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
Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)
May 17, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1948, Israel’s founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering. Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of ...
Oded Zinger, "Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
May 11, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesLiving with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in a Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at h...
Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesThe twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaa...
Samantha Pickette, "Peak TV's Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy" (Lexington, 2022)
May 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Peak TV’s Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Pickette analyzes the ways in which contemporary American television is establishing a new version of the Jewish woman and a new take on American Jewish female identity that challenges the stereotypes of Jewish femininity proliferated on television since its inception. Using case studies of streaming, cable, and network comedy series from the past ...
Ephraim Chamiel, "To Know Torah" (2018)
May 06, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesWould you like to learn about the Pentateuch from a Jewish point of view, digging deep into the plain meaning of the Bible's stories and commandments? To Know Torah is an enlightening encounter between a contemporary interpreter and the celebrated tradition of Torah commentary throughout the ages. Tune in as we speak with Ephraim Chamiel about his five volumes, To Know Torah. Dr Ephraim Chamiel obtained his education at Midrashiat Noam, Yeshivat Kerem Beyavne and the Hebrew University. His pe...
Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)
May 03, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutesIn the race to discover real solutions for the conflicts that plague contemporary society, it is essential that we look to precedent. Many of today's conflicts involve ethno-religious tensions that modern wisdom alone is ill-equipped to resolve. In Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (Oxford UP, 2021), Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth asks us to consider ancient religious and traditional cultural solutions to such present-day issues. Roth presents thirty-six case studies featu...
Ostap Kin, "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" (HURI, 2022)
April 29, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesIn 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time fr...
Remember the Sabbath (with Senator Joe Lieberman)
April 27, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesToday I talked with Senator Joe Lieberman—who ran for Vice President in 2000 with Al Gore, and for President in 2004 in the Democratic primary—about his book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011). Senator Lieberman is a devout Jew and talks with me about the Sabbath tradition, a custom rooted in God’s day of rest at the end of creation (Genesis 2) and the Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). It is the shared practice of all Abrahamic m...
Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman, "Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus" (U Rochester Press, 2020)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourCrispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russ...
Barak S. Cohen, "For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod" (Brill, 2017)
April 21, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesIn For Out of Babylonia Shall Come Torah and the Word of the Lord from Nehar Peqod (Brill, 2017), Barak S. Cohen reevaluates the evidence in Tannaitic and Amoraic literature of an independent "Babylonian Mishnah" which originated in the proto-Talmudic period. The book focuses on an analysis of the most notable Halakhic corpora that have been identified by scholars as originating in the Tannaitic period or at the outset of the Amoraic. If indeed such an early corpus did exist, what are its cha...
Barak S. Cohen, "The Legal Methodology of Late Nehardean Sages in Sasanian Babylonia" (Brill, 2011)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBarak S. Cohen's The Legal Methodology of Late Nehardean Sages in Sasanian Babylonia (Brill, 2011) consists of a systematic analysis of the halakhic/legal methodology of fourth and fifth century Nehardean amoraim in Babylonia (as well as their identity and dating). The book uncovers various distinct characteristics present in the halakhic decision making and source interpretation, and demonstrates how certain amoraim can be characterized as portraying consistent interpretive and legal approac...
Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard (JP)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesEugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to 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 dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining ...
Joshua Berman, "Narrative Analogy in the Hebrew Bible: Battle Stories and Their Equivalent Non-battle Narratives" (Brill, 2004)
April 19, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesThe Hebrew Bible is filled with narrative doubling, which can be a challenge to interpret. Through an interdisciplinary model, Joshua Berman offers new insights into how battle reports may serve as oblique commentary and metaphors for the non-battle accounts that immediately precede them. Battle scenes are revealed to stand in metaphoric analogy with accounts of a trial, a rape, a drinking feast, and a court deliberation, among others. Join us as we speak with Joshua Berman about his book Nar...
Timothy Sean Quinn, "Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon" (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021)
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAlthough Kant considered him the greatest critic of his work, and Fichte thought him the most impressive mind of the generation, Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) has fallen into relative obscurity. Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021) draws attention to works written during the final years of Maimon's life. These essays are of particular interest: they show that even though Maimon was a self-proclaimed apiqoros grappling with the implications of Kantian phi...
Piotr M. A. Cywiński, "Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human" (Muzeum Auschwitz, 2022)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAuschwitz is perhaps the best-known memorial site in the world. Epicenter of the Nazi extermination campaign of Europe’s Jewish population, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp system also held over 400,000 inmates (Jews and Gentiles both) in unspeakable conditions. Famous survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are widely read by high-schoolers and undergraduates, but a synoptic overview of the human experience and emotions of the Auschwitz inmates has long been missing. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the...
The Future of Antisemitism: A Discussion with Dave Rich
April 15, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesFew people would describe themselves as antisemites. And yet many Jews living in Europe and the US believe that they encounter anti-semitism quite frequently – so what accounts for these different perceptions? Owen Bennett Jones discusses antisemitism with Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into our World and How You Can Change It (Backbite, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a residen...
Laura Hobson Faure, "A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France" (Indiana UP, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhile the role the United States played in France’s liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A 'Jewish Marshall Plan': The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Indiana UP, 2022), Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreli...
