - 55 minutesPerhaps no scholar has exerted a more decisive influence on the study of Jewish thought and theology over the past half century than Michael Fishbane. Continuing his recent engagement with Jewish theology, in Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Professor Fishbane articulates a four-fold matrix of theological thought and inquiry that addresses the modern person in all her complexity and perplexity, charting a path toward deep encounter, and de...
Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, "Talks on the Parasha" (Maggid, 2015)
July 08, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesRabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz (11 July 1937 – 7 August 2020), an Israeli Chabad Chasidic rabbi, teacher, philosopher, author, and translator, has been compared to Rashi and Maimonides in terms of the import of his scholarly and religious achievements. In today’s show, we speak with his son, Rabbi Meni Even-Israel, about two of his father’s books: Talks on the Parasha, featuring explanations of the Torah, and Change & Renewal, which explains the significance of the Jewish holidays. Rabbi M...
Ruth Mazo Karras, "Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourToday on the podcast, Ruth Mazo Karras, the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin talks about her new book, Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, out this year, 2021 with University of Pennsylvania Press. "How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men,...
Assaf Shelleg, "Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesTheological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford UP, 2020) offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on ...
Sina Kahen, "Ideas: Bereshit" (2020)
July 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Torah — the Bible — is Judaism’s crown. The ideas gleaned from it have improved and advanced human civilization. In the first two installments of his series, Ideas (2020 and 2021), which treat the books of Genesis and Exodus, Sina Kahen weaves together ideas from ancient to modern times in an effort to provide an intellectually honest and spiritually fulfilling representation of the Torah’s weekly portions. Drawing from science, philosophy, psychology, and history, this series offers the ...
Mariusz Kalczewiak, "Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture" (U Alabama Press, 2019)
June 25, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Dr. Mariusz Kałczewiak, senior research associate and lecturer in the Eastern European studies department at the University of Potsdam, recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Kałczewiak sheds light on marginalised aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish ...
Isaac W. Oliver, "Luke's Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts" (Oxford UP, 2021)
June 23, 2021 08:00 - 38 minutesDoes the author of Luke-Acts write off the Jewish people, or does his presentation demonstrate that hopes for the restoration of Israel were very much still alive within the early church? In Luke's Jewish Eschatology (Oxford University Press, 2021), Isaac W. Oliver investigates Luke's perspective on the salvation of Israel in light of Jewish restoration eschatology, situating Luke-Acts in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The author of Luke-Acts, Oliver cogently ...
Edward B. Westermann, "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany" (Cornell UP, 2021)
June 10, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe title of Edward Westermann's new book, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell University Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021), suggests that it is about the use of alcohol by perpetrators of the Holocaust. And it is. Westermann documents extensively how alcohol served to bind perpetrators together and to help them celebrate, conduct and perhaps forget mass murder. The amount of alcohol consumed as part of the ...
Hugh McLeod and Todd Weir, "Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century" (Oxford UP, 2020)
June 10, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesTodd H. Weir and Hugh McLeod, two leading historians of religion, have teamed up to edit a volume in the Proceedings of the British Academy that explores how conflicts between secular worldviews and religions shaped the history of the 20th century. With contributions considering case studies relating to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, atheism and communism, and from several continents, Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2020) o...
Natalia Aleksiun, "Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
May 31, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThoroughly researched, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Liverpool UP, 2021) highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history devoted themselves to creating a sense of Polish Jewish belonging while also fighting for their right...
Natalia Aleksiun, "Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust" (Littman Library, 2021)
May 31, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThoroughly researched, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021) highlights the historical scholarship that is one of the lasting legacies of interwar Polish Jewry and analyses its political and social context. As Jewish citizens struggled to assert their place in a newly independent Poland, a dedicated group of Jewish scholars fascinated by history devoted themselves to creating a sense of Polish Jewish belonging while...
Katarzyna Person, "Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation" (Cornell UP, 2021)
May 28, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesIn Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021) , Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corru...
Zev Eleff, "Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life" (Wayne State UP, 2020)
May 27, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAuthentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life (Wayne State University Press, 2020), by Zev Eleff, challenges the current historical paradigm in the study of Orthodox Judaism and other tradition-bound faith communities in the United States. Paying attention to "lived religion," the book moves beyond sermons and synagogues and examines the webs of experiences mediated by any number of American cultural forces. Eleff lucidly explores Orthodox Judaism's engagement with Jewish l...
Devi Mays, "Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora" (Stanford UP, 2020)
May 26, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourForging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Author Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new home...
A Conversation with Jessica Kirzane about Yiddish Studies
May 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: how Jessica first began to learn Yiddish, w...
Leon R. Kass, "Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus" (Yale UP, 2021)
May 17, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEverything, in the end, comes down to Exodus. Everything that we are as a civilization goes back to Exodus. Every person, religious or not, who wants to consider him or herself educated needs to engage with Exodus. And, fortunately for us, the noted academic Leon Kass has provided us with that unique thing—a book that is both magisterial and readable. We will discuss with him his 2021 work, Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2012). Kass examines Exodus in meticulous...
