New Books in Jewish Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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Religion & Spirituality
Judaism
1001
Alan L. Mittleman, "Does Judaism Condone Violen...
How did Biblical figures such as Moses and Joshua justify brutal levels of violence against their enemies?
58 min
1002
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
1003
Kenneth Austin, "The Jews and the Reformation" ...
Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselves in opposition to each other...
37 min
1004
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
1005
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
1006
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
1007
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
1008
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
1009
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
1010
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
1011
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
1012
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
1013
John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story...
How did the Bible become the Bible? It's a long story....
59 min
1014
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
1015
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
1016
Natan M. Meir, "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" (St...
Meir reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority....
56 min
1017
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
1018
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
1019
Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and...
"The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies" is turning twenty-five...
43 min
1020
Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: T...
Jesus was Jewish? Yes, he was...and how.
65 min
1021
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
1022
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
1023
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
1024
Yitzhak Lewis, "Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman...
Lewis lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing...
52 min
1025
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