Helene J. Sinnreich, "The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 07, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesDuring World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters, ' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge UP, 2023) f...
Laura Arnold Leibman, "Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 05, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesAn obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family (Oxford UP, 2021) overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about he...
Andrea Hammel, "Finding Refuge: Stories of the Men, Women and Children who fFed to Wales to Escape the Nazis" (Honno Press, 2022)
April 04, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesA popular history telling the stories of people who found refuge in Wales from Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. Finding Refuge will resonate with those who have personal experience of similar situations, those looking to understand the refugee experience, young people investigating Welsh and European history and the stories of their ancestors, as well as the general history reader. These are stories of child refugees, artists and doctors. Their testimonies are harrowing and sad, but also at tim...
S. L. Wisenberg, "The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
April 04, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesToday I talked to S. L. Wisenberg about her book The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home (U Massachusetts Press, 2023). As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. In this remarkable collection of essays, she recalls chasing popularity, taking a Neiman Marcus sponsored class about fashion at age eleven. She tells funny but poignant stories about her travels in Paris, Vienna, and Poland, inclu...
Jeremy Kagan, "The Intellect and the Exodus" (Maggid, 2018)
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesDeveloping emuna, or faith in God, is extraordinarily challenging in our day. Emuna may have sat comfortably with us as we dwelt among the worshiping cultures of the ancient Near East. But several thousand years of exposure to rationally based Western cultures has transformed our consciousness, personalities, and outlook to the point that God often seems like an idea pasted incongruously onto our vision of reality. How can we achieve an emuna that is integrated, consistent with our rational c...
Andrew D. Berns, "The Land Is Mine: Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAfter their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and bu...
Ari Joskowicz, "Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2023)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023). Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world has not recognized their destruction equally. In postwar decades, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ig...
Philip Jenkins, "He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesJews and Christians alike have made Psalm 91 one of the most commonly used and cited parts of the Bible. For over two thousand years, the psalm has played a pivotal role in discussions of theology and politics, of medicine and mysticism. In He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence: The Many Lives of Psalm 91 (Oxford UP, 2022), acclaimed religion scholar Philip Jenkins illustrates how the evolving uses of Psalm 91 map developing ideas about religion and the supernatural. Depending on the er...
David Horgan, "Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West" (U Nevada Press, 2021)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHelmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West (U Nevada Press, 2021) tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, a mother (Rachel Koskin) and her daughter (Helmi). With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the Second World War to become United States citizens after seeking safe harbor in the unlikely western desert town of R...
Eric Alterman, "We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel" (Basic Book, 2022)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. In We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the chall...
Sara Koplik, "A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan" (Brill, 2015)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan (Brill, 2015) by Sara Koplik describes the situation of Jews in that country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly 1839-1952. It examines the political, economic and social conditions they faced as religious minorities. The work focuses upon harsh governmental economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s spearheaded by 'Abd al-Majid Khan Zabuli which caused the impoverishment and suffering of both the local communit...
Suzanna Eibuszyc, "Memory Is Our Home: Loss and Remembering--Three Generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s" (Ibidem, 2022)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA courageous young woman escaping Nazi Germany, with no choice other than to leave her family behind... Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc was born in Warsaw near the end of World War I, the youngest of six children. Little Roma grows up to become a striking, opinionated woman, but her life in its current form is about to change completely. The first shots in World War II are fired when Hitler and Nazi Germany invade Poland, turning all the Jews of Europe into their targets. In a decision full of reso...
Roni Mikel-Arieli, "Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948-1994)" (de Gruyter, 2022)
March 28, 2023 08:00 - 2 hoursThe lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, Roni Mikel Arieli's Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948-1994) (de Gruyter, 2022) examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives,...
Karen Baum Gordon, "The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBorn a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich. In The Last Let...
Kieron Pim, "Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth" (Granta Books, 2022)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourEndless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring th...
Max Kaiser, "Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMax Kaiser's book Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifas...
Publishing Jewish Children's Books: A Chat with Joni Sussman
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesJoni Sussman talks about her love for children's books and for everything Jewish and how she found her life's mission combining these passions as publisher of Kar-Ben, (part of Lerner Publishing Group), which is dedicated to creating great children's books related to Judaism for Jewish and non-Jewish children in North America and beyond. Now publishing over 20 titles a year, Joni shows us several of her upcoming books and gives excellent tips for writers who wish to submit picture book manusc...
Simon Parkin, "The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp" (Scribner, 2022)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp (Scribner, 2022 is the “riveting…truly shocking” (The New York Times Book Review) story of a Jewish orphan who fled Nazi Germany for London, only to be arrested and sent to a British internment camp for suspected foreign agents on the Isle of Man, alongside a renowned group of refugee musicians, intellectuals, artists, and—possibly—genuine spies. Following the events of Kri...
Ellin Bessner, "Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II" (New Jewish Press, 2018)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesToday I talked to Ellin Bessner about her book Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, 2018). "He died so Jewry should suffer no more." These words on a Canadian Jewish soldier's tombstone in Normandy inspired the author to explore the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort. As PM Mackenzie King wrote in 1947, Jewish servicemen faced a "double threat" - they were not only fighting against Fascism but for Jewish survival. At the same time, they encounte...
Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)
March 18, 2023 04:00 - 1 hourSuperman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World Wa...
Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the revolutionary tradition from - and against - which legendary anarchist feminist Emma Goldman sprung. Goldman refused...
Philip W. Blood, "Birds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland" (Ibidem Press, 2021)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBirds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland (Ibidem Press, 2021) is a microhistory of the Nazi occupation of Białowieźa Forest, Poland’s national park. The narrative stretches from Göring’s palatial lifestyle to the common soldier on the ground killing Jews, partisans, and civilians. Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geograp...
Omer Bartov, "The Butterfly and the Axe" (Amsterdam Publishers, 2023)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSpring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers? Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives. Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories, testimonies, diaries, letters and confessions, The Butterfly and the Axe (Amsterdam Publishers, 2...
The Sobibor and Treblinka Death Camps: A Discussion with Chris Webb
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to historian Chris Web about two books detailing the workings of the Nazi extermination camps: Chris Webb, The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2017) Chris Webb and Michael Chocholaty, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2021) You can hear Webb discuss his work on the Belzec Death Camp here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium membe...
Sharon Shalom, "From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Ethiopian Jews" (Gefen Books, 2016)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesSome two thousand years ago, a group of Jews settled in Ethiopia and was for millennia cut off from the rest of world Jewry, preserving its heritage with great self-sacrifice. When this community, the Beta Israel, ultimately made its way to Israel to rejoin its brethren in the late twentieth century, a host of complex dilemmas emerged. Should the Beta Israel shed its venerated customs, based on ancient, pre-rabbinic Jewish law, and adopt the rabbinic halakhah of modern-day Jewry? Or is there ...
Kiril Feferman, "If We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIf We Had Wings We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction 1941-42 (Academic Studies Press, 2020) is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters,...
On Chaim Grade’s "The Yeshiva"
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourChaim Grade’s novel, Tsemakh Atlas: Der Yeshivah, was originally published in Yiddish in the late 1960s. Considered a landmark of modern Yiddish literature, the novel now known as The Yeshiva, captures the inner life of the pre-Holocaust Lithuanian yeshiva tradition, with protagonists who are steeped in the pietistic Musar movement and tormented by religious doubt. Yehudah DovBer Zirkind is a research fellow at the Herzog Institute for the Study of Hasidism and a graduate student of Yiddish l...
Jordan Gorfinkel, "The Koren Tanakh Graphic Novel: Esther" (Koren, 2023)
March 04, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesThe Koren Tanakh Graphic Novel: Esther (Koren, 2023) contains the complete unabridged Hebrew text of Megillat Esther, and is suitable for use on Purim and for year-round study and enjoyment. Recommended for adults and older youth. The creative team of writer/producer Jordan B. Gorfinkel and Israeli illustrator Yael Nathan fully immerses you in the vivid world of Shushan, royal court of Ancient Persia. Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Ling...
Reuven Mohl, "Faith Fulfilled: Megillat Esther and Ma'ariv Evening Service for Purim" (Urim Publications, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesFaith Fulfilled: Megillat Esther and Ma'ariv Evening Service for Purim (Urim Publications, 2022) presents selections of the writings of Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, one of the major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, as a new and meaningful commentary for the Megillah and Ma'ariv Service. The Purim holiday experience will be enriched with the reading of the Purim story along with Rabbi Berkovits' insightful and refreshing ideas that address crucial topics for the modern era. Matthew M...
Francine Lazarus, "A Hidden Jewish Child from Belgium: Survival, Scars and Healing" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2017)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFrancine Lazarus survived WWII in Belgium hidden with strangers, isolated from her family, and moved from place to place. She witnessed murder and was often injured herself. With her father murdered in Auschwitz, her story continues post-war with the young Francine, neglected and abused by her family, being sent into foster care. At 13 she was sent to work and forced to abandon education. Like most child Survivors, she was told to forget about her war experiences. After an involuntary migrati...
Measure for Measure Episode 2: Olives
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 21 minutesJews are ritually obligated to eat matzah during Passover. But how much matzah? Well, that depends on your views on the size of an olive. This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman. Special thanks to Rabbi Natan Slifkin, founder of RationalistJudaism.com for his work on olives and biblical measurements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
Kenneth R. Stow, "Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions" (Yale UP, 2016)
February 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Kenneth R. Stow about his book Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2016). After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793...
Ron Hirschbein and Amin Asfari, "Jews and Muslims in the White Supremacist Conspiratorial Imagination" (Routledge, 2023)
February 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSupremacists imagine that Jews and Muslims secretly strive to replace white, European civilization with an unspeakable tyranny. The authors, a Jew and a Muslim, analyze the nature of the conspiracism that targets their communities. They historicize the supremacist conspiratorial imagination, narrating the paranoia on a continuum, from modernity to the postmodern. They begin with the texts of modernity, following them through to the dark areas of the Internet and examining their violent denoue...