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, "The Erez Concise Guide Series" (Koren, 2021)
May 17, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutesThe Erez Series is comprised of the Concise Guides to the full gamut of Jewish thought, from the Torah to modern halakha (Jewish law) and Mahshava (Jewish philosophy). The late Rabbi Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz zt"l was one of the leading thinkers of the modern age and the most prolific author of Jewish thought and commentary since the middle ages. The Erez Series distills the essence of 4 of the principal schools of the Jewish tradition Torah, the Sages (Hazal), Halakha, and Mahshava as a to...
Harry Freedman, "Reason to Believe: The Controversial Life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
May 17, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourLouis Jacobs was Britain's most gifted Jewish scholar. A Talmudic genius, outstanding teacher and accomplished author, cultured and easy-going, he was widely expected to become Britain's next Chief Rabbi. Then controversy struck. The Chief Rabbi refused to appoint him as Principal of Jews' College, the country's premier rabbinic college. He further forbade him from returning as rabbi to his former synagogue. All because of a book Jacobs had written some years earlier, challenging from a ratio...
Robert D. Miller II, "Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021)
May 13, 2021 08:00 - 26 minutesRecognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahw...
Mira Sucharov, "Borders and Belonging: A Memoir" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
May 11, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesMira Sucharov’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), is a work that takes seriously the feminist adage that the “personal is political,” and vice versa. Through an intimate telling of her life, Sucharov uses the work to trace her shifting relationship to Israel, and the Israeli-Plaestinitan conflict, the meaning of diaspora Jewish identity, and what writing about International Relation can look like. The memoir covers topics such as the divorce of her parents,...
Amelia M. Glaser, "Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine" (Harvard UP, 2020)
May 05, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesBetween the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were...
Lila Corwin Berman, "The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution" (Princeton UP, 2020)
May 05, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesFor years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated r...
Adam Hochschild, "Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)
May 04, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutesIn the political ferment of early twentieth century New York City, when socialists and reformers battled sweatshops, and writers and artists thought a new world was being born, an immigrant Jewish woman from Russia appeared in the Yiddish press, in Carnegie Hall, and at rallies. Her name was Rose Pastor Stokes, and she fought for socialism, contraception and workers’ rights. What set her apart was not just the strength of her speeches or the passion of her commitments, but her marriage to Jam...
Svenja Bethke, "Dance on the Razor's Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesThe ghettos established by the Nazis in German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War have mainly been seen as lawless spaces marked by brutality, tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance on the Razor's Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos (University of Toronto Press, 2021) explores how under these circumstances highly improvised legal spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogene...
Daniel Herskowitz, "Heidegger and His Jewish Reception" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
April 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I interview Daniel Herskowitz, Career Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, about his first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In the book, Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main pat...
Thomas Robinson and Hillary Rodrigues, "World Religions Reader: Understanding Our Religious World" (ROBINEST, 2020)
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 42 minutesPreparing online materials since 2005 (including Hindusim the EBook, 2016), Dr. Hillary Rodrigues has been working on a fantastic resource for anyone interested in studying or teaching world religions. See www.robinest.org. Designed as an introductory reader for a World Religions course, the eBook World Religions Reader: Understanding Our Religious World (ROBINEST, 2020) provides key texts from Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Christianity, and ...
Massoud Hayoun, "When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History" (New Press, 2019)
April 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhen We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (New Press, 2019) is part-memoir, part-history of Jewish Arabs. We follow Massoud Hayoun as he documents his family’s history, their place in the Arab world and how they came to America, as well as engage with how Massoud engages with his own sense of identity. Massoud Hayoun is a journalist and author based in Los Angeles. He has reported for Al Jazeera English, Pacific Standard, Anthony Bourdain's Parts Uknown online, The Atlantic, Ag...
Rachel B. Gross, "Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice" (NYU Press, 2021)
April 19, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history surrounding them. In Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (NYU Press, 2021), Rach...
Sheila E. Jelen, "Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies" (Wayne State UP, 2020
April 12, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. I...
Cedric Cohen-Skalli, "Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography" (Brandeis UP, 2020)
April 09, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourDon Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was an important forerunner of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier; a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings; a preacher and exegete; and a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities; Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography (Brandeis University Press, 2020) i...
Dina Porat, "Vengeance and Retribution Are Mine: Community, the Holocaust, and Abba Kovner's Avengers" (Pardes, 2019)
April 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourVengeance and Retribution Are Mine: Community, the Holocaust, and Abba Kovner's Avengers (Pardes, 2019) is a book by Israeli historian Dina Porat on Nakam, a small group of Holocaust survivors led by Abba Kovner which sought violent revenge against Germans. She chose the title to express her belief that humans should leave revenge for God. It was first published in 2019 by Pardes Publishing in Hebrew, and is the first scholarly book on Nakam. Dina Porat is an Israeli historian. She is profess...
Roundtable on Medieval Conspiracy Theories
March 31, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourJoin us today for a roundtable conversation with three leading medieval scholars about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in history. Michael T. Bailey, professor of history at Iowa State University is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of the idea of the Witches’ Sabbath, the verifiable hysterical historical panic about a gathering of diabolical witches joined together to dance with the devil himself in order to spread evil power, a nocturnal festival capable of destr...
Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the pre...
Joshua Cole, "Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2019)
March 17, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourJoshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery. Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political v...