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
Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman, "Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens" (Academic Studies Press, 2017)
August 29, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesJane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman's Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens (Academic Studies Press, 2017) is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how...
Ari Finkelstein, "The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch" (U California Press, 2018)
August 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the generation after Constantine the Great elevated Christianity to a dominant position in the Roman Empire, his nephew, the Emperor Julian, sought to reinstate the old gods to their former place of prominence--in the face of intense opposition from the newly powerful Christian church. In early 363 c.e., while living in Syrian Antioch, Julian redoubled his efforts to hellenize the Roman Empire by turning to an unlikely source: the Jews. With a war against Persia on the horizon, Julian thou...
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn this episode from the Institute’s Vault we hear from Rebecca Goldstein, an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her first book was her 1983 novel, The Mind Body Problem. Goldstein spoke to the Institute in 2006 about her book, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken Books, 2009). A bit about the book: In 1656, Amster...
Jason Weiner, "Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesThe Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. Jason Weiner's book Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility (Georgetown UP, 2022) is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics. B...
Yehuda Halper, "Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa" (Brill, 2021)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age Without Plato: Permitting and Forbidding Open-Inquiry in 12-15th Century Europe and North Africa (Brill, 2021), Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewis...
Gadi Sagiv, "Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesGadi Sagiv's book Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves. In ancient...
Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, "Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesFrom his debut as a novelist, Mordecai Richler challenged, provoked, enraged, entertained, and surprised readers. Criticizing him for his portrayals of Canada and accusing him of being anti-Jewish, many found his mix of progressive sympathies and illiberal satire confounding but hard to ignore. His novels were too engaging: their subjects crackled with contemporary relevance, and their humour was irresistible. Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) is a...
Esra Özyürek, "Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany" (Stanford UP, 2023)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesAt the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, Germ...
Stanley E. Porter and Alan E. Kurschner eds., "The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism" (Pickwick, 2023)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesIn The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism (Pickwick, 2023)., a wide range of scholars write on the question of the promises of God to Israel. These essays put forward the position that unconditional promises were given to Israel, which have not been fulfilled in the church or any other entity. At the consummation, there will be a continuing role for the Jewish people, realized through their national and territorial hope of a restored-redeemed Israel. Join us as we sp...
Mike Rothschild, "Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories" (Melville House, 2023)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House, 2023), Mike Rothschild delves into the history of the conspiracy industry around the Rothschild family—from the "pamphlet wars" of Paris in the 1840s to the dankest pits of the internet today. Journalist and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild, who isn't related to the family, sorts out myth from reality to find the truth about these conspiracy theories and their spreaders. Who were the Rothschi...
Jack Cohen and Yosef Lynn, "Nurture Their Nature: The Torah’s Essential Guidance for Parents and Teachers" (Mosaica Press, 2021)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourEmbark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment with Nurture their Nature; The Torah’s Essential Guidance for Parents and Teachers (Mosaica Press, 2021), an insightful book co-authored by Rabbi Jack Cohen and Rabbi Dr. Yosef Lynn. Drawing on wisdom from the Torah, this book guides parents and teachers in finding their own unique selves and igniting the same in their children and students. It's an essential read for those shaping the next generation. Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a ...
Joshua Cohen’s "The Netanyahus" (JP, Eugene Sheppard)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesn this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them? Cohen d...
James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, "Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict" (Zero Books, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlongside their collective acumen in traditional historical-critical and social-scientific approaches to the New Testament, James Crossley and Robert J. Myles bring a worthwhile dose of historical materialist criticism to historical Jesus scholarship in Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Zero Books/John Hunt Publishing, 2023). And while the Jesus they reconstruct from the various sources available for analysis may not evolve him into a Marxist or a modern socialist, Crossley and Myles regard th...
Lea Taragin-Zeller, "The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land" (NYU Press, 2023)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Poli...
Yamin Levy, "The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition" (MHC Press, 2023)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesYamin Levy's The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition (MHC Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking book that delves into the mystical tradition of Andalusia and specifically of Maimonides. Unlike Kabalah and the European mystical traditions, Andalusian mysticism is rooted in clear Halakhic and philosophical principles devoid of superstition and magic. This book examines Maimonides works which serve as a guide for those interested in pursuing mystical union with G-d. Topics...
