New Books in Jewish Studies
1,034 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★ - 67 ratingsInterview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
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Episodes
Jason Mokhtarian, “Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran” (U of California Press, 2015)
February 22, 2016 15:38 - 32 minutesIn Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing references to Persians and Persian loanwords in the Talmudic text, as well as ancient seals and bowl ...
Shai Held, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence” (Indiana UP, 2013)
February 16, 2016 15:04 - 30 minutesIn Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, offers a sympathetic, yet critical, examination of the thought of this influential mid-twentieth century theologian, scholar, and activist. Held identifies a central theme that runs through all of Heschel’s writing: the idea of transcendence–the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. For Heschel, prayer is the paradigmati...
Aviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)
February 16, 2016 13:58 - 58 minutesAviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation...
Keren R. McGinity, “Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood” (Indiana UP, 2014)
February 08, 2016 12:02 - 32 minutesIn Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood (Indiana University Press, 2014), Keren R. McGinity, founding director of the Love and Tradition Institute and a Research Associate at Brandeis University, seeks to challenge the common assumption that when American Jewish men intermarry, they and their families are “lost” to the Jewish religion. McGinity explores the challenges and expectations intermarried Jewish men face as they strive to be good husbands and to raise their childr...
Yael Raviv, “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel” (University of Nebraska Press, 2015)
December 17, 2015 12:47 - 42 minutesIn the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement realized its political goal. It then sought to acculturate the multitude of Jewish immigrant groups in the new state into a unified national culture. Yael Raviv highlights the role of food and cuisine in ...
Ted Merwin, “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli” (NYU Press, 2015)
December 14, 2015 11:46 - 31 minutesIn Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurg...
Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature” (NYU Press, 2013)
December 14, 2015 11:21 - 29 minutesIn Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University, analyses a theme in American religious history–suffering–through the lens of Jewish and African American children’s literature. In her analysis of works by authors such as Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and ...
Kim Wunschmann, “Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps” (Harvard University Press 2015)
December 12, 2015 10:35 - 32 minutesIn Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society. Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wunschmann explores the evolut...
Maud S. Mandel, “Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
December 11, 2015 13:18 - 32 minutesIn Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead, Mandel argues that the Muslim-Jewish conflict in France has been shaped by local, national, and international forces, including the decolonization of French North Africa. Looking at key moments, from Israel’s War of Independence in 194...
Erica Weiss, “Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
December 10, 2015 15:22 - 30 minutesIn Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Erica Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, examines the lives and choices Israeli conscientious objectors, those who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. As an ethnographer, Weiss takes us into the the lives of two generations of conscientious objectors in a state that valorizes wha...
Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” (UNC Press, 2015)
December 09, 2015 13:22 - 31 minutesIn Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden. A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement. Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (...
Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film” (Penn State UP, 2015)
December 08, 2015 11:56 - 30 minutesIn Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), Ranen Omer-Sherman, a professor at the University of Louisville, looks at literary and cinematic representations of the kibbutz, what he calls the world’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Complementing historical works on the kibbutz, Omer-Sherman explores how the kibbutz is depicted in novels, short fiction, memoirs, and films by both kibbutz “insiders” and “out...
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014)
December 07, 2015 13:02 - 44 minutesIn Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities. Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history. Stein draws on material...
Leah Garrett, “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel” (Northwestern UP, 2015)
December 03, 2015 13:43 - 1 hourFinalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Award In her new book Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Leah Garrett, the Loti Smorgon (Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University in Australia) takes the reader through best-selling novels of World War II. These novels became source material for American’s popular perceptions of that war and a mirror on American society back home. Garrett tells the back stor...
Glenn Dynner, “Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland” (Oxford UP, 2014)
December 01, 2015 12:17 - 32 minutesIn Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford UP, 2014), Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College, explores the world of Jewish-run taverns in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Jews had to fend off reformers and government officials that sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Dynner argues that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans, and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns, revealin...
