New Books in Jewish Studies

Interview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books

Religion & Spirituality
Judaism
876
Karen E. H. Skinazi, "Women of Valor: Orthodox ...
Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves...
58 min
877
Aaron Koller, "Unbinding Isaac: The Significanc...
Koller provides a compelling contemporary perspective on one of the Bible's most famous and difficult texts, the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac...
57 min
878
Matthew Thiessen, "Jesus and the Forces of Deat...
Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel writers depict Jesus opposing ritual impurity itself, not the Jewish ritual purity system or the Jewish law...
34 min
879
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, "Off the Derech:...
This book combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenomenon of ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their insular communities and venture into the wider world.,,
39 min
880
Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocr...
The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the state of Israel...
49 min
881
T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecut...
In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds....
62 min
882
Assaf Gavron, "The Hilltop" (Scribner, 2015)
On a rocky hilltop stands Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a fledgling outpost of Jewish settlers in the West Bank...
50 min
883
Tamar Herzig, "A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, an...
Salomone da Sesso, was so good at his job that he was a verifiable celebrity. He had a very complex relationship with, and occasionally ran afoul of, his fellow Jews, so much so that he is charged with sodomy (amongst other things) and coverts to Christianity....
61 min
884
Yehoshua November, "Two Worlds Exist" (Orison B...
Yehoshua November's second poetry collection, Two Worlds Exist (Orison Books), movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary America...
53 min
885
John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story...
How did the Bible become the Bible? It's a long story....
59 min
886
Rafael Medoff, "The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Fra...
Roosevelt could have bombed the camps and saved Jews. Why didn't he? It's a hard question....
58 min
887
Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Sto...
"The Perfect Fascist" pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall...
60 min
888
Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The G...
A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa....
72 min
889
Natan M. Meir, "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" (St...
Meir reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority....
56 min
890
Alice Connor, "Fierce: Women of the Bible and T...
Women in the Bible aren't shy or retiring; they're fierce and funny and demanding and relevant to 21st-century people...
75 min
891
Marion Kaplan, "Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope ...
Kaplan describes the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler’s regime and then lived in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad...
49 min
892
Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and...
"The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies" is turning twenty-five...
43 min
893
Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: T...
Jesus was Jewish? Yes, he was...and how.
65 min
894
A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polym...
On May 20th, Eisler was arrested and spent the next fifteen months in Dachau and Buchenwald...
40 min
895
Shneur Zalman Newfield, "Degrees of Separation:...
Newfield presents a comprehensive portrait of the prolonged state of being “in-between” that characterizes transition out of a totalizing worldview...
61 min
896
Adam Brown, "Judging 'Privileged' Jews: Holocau...
Brown engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature...
68 min
897
Yitzhak Lewis, "Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman...
Lewis lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing...
52 min
898
Mara Benjamin, "The Obligated Self: Maternal Su...
Benjamin contends that the physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful but largely unexplored terrain for feminists...
74 min
899
David Slucki et al., "Laughter After: Humor and...
This book examines what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust...
69 min
900
Gabriel Finder, "Justice behind the Iron Curtai...
Finder and Prusin offer comprehensive account of the trials of Nazi perpetrators conducted in liberated and postwar Poland....
80 min