In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek,

In her most recent book, Holocaust: An American Understanding (Rutgers University Press), Deborah Lipstadt reviews and analyzes the emergence of Holocaust scholarship in the academy, and Holocaust consciousness in the American public,

In Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examines the complex histories of Jewish cultural patronage in...

What is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects.

In Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016), Rabbi Mark Glickman, of Temple Bnai Tikvah in Calgary, examines the massive theft of Jewish books by the Nazis. He offers a compelling account of the history of J...

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience....

Part detective story, part travelogue, Noah Lederman decided to write A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for his Family’s Holocaust Secrets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) to find answers to the questions he had since childhood about his grandparents e...

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Pacific West is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history. As the United States waged war against fascism, it removed tens of thousands of American citizens and their families from the...

As described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as deficient, profoundly connected to centuries of religious and cultural history yet marketed superficially,

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University,

On today’s program we will be speaking with David W. Stowe about his recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Song of Exile weaves together the 2,500-year history of one of the most famous psalms in ...

In White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (MIT Press, 2015), Sharon Rotbard, Senior Lecturer in the Architecture Department at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, examines the dual histories of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity,

Much of the existing literature on Mandatory Palestine adheres to a dual society model which assumes that the Palestinian Arab community and the Jewish Yishuv had separate economic, social, and cultural systems,

In Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016) Devin Naar delves deep into the archives to produce this intimate and exciting portrait of Salonica’s Jewish community between the late 19th century unti...

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah.

In The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), Bryan K. Roby, fellow at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, traces the early history of Mizrahi struggle f...

In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and w...

In The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community (New York University Press, 2016), Jeffrey Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, returns to the neighborhood he studied in his first sch...

In this lively memoir, We’re In America Now: A Survivor’s Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2016), Fred Amram offers a series of stories documenting his childhood in 1930s Germany through his coming-of-age in New York City,

In Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan, 2013), Alisa Solomon, Director of the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism,

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust,

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Se...

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to I...