Marjorie Feld, “Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
November 23, 2015 12:34 - 32 minutesIn Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the particularist and universalist commitments many American Jews have felt in the battle against apartheid. For Feld, the post-war debates among American Jews about how to deal with injustice in South Africa later expanded when the term apartheid was used in other contexts. Drawing on archival research and...
Ilan Zvi Baron, “Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique” (Edinburgh UP, 2015)
November 19, 2015 11:41 - 32 minutesIn Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Ilan Baron, Lecturer in International Political Theory in the School of Government and International Affairs and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham University, explores the transnational political obligation of Diaspora Jewry to have a relationship with Israel, including one of critique. The book, featuring Baron’s interviews about the Is...
Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Definition of Anti-Semitism” (Oxford UP, 2015)
November 12, 2015 12:44 - 33 minutesIn The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains what it is at stake in how we define anti-Semitism. “Nowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic,” Marcus writes (p. 11). Marcus discusses the global rise in anti-Semitism; in the United States, Marcus tells us, college campuses are...
Richard H. King, “Arendt and America” (U of Chicago, 2015)
November 08, 2015 20:34 - 1 hourRichard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the German-Jewish exile and political thinker Hannah Arendt’s American experience shaped her thought as she sought an alternative to totalitarianism. Her books The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution display the marks of ...
Aaron W. Hughes, “Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism” (Oxford UP, 2014)
November 05, 2015 11:20 - 32 minutesIn Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), Aaron W. Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester, explores that paradox he sees at the heart of Jewish philosophy. He looks at canonical Jewish philosophers like Maimonides and Rosenzweig, but also Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Abravanel to depict Jewish philosophy from a different perspective. Hughes suggests a possible way forward to Jewish t...
Cecile E. Kuznitz, “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
October 29, 2015 10:09 - 32 minutesIn YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, offers the first book-length history of YIVO, the center for Yiddish scholarship founded in the 1920s by a group of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Could scholarship serve as the foundation for a diaspora nationalism? Kuznitz traces the ups and downs of YIVO, usi...
Jeffery S. Gurock, “The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967” (Rutgers UP, 2015)
October 22, 2015 09:53 - 57 minutesIn The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Jeffrey S. Gurock, the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, imagines an alternate history of American Jewry had there been no Holocaust. Contributing to the increasingly popular genre of alternate history, Gurock uses historical sources to create a plausible, but fictional, narrative about mid-century American Jews, their relationship with their corel...
Jon Birger, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game” (Workman Publishing Company, 2015)
October 15, 2015 11:13 - 30 minutesIn Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (Workman Publishing Company, 2015), Jon Birger, an award-winning journalist and contributor to Fortune magazine, explores the social implications of dating markets with a shortage of college-educated men. Birger argues that demographics, not values, affect dating and marriage. Our discussion focuses on his investigation of how gender ratios in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community can explain the “Shidduch crisis.” Learn more about you...
Lila Corwin Berman, “Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit” (U of Chicago, 2015)
October 08, 2015 10:46 - 33 minutesIn Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Lila Corwin Berman, Associate Professor of History, Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History, and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, looks at how post-WWII American Jews retained a deep connection to cities, even after migrating to the suburbs in large numbers. A work of Jewish urban history, Berman’s book investigates the enduring ...
Derek J. Penslar, “Jews and the Military: A History” (Princeton UP, 2015)
October 01, 2015 11:11 - 31 minutesIn Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton University Press, 2015), Derek J. Penslar, the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History at the University of Toronto, explores the expansive but largely forgotten story of Jews in modern military service. Over more than three centuries, millions of Jews have joined, voluntarily and not, the military of their home country. Military service offered an opportunity to demo...
Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)
September 24, 2015 17:57 - 33 minutesIn Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings o...
