New Books in Jewish Studies

Interview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books

Religion & Spirituality
Judaism
1001
Jonathan Robker, "Balaam in Text and Tradition"...
Balaam plays a prominent role in the book of Numbers, but who was he?
27 min
1002
Rachel Werczberger, "Jews In The Age Of Authent...
Werczberger examined two Israeli communities of spiritual seekers in Israel..
47 min
1003
Jonathan Sarna, "American Judaism: A History" (...
Sarna chronicles the 350-year history of the Jewish religion in America...
53 min
1004
Mark Roseman, "Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Resc...
What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by?
62 min
1005
Evdoxios Doxiadis, "State, Nationalism, and the...
How did minorities fit into the new Greek state during the country’s transition from imperial rule to national sovereignty?
48 min
1006
Jeffrey Saks, "Agnon Library of The Toby Press"
Considered one of the greatest Hebrew writers, in 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature...
38 min
1007
Evgeny Finkel, "Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survi...
Can there be a political science of the Holocaust?
57 min
1008
Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel...
Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics...
52 min
1009
Lynn Kaye, "Time In The Babylonian Talmud: Natu...
Kaye examines how rabbis of late antiquity thought about time through their legal reasoning and storytelling, and what these insights mean for thinking about time today...
49 min
1010
Markus Zehnder, "New Studies in the Book of Isa...
Zehnder looks at the enigmatic figure of the ‘Servant of the Lord.’
30 min
1011
David Slucki, "My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers ...
Slucki’s memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century...
34 min
1012
Naftali Rothenberg, "Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy o...
Is love between man and woman the source of wisdom and the cornerstone of moral life?
45 min
1013
Liat Steir-Livny, "Remaking Holocaust Memory: D...
Steir-Livny analyzes 19 prominent films that reflect the key tendencies of third-generation Holocaust documentaries...
42 min
1014
Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Si...
For writer Sophia Shalmiyev, the question was never “who is my mother,” but rather, “where has she gone?”
37 min
1015
Lynn Downey, "Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Bl...
Nearly every consumer today is familiar with the name Levi Strauss thank to the jeans that bear his name...
50 min
1016
Miryam Sivan, "Make it Concrete" (Cuidono Press...
For twenty years, 47-year-old Isabel Toledo has been ghostwriting the stories of Holocaust survivors...
31 min
1017
Kirsten Fermaglich, "A Rosenberg by Any Other N...
Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group...
55 min
1018
Matilda Rabinowitz, "Immigrant Girl, Radical Wo...
Rabinowitz, born in 1887 in Ukraine, described her experiences as an immigrant, factory worker, single mother by choice, and union organizer...
57 min
1019
Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of...
Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism...
58 min
1020
Richard Averbeck, "Paradigm Change in Pentateuc...
For some two hundred years now, Pentateuchal scholarship has been dominated by the Documentary Hypothesis, a paradigm made popular by Julius Wellhausen...
21 min
1021
Julie Zuckerman, "The Book of Jeremiah" (Press ...
Spanning eight decades and interwoven with the Jewish experience of the 20th century, Julie Zuckerman charts Jeremiah’s life from boyhood, through service in WWII, to marriage and children, a professorship and finally retirement, with compassion, honesty, and a respect that even Gerstler himself would find touching...
23 min
1022
Jack Wertheimer, "The New American Judaism: How...
Wertheimer argues that American Jews are indeed engaging with Judaism, albeit in unique and unorthodox ways...
60 min
1023
Adriana X. Jacobs, "Strange Cocktail: Translati...
Adriana X. Jacobs offers a translation-centered reading of twentieth-century modern Hebrew poetry...
39 min
1024
Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genoci...
The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a dual role: SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front...
53 min
1025
Vivi Lachs, "Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigran...
Lachs looks at London's Yiddish popular culture...
36 min