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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1176
Mira Balberg, “Blood for Thought: The Reinventi...
Mira Balberg‘s Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2017) delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations,
52 min
1177
Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chel...
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Ce...
30 min
1178
Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competi...
The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name.
29 min
1179
Kerry Wallach, “Passing Illusions: Jewish Visib...
What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, explores these questions in her new book,
39 min
1180
Chad Alan Goldberg, “Modernity and the Jews in ...
In his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert Park mobilized ideas and ideologies about Jews to concep...
51 min
1181
Bonnie Anderson, “The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter:...
As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Pr...
45 min
1182
Motti Inbari, “Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy C...
Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism,
47 min
1183
Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidic Studies: Essays i...
Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure,
87 min
1184
Eric T. Jennings, “Escape from Vichy: The Refug...
In Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Harvard University Press, 2018), Eric T. Jennings reveals the fascinating history of the Martinique Corridor, a pathway travelled by thousands of political refugees who fled mainland Fra...
53 min
1185
Adriana M. Brodsky, “Sephardi, Jewish, Argentin...
How do immigrant populations navigate between ancestral ties and connections to their new homes? How do their plural histories create layered identities, and how do those identities change over time? Adriana M. Brodsky, Professor of History at St.
59 min
1186
Yair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: Th...
Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738,
51 min
1187
Vivian Liska, “German-Jewish Thought and Its Af...
In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as well as a Distinguish...
26 min
1188
Cynthia Baker, “Jew” (Rutgers UP, 2017)
What is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new book Jew,
67 min
1189
David Weinstein, “The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jew...
Eddie Cantor was once among the most popular performers in the United States. He was influential and innovative on stage, radio, and film from the early twentieth century though the early 1960s. He is not widely known today, however,
59 min
1190
Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spin...
Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
58 min
1191
Ian Black, “Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Je...
In Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become kn...
41 min
1192
David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princet...
Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us,
72 min
1193
Sara Hirschhorn, “City on a Hilltop: American J...
Who are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Is...
27 min
1194
Jeffrey Shandler, “Holocaust Memory in the Digi...
How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past?
53 min
1195
Alfred Ivry, “Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplex...
Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing,
63 min
1196
Leon Wiener Dow, “The Going: A Meditation on Je...
Leon Wiener Dow’s most recent work The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers readers intimate, informative, and at times provocative reflections on halakha, or Jewish law. The author makes nuanced philosophical and theolog...
49 min
1197
Benjamin R. Gampel, “Anti-Jewish Riots in the C...
Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history,
69 min
1198
Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life a...
One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small tow...
64 min
1199
Noam Zadoff, “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to J...
Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth—with his arriv...
72 min
1200
Ella Shohat, “On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and O...
Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine,
48 min