Michael L. Satlow, “How the Bible Became Holy” (Yale UP, 2014)
September 17, 2015 12:22 - 32 minutesIn How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), Michael L. Satlow, a professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University, explores how an ancient collection of obscure writing became, over the course of centuries, “holy.” We take for granted that texts have power, but that idea was not always so obvious to people. Satlow traces the story of how the Bible became the foundational, authoritative text of Judaism and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. V...
Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948” (Yale UP, 2014)
September 10, 2015 13:35 - 32 minutesIn Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that multilingualism persisted in Palestine after World War I despite the traditional narrative of the swift victory of Hebrew. Halperin looks at the intertwined nature of language, identity, and nationalism, and how language was...
Jeffrey S. Shoulson, “Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
September 03, 2015 10:18 - 30 minutesIn Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings o...
Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., “The Jewish Study Bible” (Oxford UP, 2014)
September 02, 2015 17:03 - 1 hourAt 2,300 pages and featuring 54 contributors and 42 contextual and interpretive essays, the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014) represents a monumental scholarly achievement. In my conversation with coeditor Marc Zvi Brettler, he talks about the complexity of that undertaking and the foundations upon... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jew...
Lisa Moses Leff, “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2015)
August 03, 2015 11:54 - 35 minutesLisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
John H. Walton, “The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate” (IVP Academic, 2015)
July 24, 2015 18:30 - 56 minutesFor centuries the story of Adam and Eve has resonated richly through the corridors of art, literature, and theology. But, for most modern readers, taking it at face value is incongruous. New insights from anthropology and population genetics–let alone evolutional biology–complicate any attempt to reconcile them with a biblical account of human origins. Indeed, for many Christians who want to take seriously the authority of the Bible, insisting on a literal understanding of Genesis 2-3 looks p...
Mark S. Wagner, “Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen” (Indiana UP, 2015)
June 20, 2015 19:30 - 56 minutesDuring the early twentieth century, Yemeni Jews operated within a legal structure that defined them as dhimmi, that is, non-Muslims living as a protected population under the sovereignty of an Islamic state. In exchange for the payment of a poll tax, the jizya, and the acknowledged of supremacy of Islam, their lives and property were to be inviolable. Although this framework burdened Jews with some legal disadvantages, for example a Muslim’s witness testimony was worth double that of a Jew’s ...
Shulem Deen, “All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir” (Graywolf Press, 2015)
June 14, 2015 15:40 - 1 hourWinner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award, Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice At fourteen, young Shulem Deen, a Hassid in Boro Park, New York, lost his loving father. How was he to deal with the enormous gap in his life that his father’s early death left? He embraced -and was embraced by – a pious spiritual community, the Skverer Hassidim, who had their own town, New Square, New York. In this discreet town of approximately 12,000, only 30 miles north of New York city, the Skverer Hass...
Lital Levy, “Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine” (Princeton UP, 2014)
April 06, 2015 23:39 - 58 minutesSince the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a highly contentious political environment, the two languages have been identified with opposing national movements – Hebrew associated with Jews and Arabic with Palestinians. Lital Levy’s book destabilizes this categorization. Highlighting the space between these two languages, Levy asks not what it me...
Emily Alice Katz, “Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967” (SUNY Press, 2015)
March 26, 2015 10:10 - 54 minutesWorld War Two and the establishment of the State of Israel significantly altered American Jewish attitudes toward Zionism. American Jews supported Israel during times of conflict, like the 1948 war. However, it was not until 1967 that Israel rose to the top of the American Jewish political agenda. Emily Alice Katz, in her new book, argues that the consumption of Israeli culture after 1948 laid the ground work for this political transformation. Katz’ book, Bringing Zion Home: Israel in Americ...
Hasia Diner, “Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way” (Yale University Press, 2015).
March 10, 2015 11:24 - 51 minutesThe period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain,...
Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (Yale UP, 2014)
March 02, 2015 05:00 - 52 minutesAlon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square.Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Dachau.There is a good deal of symbolic violence, too.The synagogue and all its contents are vandali...
