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
Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the ...
Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps...
58 min
1002
V. Nesfield and P. Smith, "The Struggle for Und...
An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust...
47 min
1003
N. Chare and D. Williams, "Testimonies of Resis...
Chare and Williams assemble careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented-by themselves and by others-both during and after the Holocaust.,.,
50 min
1004
Rachel Manekin, "The Rebellion of the Daughters...
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over three hundred young Jewish women from Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) fled their communities and sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism...
50 min
1005
Bernice Lerner, "All the Horrors of War: A Jewi...
Lerner describes their lives – one of them her mother, the other one of the people who helped save her – and how they intersected when British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945...
42 min
1006
Karen Taliaferro, "The Possibility of Religious...
Taliaferro argues that natural law can act as a mediating tool...
80 min
1007
Jewish Architecture: A Stage for Jewish Liturgy
An interview with Steven Fine
26 min
1008
R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewis...
In this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it means to be “American”.
61 min
1009
Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memor...
The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current century. And like many popular events it is filled with mis-understandings and mis-interpretations...
31 min
1010
Alan Brill, " Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hin...
How do Judaism and Hinduism compare as religions?
34 min
1011
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
1012
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
1013
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
1014
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
1015
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
1016
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
1017
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
1018
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
1019
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
1020
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
1021
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
1022
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
1023
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
1024
John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story...
How did the Bible become the Bible? It's a long story....
59 min
1025
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