Erica Brown, "Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning" (Maggid, 2023)
July 22, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesEcclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." As part of a search for enduring meaning, it questions the nature of work, mortality, happiness, justice, goodness, and life itself. Abounding with careful observations, disappointments, and insights, Ecclesiastes is one of the richest and most complex books in all of Tanakh. Join us as we speak with Erica Brown, whose commentary offers a fresh a...
Moshe Miller, "Rising Moon: Unraveling the Book of Ruth" (Kodesh Press, 2022)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesRuth, a princess of Moab, leaves her homeland after suffering terrible losses to become the mother of the royal house of Israel. Now, in a revolutionary reading of this immortal tale, Moshe Miller provides an entirely new perspective on this beloved story. Beneath the simple surface of this story, the Sages trace a web of primal issues, including the Serpent in the Garden of Eden; the jealousy of Cain; the painful break between Abraham and Lot; and the mystery that is the mitzvah of yibum. Th...
Paul Hanebrink, "In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944" (Cornell UP, 2018)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary--a liberal society in the nineteenth century--as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion shou...
Béla Bodó, "Black Humor and the White Terror" (Routledge, 2023)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBéla Bodó's book Black Humor and the White Terror (Routledge, 2023) examines political humor as a reaction to the lost war, the post-war chaos, and antisemitic violence in Hungary between 1918 and 1922. While there is an increased body of literature on Jewish humor as a form of resistance and a means of resilience during the Holocaust, only a handful of studies have addressed Jewish humor as a reaction to physical attacks and increased discrimination in Europe during and after the First World...
Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2018)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy do pogroms occur in some localities and not in others? Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg examine a particularly brutal wave of violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The authors note that while some communities erupted in anti-Jewish violence, most others remained quiescent. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never a...
Ben Nadler, "The Jewish Deli: An Illustrated Guide to the Chosen Food" (Chronicle Books, 2023)
July 18, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesBeloved culinary and cultural institutions, Jewish delis are wonderlands of amazing flavors and great food—bright, buttery, briny, sweet, fatty, salty, smoky. . . . In The Jewish Deli: An Illustrated Guide to the Chosen Food (Chronicle Books, 2023), comics artist and deli aficionado Ben Nadler takes a deliciously entertaining deep dive into the history and culture of this food and the places that serve it up to us across the counter. Nadler guides readers through the details and delights of e...
Judith Roumani, "Jews in Southern Tuscany During the Holocaust" (Lexington Books, 2020)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe province of Grosseto in southern Tuscany shows two extremes in the treatment of Italian and foreign Jews during the Holocaust. To the east of the province, the Jews of Pitigliano, a four hundred-year-old community, were hidden for almost a year by sympathetic farmers in barns and caves. None of those in hiding were arrested and all survived the Fascist hunt for Jews. In the west, near the provincial capital of Grosseto, almost a hundred Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned in 1943–194...
David Curwin, "Kohelet: A Map to Eden" (Maggid, 2023)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 16 minutesThe book of Kohelet or Ecclesiastes is one of the most challenging biblical books to comprehend, yet it is traditionally read on every Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. In a groundbreaking work, David Curwin draws from traditional sources and modern scholarship to take us on an eye-opening journey through Kohelet and other books of the Tanakh. Starting with a look at the life of King Solomon, whose successes and failures are reflected in the teachings of Kohelet, Curwin then presents linguistic an...
Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon, 2022)
July 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Joseph Sassoon about his book The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (Pantheon, 2022) They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as ‘the Rothschilds of the East.’ Mesopotamian in origin, and for more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and sons starting over w...
Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible" (Princeton UP, 2023)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesEarly Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canoni...
Daniel Boyarin, "The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto" (Yale UP, 2023)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesDaniel Boyarin's new book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023) is a provocative anti-Zionist manifesto pleading for a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood and sketching an alternative vision for a Jewish future beyond the nation-state: the Diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the "nation" and the "state," only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty. Professor emeritus of Talmudic c...