Timothy Michael Law, “When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible” (Oxford UP, 2013)
December 10, 2014 11:46 - 58 minutesWhen a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Timothy Michael Law, Lecturer in Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, offers a thorough chronicle of the creation and afterlife of the Septuagint in When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making...
Yaacov Ariel, “An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews” (NYU Press, 2013)
December 04, 2014 13:46 - 33 minutes“In no other instance,” notes Yaacov Ariel, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “have members of one community of faith considered another group to hold a special role in the divine course of human redemption and to be their God’s first nation.” This theological concept underpins An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (NYU Press, 2013), Ariel’s most recent monograph, published in 2013 with New York University Press. It weaves toge...
Daniel Lee, “Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942” (Oxford UP, 2014)
October 07, 2014 14:29 - 1 hourDaniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of coo...
Rebecca Rossen, “Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance” (Oxford UP, 2014)
September 13, 2014 12:22 - 46 minutesHow does an author craft a work that speaks across the boundaries of dance studies, Jewish studies and gender studies? What does it mean for dance to function as a site for probing complex questions of racial, ethnic and cultural identity? How do choreographers respond to the prompt, “make a Jewish dance?” What does all of this have to tell us about the ways in which Jewish identities show up onstage both historically and contemporarily? I was grateful to engage these questions with dancer, c...
Matthew Hedstrom, “The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century” Oxford University Press, 2012
August 08, 2014 12:13 - 58 minutesExpressions of religious belief through popular media are a regular occurrence in our contemporary age. But the circulation and negotiation of religious identities in public contexts has a fairly long history in American culture. Matthew Hedstrom, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, looks beyond the church to determine how religious liberalism was popularized through mainstream book culture. In The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in t...
Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014)
July 28, 2014 17:40 - 54 minutesFor those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift. It is safe to say that his voice is singular in its mellifluousness and its range. I first encountered his writing at one of my dearest friend’s, and any second now new NBiP host and psychoanalyst Anne Wennerstrand’s wedding. Her husband, (doyen of the world of choreograp...
Ronen Shamir, “Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine” (Stanford UP, 2013)
July 23, 2014 14:45 - 1 hourRonen Shamir‘s new book is a timely and thoughtful study of the electrification of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2013) makes use of Actor-Network Theory as a methodology to trace the processes involved in constructing a powerhouse and assembling an electric grid in 1920s Palestine. The book brilliantly shows how electrification “makes politics” rather than just transmitting it: under the auspices of British...
Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” (Stanford UP, 2014)
July 15, 2014 11:34 - 1 hourIn 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindrance to progress and modernity. Over the past two decades, historians have appropriated the term “culture war,” liberated it from its German origin and applied it as a generic expression for secular-catholic conflicts across nineteenth-century Europe. Intellectual and cultural historians have discovere...
Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014)
July 13, 2014 12:45 - 1 hourThere is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo. We know when and where the notion of “Blood Libel,” as this myth is conventionally called, appeared (12th-century England), but we don’t know why. Indeed, given the utter absurdity of the charge (Jews, of course, ar...
Mark Levene, “The Crisis of Genocide” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
June 03, 2014 11:15 - 1 hourI imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught. I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014). These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, o...
Donna-Lee Frieze, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” (Yale UP, 2013)
May 01, 2014 17:58 - 37 minutesIt’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things. In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation ...
Laura Silver, “Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food” (Brandeis University Press, 2014)
April 26, 2014 16:22 - 53 minutesSomething nice and filling for you here! Laura Silver‘s book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis University Press, 2014) concerns itself not only with the round — or is it square? — savory pastry brought to America from somewhere in Europe to fill the working bellies of not well-to-do immigrants. The tale of the knish is a way to tell the story of where an ethnic group has been, where they think they are, and where they might be going. A free-ranging talk between Lower East Sid...