Jennifer Caplan, "Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this comprehensive approach to Jewish humor focused on the relationship between humor and American Jewish practice, Jennifer Caplan calls us to adopt a more expansive view of what it means to “do Jewish,” revealing that American Jews have turned, and continue to turn, to humor as a cultural touchstone. Caplan frames Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials (Wayne State UP, 2023) around four generations of Jewish Americans from the Silent Gene...
Lia Brozgal and Rebecca Glasberg, eds., "A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Leïla Sebbar" (U California Press, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Leila Sebbar (U California Press, 2023) brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal co...
Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, "Stereotyping Religion II: Critiquing Clichés" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesBuilding on the success of Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés, this follow up volume dismantles a further 10 widespread stereotypes and clichés about religion, focusing on clichés that a new generation of students are most familiar with. Each chapter includes: A description of a particular cliché; Discussion of where it appears in popular culture or popular media; Discussion of where it appears in scholarly literature; A historical contextualization of its use in the past; An analysis ...
Anna Müller, "An Ordinary Life?: The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996" (Ohio UP, 2023)
June 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWith An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996 (Ohio University Press, 2023), historian Anna Müller has produced a beautifully written book that is part biography, part family ethnography, part critical meditation on the challenges and contradictions of historical sourcework. Honest and illuminating reflections on the process of crafting an intimate portrait from a scholarly perspective are interwoven with an illuminating case study of migration, motherhood, identity, and in...
Edward Kissi, "Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples" (Routledge, 2021)
June 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThis book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War. An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples (Routledge, 2021) looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, ...
David Wenham, "Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesJesus changed our world forever. But who was he and what do we know about him? David Wenham's Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a concise and wide-ranging engagement with that enduring and elusive subject. Exploring the sources for Jesus and his scholarly reception, he surveys information from Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts, and also examines the origins of the gospels, as well as the evidence of Paul, who had access to the earliest oral tradi...
Yaakov Beasley, "Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: Lights in the Valley" (Maggid, 2020)
June 26, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesWhat do we do when God is silent? This question was asked by the ancient Jewish people during their darkest era, the seventh century BCE. Assyrian armies had ransacked, looted, and burned their once-beautiful land--destroying or exiling much of the populace, leaving behind scarred and traumatized inhabitants under a tyrant's rule. In this environment, violence and idolatry flourished. The prophets were silenced and the Torah nearly forgotten, threatening the survival of God's people. Into thi...
Illuminations Episode 9: Rituals for a Dying World
June 22, 2023 08:00 - 24 minutesAbsorbing the full reality of climate change will require more than a scientific approach. Some American Jews are showing how religious ritual can help us metabolize catastrophic grief while also pointing towards a future rebirth. Guests: -Jennie Rosenn, Founder & CEO of Dayenu -Andrue Kahn, Central Synagogue -Malkah Binah Klein, Community leader This episode was produced by Liya Rechtman. Zachary Davis is the host of Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large and the Editor-in-Chief of Radiant. Learn...
W. Gil Shin, "The 'Exodus' in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31): A Lukan Form of Israel's Restoration Hope" (Brill, 2022)
June 21, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesThere has been a dearth of study in Lukan scholarship on the transfiguration account and the enigmatic statement about Jesus' "exodus" in Jerusalem. Now Gil Shin has provided a model of new exodus based on the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, illuminating along the way how the motifs of Moses and David are conjoined within a larger drama of the (new) exodus and the subsequent establishment of Israel's (eschatological) worship space. Join us as we speak with Gil Shin about his recent book, The "E...
Daniel A. Klein, "Shadal on Numbers: Samuel David Luzzatto's Interpretation of the Book of Bemidbar" (Kodesh Press, 2023)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesSamuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known by his Hebrew acronym, Shadal, was the leading Italian Jewish scholar of the 19th century. Now, for the first time, an all-English version of Shadal's text translation and unabridged commentary of the book of Numbers, Bemidbar, is available through Kodesh Press. Luzzatto's work was translated and edited by Daniel A. Klein, who also offers copious explanatory notes as well as two appendices, offering translations of Shadal's poetry and letters. Tune in ...
Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesUntil fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more th...
Pinchas Blitt, "A Promise of Sweet Tea" (Azrieli Foundation, 2021)
June 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Pinchas Blitt about his Holocaust memoir A Promise of Sweet Tea (Azrieli Foundation, 2021). In a village in prewar Eastern Europe, young Pinchas is surrounded by colorful characters, vivid stories and the rich language and traditions of his ancestors. As anti-Semitism rises, Pinchas is beset by fears, but he finds belonging in family, Jewish texts and prayers. In 1939, Pinchas adapts to the new Soviet occupation, but when the Nazis arrive, his beloved village is decimated, a...
Randy Grigsby, "This Labyrinth of Darkness and Light: Henrietta Szold, the Rescue of Children from Hitler's Europe and Her Palestine Experience" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2022)
June 08, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesDrawing on Henrietta Szold's letters and diary, extensive research, and historical sources of that time in Germany and Palestine, the book is a powerful narrative and spellbinding rescue story that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspirational chapters in Jewish history. Szold was seventy-three, founder of Hadassah, the Jewish Zionist women's organization, when she was appointed to direct Youth Aliyah, and over the next decade transported over 20,000 Jewish children from Nazi E...
Randy Grigsby, "A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019)
June 06, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn October 1938, eight-year-old Josef Rosenbaum, his mother, and his younger sister set out from Germany on a cruel odyssey, fleeing into eastern Europe along with thousands of other refugees. Sent to Siberian slave labor camps in the wildernesses, they suffered brutal cold, famine, and disease. When Germany invaded Russia many refugees were forced out of Siberia to primitive tent camps in Uzbekistan, accompanied by the Polish army-in-exile previously imprisoned by the Soviets. Within weeks t...
Eliyana R. Adler and Katerina Capková, "Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesDiaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses. In Eliyana R. Adler and Katerina Capková's edited volume Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its A...
Béla Bodó, "The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921" (Routledge, 2019)
May 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust. Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, Béla Bodó's book The White Terror: Antisemitic...
Hilary Frances Aked, "Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity" (Verso, 2023)
May 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIs there such a thing as “the Israel lobby,” and how powerful is it really? Hilary Frances Aked's book Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (Verso, 2023) provides a forensically researched account of the activities of Israel's advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid. The book traces the history and changing fortunes of key actors within the British Zionist movement in the context of the Israeli government's contemporary effort...
Bart D. Ehrman, "Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)
May 28, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesA New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters. You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, int...
Jessica M. Marglin, "The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Princeton UP, 2022)
May 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing initiated a fierce lawsuit over his large estate. Before Shamama’s riches could be disbursed among his aspiring heirs, Italian courts had to decide which law to apply to his estate—a matter that depended on his nationality. Was he an Italian citizen? A subject of the Bey of Tunis? Had he become stateless? Or was his Jewishness also his nationality? Tracing a decade-lo...
Aomar Boum, "Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the forced labor camps of Algeria and Morocco, Jews and other "undesirables" faced brutal conditions and struggled to survive in an unforgiving landscape qu...
Saskia Coenen Snyder, "A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 25, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesDuring the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed,...
Avigail Rock, "Great Biblical Commentators: Biographies, Methodologies, and Contributions" (Maggid, 2023)
May 23, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe vast and vibrant world of biblical commentary has, over the generations, shaped not only our understanding of the Tanakh, but Judaism's worldview and values as well. The biblical commentator - or parshan - is a spiritual seeker, proposing answers to the theological and existential questions raised by the text and serving as mediator between Tanakh and the reader. Keenly aware of their contemporary reality, biblical exegetes search for the Torah's answers to both timeless human issues and ...
Elly Gotz, "Flights of Spirit" (Azrieli Foundation, 2018)
May 20, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesToday I talked to Elly Gotz, author of the memoir Flights of Spirit (Azrieli Foundation, 2018). Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving three years in the ghetto, where thousands from his community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' next victims. But there is no escape from the ghetto's liquidation in the summer of 1944, and Elly a...
Simon Geissbühler, ed., "Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath" (Ibidem Press, 2016)
May 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFrom summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, more than 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian...