New Books in Jewish Studies

Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements. During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of material assistance and propaganda. The defendants and their supporters in Nazi Germany were able to rely on an extensive network that had been established in the early 1920s to combat “Judaeo-Bolshevism.” This conspiratorial “Antisemitic International” united German völkisch circles, Italian fascists, Russian monarchists, and French conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the plaintiffs actively sought to expose the “Protocols” as a forgery in the hope that this would counteract their impact. In this lecture, Michael Hagemeister will use the Bern trial as a case study of Jewish legal self-defense in order to shed light on both the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the concerted efforts against the “Antisemitic International” in the 1930s, which have received little attention from historians. Read more about Michael Hagemeister's research on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This lecture originally took place on April 10, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish schools with strong ties to Jewish socialism and the labor movement, Hebraist schools promoting political and cultural Zionism, and religious schools that retained--or innovated upon--traditionalist educational models reflected different opinions for what Jewish children in interwar Poland would need in the present to secure their future. In this lecture, Elena Hoffenberg draws upon materials held by YIVO to explore how projections about the future in terms of work, culture, and politics guided parents, educational activists, and young people themselves. Choices as reflections of competing political and religious commitments, as well as material constraints, to better understand what Polish Jews expected for their individual and communal futures. This lecture originally took place on March 2, 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Once upon a time, or so we've been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met. Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors. Nothing is value-free. In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics. Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics. This episode originally aired on 8/12/2019 and was republished on 8/28/2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire. Although we lack transcriptions of melodies or lyrics from before the end of the 19th century, a comparative study of documentation collected from then until the middle of the 20th century reveals that older layers of this musical-poetic creativity had been preserved over long periods of time. I refer to this older repertoire as the "musical pripetshik." Similar to the traditional combined home-heat-generating cooking oven known as the pripetshik, this old song repertoire was an integral part of Jewish culture, evolving in meaning and function over time. While for many, the image of the pripetshik corresponds to the nostalgic song by Mark Varshavski of 1901, this lecture will explore the earlier history of this and other poetic and musical images to offer an appreciation of their significance. This lecture originally took place on July 23, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archives, and regulating interpretation. Tracing a trajectory from the Letter of Aristeas to Jerome's De viris illustribus, this Element shows how citation, collection, cataloguing, and textual ordering made traditions appear authoritative. Examining Aristeas, Josephus, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius, and Jerome, it argues that apologetics is best understood as a form of curatorial power through which ancient communities learned to think with books. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Sabrina Inowlocki is a Senior Research Fellow Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (IRCI) at the Australian Catholic University. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Tune in to this interview about Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale UP, 2026). Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. with honors in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago. Her research operates at the intersection of biblical philology, poetics, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its own Terms (Routledge 2019), Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026), as well as the co-author of Hebrew Funerary Inscriptions from Iron Age Judah (Society of Biblical Literature Press, forthcoming). Her current major projects include a commentary on Ecclesiastes for the Old Testament Library series (Westminster John Knox Press), and serving as Project Director for an NEH-funded international collaboration investigating the institutional history and anti-Jewish scaffolding of modern biblical criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO's Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context. Elżbieta Janicka focuses on the case of the former German Nazi death camp Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries, the majority from Poland. While keeping in mind that “Treblinka” is as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station at Treblinka the village, Janicka examines symbolic topography, such as the symbols and narratives that are imprinted into these sites under the auspices of the Treblinka Museum. Regarding the unrestricted Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable for Poland, Janicka raises the question: Why doesn't the present Polish strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation? Janicka argues that while Polish cultural institutions do not deny the Holocaust itself, they practice a form of denialism by obscuring the reality of Polish involvement in the Holocaust. This lecture fits into a broader debate about Polish public institutions that promote a counter-history of the Holocaust and have at their disposal extraordinary means of propaganda both within Poland and abroad. This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.  In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm's ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm's entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish. Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman. This lecture originally took place on December 21, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

How do you build bridges after living through one of history's greatest ruptures? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Shimon Redlich to discuss his memoir Bridge Builder: My Life Since the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2026), the concluding volume of his remarkable four-part autobiographical journey. Picking up in the late 1950s, Bridge Builder follows Redlich from his years as a student in Jerusalem and the United States to his distinguished career as a professor at Ben-Gurion University. Along the way, he reflects on friendships that crossed religious and national boundaries, his encounters with Jews and non-Jews across Eastern Europe, and his willingness to engage difficult historical and political questions with honesty and empathy. More than a memoir, the book is a meditation on memory, reconciliation, and intellectual curiosity. Drawing on both personal recollection and meticulous historical research, Redlich explores what it means to carry the legacy of the Holocaust while refusing to let it become the only lens through which to view the world. His story is one of survival, but also of dialogue, scholarship, and the lifelong work of building understanding across divides. Together, Redlich and Katz discuss the relationship between memory and history, the challenges of confronting painful pasts, and why bridge-building remains one of the most important—and difficult—tasks of our time. About our contributors: Shimon Redlich, a child survivor of the Holocaust, was born in Lwow in 1935 and lived in nearby Brzezany until 1945, when he was repatriated to Lodz. He left Poland for Israel in 1950. He studied at the Hebrew University, Harvard, and New York University. He taught history at Ben-Gurion University for almost forty years. Redlich has written numerous books and articles on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe and his memoirs, of which this book is the fourth and final volume. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid and the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer. Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman, together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion. The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq; the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct Judeo-Arabic dialect. Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948, Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory. Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.  Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence rather than inherited assumption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Are we currently experiencing a Yiddish renaissance? This is one of the questions we are often asked at YIVO. YIVO's own community of Yiddish learners has expanded more than 10-fold in the last two years. Duolingo has added Yiddish as a language. Headline after headline touts Yiddish as unexpectedly alive and well. What does this all mean for Yiddish in the 21st century? Join YIVO for a conversation about the Yiddish world today. Led by YIVO's Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, this program will feature journalist and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen, scholar and In Geveb Editor-in-chief Jessica Kirzane, scholar and Yiddish podcast founder and host Sandra Fox, and YIVO's Director of Education Ben Kaplan. This panel discussion originally took place on June 1, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

A leading historian's revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the United States—from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today—showing that it has long served as a frontline in our wars over freedom of speech and the nature of American liberalism Few issues are as vexed today as antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena—college campuses, congressional hearings, immigration courtrooms, social media platforms—where we are not polarized over what counts as antisemitism, which speech is protected by the First Amendment, and what the law should do about hatred. At a time of political crisis, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession. None of this is new. In a sweeping history of ideas and law, James Loeffler recovers the forgotten roots of our contemporary turmoil. From two antisemitic riots in postwar Chicago to a neo-Nazi march in 1970s Skokie, Illinois, and the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in our own time, Loeffler explores the ways in which America's courts have grappled with hatred, freedom, and the tensions at the heart of liberal democracy: Are some hatreds more dangerous than others? Is tolerating hate speech the price we must pay for free speech? And can liberalism ever make good on its promise to end hatred through law? Confronting these questions, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America (Metropolitan Books, 2026) restores a missing history of hate speech, antisemitism, and the law, one that points to how we might protect difference without surrendering our principles of equality and freedom. James Loeffler is an award-winning historian, and Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Previously he taught at the University of Virginia and served as Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Currently a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong. By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive. Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.  Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In this New Books Network interview, Professor Željko Stanojević speaks with Professor Yigal Levin of Bar-Ilan University about his new book, The Chronicles of David and Solomon: 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 9: A New Translation and Commentary, published by Bloomsbury. The conversation explores what is new in Levin's translation and commentary, how the Book of Chronicles reshapes the stories of David and Solomon, and why Jerusalem, the Temple, the priesthood, the Levites, geography, political memory, and the idea of “all Israel” are central to the Chronicler's message. The book offers a new English translation and detailed commentary on 1 Chronicles 10 through 2 Chronicles 9. It is part of a planned multi-volume commentary. It begins with the death of Saul and follows the Chronicler's account of David's rise to power, the establishment of Jerusalem, the transfer of the Ark, the divine promise concerning David's dynasty, preparations for the Temple, Solomon's accession, and the construction and dedication of the Jerusalem Temple. Levin shows that Chronicles does far more than repeat Samuel and Kings. The Chronicler selects, reorganises, expands, and omits earlier material to create a distinctive interpretation of Israel's past. David is presented above all as the king who prepares Jerusalem, worship, personnel, materials, and institutions for the future Temple, while Solomon completes that project by building and dedicating the Temple. The volume also examines priests, Levites, musicians, gatekeepers, officials, military groups, tribes, cities, territories, genealogies, and neighbouring peoples. These details are essential for understanding how the Chronicler imagined Israel's unity, institutions, memory, and identity. Levin combines Biblical Hebrew, textual comparison, historical geography, archaeology, genealogy, literary analysis, and the history of ancient Israel. The commentary is especially valuable for scholars and students of Chronicles, David and Solomon, the Jerusalem Temple, biblical historiography, Persian-period Yehud, Biblical Hebrew, biblical archaeology, and ancient Israelite history. Professor Yigal Levin is an Israeli historian and biblical scholar at Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses on the history of ancient Israel, the Book of Chronicles, historical geography, biblical archaeology, biblical historiography, genealogies and tribal identity, Persian-period Yehud, and the relationship between biblical texts, geography, archaeology, and history. He is also Director of the Rivlin Institute for the History of the Land of Israel and its Settlement. Professor Levin is a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal, an international, peer-reviewed, Diamond Open Access journal published by the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade. The journal publishes research in Hebrew language, Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, Jewish Studies, Semitic linguistics, philology, textual criticism, biblical archaeology, ancient Israelite history, Hebrew literature, manuscript studies, translation, lexicography, and related fields. EHJ does not charge authors submission or publication fees. Professor Levin has also been announced as a speaker at the international online conference New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies, to be held on 6–8 November 2026. The conference brings together scholars from biblical studies, Hebrew studies, theology, archaeology, Jewish Studies, history, and related disciplines. The interview is hosted by Professor Željko Stanojević, President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, and European Hebrew Journal, and a New Books Network host for Biblical Studies.European Hebrew Journal Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature: Conference: New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies, An International Online Conference Supporting the Diamond Open Access Mission of the European Hebrew Journal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Drawing from some four hundred Yiddish-language interviews conducted by the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories project, Jeffrey Veidlinger will explore how elderly Yiddish speakers in Ukraine described their memories of Jewish life in the Soviet shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. This exploration will help us understand how despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, these interviews infused with memories of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life, even within the shadow of the shtetl. This lecture originally took place on July 1, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Max Weber's Studies of Ancient Judaism: The Historical Foundation for a Theory of the Modern Age (Mohr Siebeck, 2002) Eckart Otto provides a history of Max Weber's work on the cultural history of ancient Judaism, a subject on which Weber spent more than 10 years. He shows how closely these studies are linked not only to theology and Jewish studies, jurisprudence and economics, the science of history and philosophy but also to the contemporary discussions surrounding the historico-cultural significance of Judaism for the »spirit of capitalism« and the chances for Judaism to preserve its identity in the conflict between assimilation and Zionism. This conversation is a companion to Željko Stanojević's interview with Eckart Otto about Deuteronomy in the Pentateuch and the Hexateuch: Studies of the Literary History of the Pentateuch and the Hexateuch within the Framework of Deuteronomy. Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Eckart Otto is a highly distinguished German theologian, biblical scholar, and internationally recognised authority on Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, biblical law, the Hebrew Bible, and the legal traditions of the ancient Near East. He is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Hebrew Bible at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Professor Eckart Otto is also a prominent member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal, published by the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, Serbia. This interview is hosted by Professor Željko Stanojević, a Serbian-Israeli Hebrew linguist, biblical philologist, lexicographer, translator, and researcher in Semitic languages. He is President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, and a host on the New Books Network. European Hebrew Journal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Deuteronomy in the Pentateuch and the Hexateuch: Studies of the Literary History of the Pentateuch and the Hexateuch within the Framework of Deuteronomy (Mohr Siebeck, 2000; unrevised e-book edition, 2019), Eckart Otto contributes to the study of Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, the Hexateuch. The book argues that both the Hexateuch and the Pentateuch developed ideas already articulated in the Deuteronomistic form of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy therefore appears not simply as one component of the Pentateuch, but as a central point of departure for understanding the formation of larger compositions. Otto places Deuteronomy at the centre of the literary history of ancient Israel. Rather than treating Deuteronomy, the Priestly Writing, Joshua, and Pentateuchal traditions as isolated units, he reconstructs the processes through which these texts were connected, revised, and reinterpreted. The combination of the Priestly Writing with Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic Book of Joshua produced a Hexateuchal composition extending from Genesis through Joshua. A later Pentateuchal redaction separated the Torah from Joshua and placed Deuteronomy's covenant at Horeb at its centre. The Hexateuch reaches its narrative conclusion with Israel's arrival in the promised land, while the Pentateuch ends with Moses and Israel still outside the land. This makes Torah and covenant, rather than possession of the land, central to Israel's identity. Otto also argues that Hexateuchal and Pentateuchal redactors did not merely use a completed Deuteronomy; they reshaped Deuteronomy itself to serve their conceptions of covenant, law, land, and Israel's relationship with God. Deuteronomy contributed to the emergence of the Hexateuch and Pentateuch, but the later redactions of these larger works also transformed Deuteronomy. Otto connects these literary developments with conflicts among priestly groups in the Persian period and with debates over priesthood, law, authority, identity, and inherited traditions. Through this approach, Otto challenges the traditional separation between Pentateuchal and Deuteronomic research. His study also has implications for the hypothesis of a “Deuteronomistic History,” inviting scholars to reconsider the relationship between Deuteronomy, Joshua, the historical books, the Priestly Writing, and the final form of the Torah. It also contributes to discussions of biblical historiography, authoritative scripture, law and narrative, and the Torah's emergence as Judaism's foundational text. In this New Books Network interview, Professor Otto explains the book's central arguments in his own words. The conversation addresses the relationship between Pentateuch and Hexateuch, the integration of Priestly and Deuteronomistic traditions, the role of Joshua, the covenant at Horeb, and the priestly conflicts that shaped the Torah in the Persian period. This conversation is a companion to Željko Stanojević's interview with Eckart Otto about Max Weber's Studies of Ancient Judaism: The Historical Foundation for a Theory of the Modern Age. Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Eckart Otto is a distinguished German theologian and biblical scholar, known for his work on Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, biblical law, the Hebrew Bible, and ancient Near Eastern legal traditions. He is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Hebrew Bible at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. This interview is hosted by Professor Željko Stanojević, a Serbian-Israeli Hebraist, biblical philologist, lexicographer, translator, and Semitic-language researcher. He is President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, and a host on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction. In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust. Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler. Buy the book: here This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What does it really mean to go "beyond the letter of the law"? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with scholar Deborah Barer to discuss her book Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud, which offers a surprising new interpretation of one of the Talmud's most enduring ethical concepts: lifnim mi-shurat ha-din. For generations, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din has been understood to mean acting "beyond the letter of the law"—choosing generosity or compassion over strict legal obligation. Barer challenges that assumption. Through a close reading of classical rabbinic texts, she argues that the Talmud originally used the phrase not to describe a particular kind of moral act, but a particular way of making decisions. Rather than rigidly following established rules, rabbis sometimes improvised, departing from expected patterns in pursuit of the right outcome for a unique case. By tracing how this idea developed from in the Talmud, Barer uncovers how one phrase evolved into a cornerstone of Jewish ethical thought. Her work invites readers to rethink the relationship between law and morality, showing that creativity and flexibility have always been part of the rabbinic legal tradition. Together, Barer and Katz explore why improvisation matters in Jewish law, how the Talmud balances consistency with compassion, and what this ancient model of decision-making can teach us about navigating difficult moral questions today. Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, with an emphasis on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She served as the editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning. Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026) tells the compelling story of the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group (JBG), a five-thousand-strong military unit, recruited primarily from the Jewish population of Palestine, and the only exclusively Jewish military unit to fight under the British flag during the Second World War. Gianluca Fantoni reconstructs the military and human experience of the brigade in Italy and investigates its enduring and controversial place in memory and public debate. Formed in 1944, the JBG saw combat in the final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with distinction against German forces. After the war, many of its members – who often had little or no military training, and included artists, scientists, and farmers – engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork for the future Israeli state. Others sought retribution against Nazis and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and the desire for justice. Far more than a conventional military history, Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers is both a critical study of the political uses of history and a vivid, passionate narrative that brings to life the men and women of the brigade. Accessible and engaging, this book offers readers a rare lens through which to understand the intersections of war, memory, and politics in twentieth-century Europe. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman about his book Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become? (Jewish Publication Society, 2023), the 2023 National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. His work has consistently addressed what constitutes Jewish peoplehood across a landscape of internal difference. Hartman's central argument distinguishes between the Genesis covenant and the Exodus covenant. The Genesis covenant is a covenant of belonging: membership in the Jewish people that obtains by birth or by formal entry into the community, independent of belief or practice. The Exodus covenant, by contrast, is a covenant of aspiration, calling the people toward holiness, ethical development, and spiritual growth. Where the first establishes identity, the second establishes obligation. In our discussion, Hartman emphasized that the Genesis covenant requires each community, and each individual, to relinquish the presumption of controlling a singular, authoritative account of the Jewish story. Read together, the two covenants do not divide the Jewish people into separate camps so much as describe the full shape of Jewish belonging: one covenant that secures the people as a people, and a second that gives that peoplehood its ongoing direction and purpose. Jewishness, on this account, transcends denominational boundaries—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, and otherwise—even as each tradition supplies its own particular mode of enacting the Exodus covenant's demand for growth. Hartman situated this framework within a longer pattern in Jewish intellectual history: the recurring effort to locate an essential core beneath the full body of commandments, exemplified by Hillel's reduction of the Torah to a single ethical principle. This tendency toward distillation, he argued, helps explain how communities as historically and culturally distinct as Yemenite, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and secular Israeli Jews continue to recognize one another as belonging to a single people, notwithstanding significant divergence in practice. Shared calendar and shared collective memory, in his formulation, do more to sustain peoplehood than uniformity of observance. The conversation turned to the relationship between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. Hartman located Zionism itself within the Genesis covenant: attachment to the Jewish people's return to and sovereignty in the land of Israel is, on his account, a constitutive part of Jewish family and belonging, not a separate or optional commitment layered on top of it. Hartman further addressed the changing status of intermarriage, noting a shift from its historical treatment as a violation of the Genesis covenant toward broader acceptance, particularly in Diaspora communities. He observed that a substantial proportion of Jewish spouses in intermarriages maintain Jewish identity, practice, and communal affiliation, complicating any straightforward inference from rising intermarriage rates to communal decline. Jewish continuity, on this account, is proving more resilient, and more complex, than earlier demographic anxieties assumed. The conversation closed on the question of how Exodus Judaism—a Judaism oriented toward aspiration, self-criticism, and moral striving—can be sustained in a period marked by contested facts and by the anti-Zionism as antisemitism seen around the world. Hartman offered no definitive resolution, but argued for the continued value of engaging the argument itself: treating the Genesis covenant as the foundation that preserves collective belonging, and the Exodus covenant as the ongoing rationale for what that belonging is for. As we continue the discussion to find common ground and appreciation of the greater Jewish story, follow Jewish Tapestry for engaging talks on Jewish heritage communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Light of Learning (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War I, as secularism spread, Hasidic leaders rapidly reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of world-renowned yeshivas, Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and eventually underground yeshiva bunkers during the Holocaust. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour. Join YIVO for a presentation on this book with author Glenn Dynner along with performances of Hasidic nigunim by Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics. Buy the book: here This lecture and performance originally took place on March 13, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system? To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon. Mentioned in the episode Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass) Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...) Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980) Tony Judt Postwar (2005) Recallable Books: Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810) Read a transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Hannah Pollin-Galay uses cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation to explore Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Join YIVO for a discussion with Pollin-Galay about this new book, led by historian Samuel Kassow. Buy the book: here This book talk originally took place on December 2, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Bring the breadth of Jewish history and civilization into your classroom with ready-to-use teaching modules curated by experts. The Posen Library is an educational resource grounded in primary sources and made broadly accessible through the creation and curation of engaging contextual material. Its goal is to highlight the varieties of Jewish culture and civilization across time and space for English-speaking audiences and to be the first stop for those, in university settings and beyond, who are interested in teaching about the significant breadth of Jewish experiences. Originally conceived as a 10-volume print anthology, the Posen Library's free digital platform makes the published content globally accessible. Content from print volumes is added to the site as the volumes are published by Yale University Press. Nine out of the ten volumes have been published to date. The Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative comprises teaching modules centered around core teaching topics. Each module consists of an overview and curricular material that can be used in four class meetings, focusing on 20–25 primary sources (texts, images, and other media) with interpretive content and supplementary resources for both students and instructors. Posen Library curricula offer flexibility and are designed to be easily integrated into coursework in a variety of ways—perfect for launching a new class or refreshing a syllabus to include new perspectives and voices. Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles. Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the Senior Scholar for Pedagogy at the Posen Library. Geraldine Gudefin is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore. Mentioned in this episode: Posen Library Teaching modules: here Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative Fellowship: here Sarah Bunin Benor's “Jewish Culture around the world” Module: here Lila Corwin Berman's “Who Is American? Citizenship, Law, and Jewish History in the United States” Module: here Geraldine Gudefin's “Jewish Emancipation, Citizenship, and Belonging” Module: here Geoffrey Levin's “Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: Empire, Colonialism, and Identity” Module: here Karen E. H. Skinazi's “Sephardic Journeys: Literature, Memory, and Jewish Culture” Module: here Jewish Language Project: here Jewish Cultures on the Map: here Jewish English Lexicon: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the mid-1930s a group of New York Yiddishist intellectuals established the Central Jewish Library and Press Archive, whose collections became the nucleus of the YIVO Library when the Institute relocated from Vilna to New York in 1940. Over the succeeding decades, the Library grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to the dedication of its librarians and supporters. It emerged as a “collection of collections,” absorbing the extensive personal libraries of prominent Yiddish writers, scholars, and book collectors. Crucially, after 1945 the Library also recovered large portions of the Vilna YIVO's prewar holdings along with thousands of rabbinic works from Vilna's Strashun Library. Throughout its history, the YIVO Library has been a beehive of scholarship and bibliography, which has been fostered by such outstanding figures as Mendl Elkin and Dina Abramowicz. In this presentation, Zachary M. Baker will offer some personal reflections on the legacy that the YIVO Library's founders and builders have left behind. View the bibliography for this talk: here This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel's society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel's society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene is a distinguished international scholar closely associated with the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ), an international double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal. Dr. Greene serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. In addition to contributing to the supervision of the scholarly quality of submitted articles, the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, the journal's publisher, has released an official academic interview with him as part of its series of scholarly conversations. His publication and interview, entitled “Scribes, Scripts, and State Formation in Ancient Israel,” were produced in collaboration with Željko Stanojević, the journal's Managing Editor. About Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene Dr. Greene is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the prestigious University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. His principal areas of scholarly expertise and the fields he represents within the journal include: Biblical Hebrew and Philology: The study of the historical development and linguistic structure of ancient Hebrew. Northwest Semitic Languages and Epigraphy: The analysis of ancient inscriptions on stone, clay, and other materials from the Levant. Palaeography: The historical development of ancient scripts and manuscript traditions. The Formation of the Ancient Israelite State: Anthropological and sociological approaches to the emergence of institutions during the Iron Age, with particular attention to the role of scribes in the formation of biblical texts, including the Deuteronomistic History. In his research, Dr. Greene also employs modern digital technologies, including advanced Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to analyse damaged ancient inscriptions and reconstruct patterns of literacy in the Iron Age Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Jacob: Conflicted Twin, Aggrieved Patriarch (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2025), George Savran brings his narrative interpretive approach to look closely at Jacob's shifting identity. Jacob is indelibly linked to his brother Esau in the Genesis narrative, and their complex relationship as twins foregrounds this problematic connection. Jacob's lineage is examined-he differs noticeably from his ancestors and his offspring in the complexity of his changing character. At times he is a "simple man" at the mercy of the demands of others; elsewhere he is a devious trickster eager to use his wits to achieve personal success. His search for a coherent identity, as it unfolds in this study, leads to his emergence as the patriarch of his family, compelled to make peace with his brother and his sons in the midst of ongoing conflict. This study brings out how Jacob's mature identity is clarified further by his reactions to three unusual and unexpected encounters which shed light on his ability to recalibrate his self-understanding. The first is his struggle with the man/angel at the Jabbok, where he receives a blessing with the name Israel, and comes to realize that his relationship to God is more complicated (and less predictable) than he had previously thought. An additional insight comes the following day during his reunion with Esau, as he learns to appreciate him in a new way and compares beholding his face to "seeing the face of God". This is a remarkable admission by a brother who thought only the worst of his twin. Jacob's rethinking his own self-importance emerges later in the Joseph story, when he is compelled to realizes that his insistence on his personal concerns will lead to the dissolution of his family. Savran's interpretation of these reactions underscores their significance in Jacob's development, revealing a character of depth and resilience and giving new meaning to his role as the avatar of Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When Jews plunged into the world of politics en masse at the beginning of the 20th century, a variety of new options were available to them. Two of the leading figures who proffered novel, but opposing political avenues to the Jewish masses were Dr. Chaim Zhitlowsky and Leon Trotsky. Zhitlowsky, a founder of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party, offered a synthesis of socialism and Yiddish nationalism. Trotsky, a leading Russian Social Democrat, formulated a strict version of internationalism that left no room for Jewish national aspirations. Many Jews, however, did not view their political choices in such stark terms. Instead, they saw both men as leaders and thinkers who pointed the way to Jewish national liberation and working-class revolution, a Jewish homeland, as well as a flourishing life in the diaspora. In this lecture, Tony Michels will explore the political ideas of Trotsky and Zhitlowsky, and how Jews engaged with them during the first half of the 20th century. This program is the first in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO's current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world's most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States. This lecture originally took place on April 28, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton UP, 2025) is a critical look at the difficulties women face in the field of Jewish studies, drawing on quantitative data, personal stories, and the gendered history of the field. The field of Jewish studies has expanded significantly in recent years, with increasing numbers of women entering the field. These scholars have brought new perspectives from studies of women, gender, and sexuality. Yet they have also faced institutional and individual obstacles. In this book, Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff examine the place of women and nonbinary people in Jewish studies, arguing that, for both intellectual and ethical reasons, the culture of the field must change. Heschel and Imhoff explore quantitative data regarding women as editors of and contributors to academic journals and anthologies, examine data regarding citations of women's scholarship, and scrutinize women's presence on panels at academic conferences. They analyze the wider context of the contemporary academy, discussing what is distinctive about Jewish studies. They trace the history of the field, its connections to traditional religious studies, and its growth in US institutions, interspersing this with stories of scholars in the field who have experienced harassment and gender discrimination. Finally, they offer suggestions for a reparative path forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective (Oxford UP, 2026) Jenny Labendz addresses distinct patterns within rabbinic eschatology that have been overlooked in scholarship and in Jewish thought. Contrary to what is usually expected of eschatology, this book demonstrates that the rabbis held a sustained eschatology of irresolution. While the rabbis occasionally waxed poetic along the lines of a perfected new world in the eschaton, a vast store of rabbinic texts depicts a deeply imperfect eschaton. This is the profound difference between rabbinic and early Christian eschatology.Despite its differences from the Christian doctrine of perfection, rabbinic eschatology aligns neatly with a different Christian concept, namely inaugurated eschatology. The eschaton is not only be hoped for in the future, but can be attained in the present. The best of all possible worlds has not yet been entirely actualized, but it has been inaugurated, in the rabbinic view by the exodus from slavery in Egypt, the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, and the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. This is a paradigm shift for thinking about rabbinic eschatology, which rejects the dogmas and binaries that generations of scholars have taken for granted. In this new book, Jenny Labendz explores the relationship between this world and the best possible world, the limits of that best possible world, and asks a crucially grounding question--what are we talking about when we're talking about the end of the world? Interviewee: Jenny R. Labendz received her PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2010 and was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis College until 2025. She is also the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture, published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Since 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been a pioneer in the field of Jewish studies. At the core of YIVO since its founding was its commitment to scholarship which supported the Jewish “folk.” This manifested in a variety of initiatives, including youth autobiography contests and a youth research division (yugfor), an Economic-Statistical section (ekstat), and the establishment of various YIVO branches. These YIVO's activities continue to pique the interests of scholars, who have recently produced new scholarship analyzing these initiatives through the lens of new pioneering research methods. Join YIVO for a panel discussion sharing new research on these historic YIVO initiatives featuring presentations by William Pimlott, Kamil Kijek, and Nicolas Vallois, followed by a conversation led by Jessica Kirzane. This panel discussion originally took place on June 11, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of Eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and peddlers, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them, many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts. In A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (Liverpool UP, 2024), Marek Tuszewicki studies manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs to tease out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. His research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in Eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbors together. Join YIVO for a discussion with Tuszewicki about this book, led by cultural critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen. Buy the book here This book talk originally took place on November 11, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with acclaimed cultural critic David Denby to discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt, 2025), a vibrant portrait of four extraordinary Americans whose Jewish identities helped shape the modern United States. Though they worked in vastly different fields, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer shared a remarkable historical moment. Coming of age after World War II, they entered an America where Jewish opportunity was expanding and antisemitism was beginning to recede. Their Jewish heritage, energized by the freedoms of American life, fueled bold, unconventional careers that reshaped music, comedy, literature, feminism, and public debate. Denby paints these figures in all their complexity: ambitious, difficult, generous, provocative, and endlessly creative. Rather than offering simple hero worship, he explores how their outsized personalities and relentless drive allowed them to challenge old assumptions about art, politics, gender, humor, and what it meant to be both fully Jewish and fully American. Together, Denby and Katz explore why this particular generation produced so many cultural revolutionaries, how Jewish identity informed their work without defining it, and what their legacies reveal about the changing place of Jews in postwar America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel'sPhänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit' (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

It's a shadowy, ornate world of cover-ups and hidden motives. In Flirting with Evil: The Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation (Apollo, 2026), Ambrogio Caiani lifts back the heavy velvet curtains of thechancel and peers behind the locked mahogany doors of the Vatican to reveal the shocking truths that make up a century of Catholic corruption. For many, Catholicism's flirtation with evil has become impossible to ignore: a pope courting Nazi officials and, horribly, turning a blind eye to the Holocaust; the Vatican becoming embroiled in a series of dodgy financial dealings; the child abuse continuously perpetrated by members of the clergy. Time and time again, Catholic figures have made terrible choices in private and preached in public about goodness and morality. This is the first history that focuses exclusively on Catholicism throughout the twentieth century, sketching not only scandalous stories of corruption but also lively portrayals of Catholicism's key characters—from a beret-clad communist revolutionary priest to the bizarre morning routine of the pope who followed a daily cold bath with dry unbuttered toast. Caiani, a critical Catholic himself, takes a frank and sceptical look at the trajectory of global Catholicism and wrestles with vital questions about the future of the church. Taking in the wider socio-political contexts of a world at war and the accumulating momentum of social progress, this brilliant history traces the evolution of the Catholic church alongside the development of our modern society right up to the election of Pope Leo XIV in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt. Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance in Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance (U Wisconsin Press, 2026). Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time. Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940. plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Forger of Paris (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) presents Adolfo Kaminsky's biography in its only authorized edition, expanded with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore. "This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." — Jewish Book Council At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world. "At a moment when someone's passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky's story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." — Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times "A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." — Foreword Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture. Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook's evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women's history, told through the food they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of American cuisine. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism. In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers, claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers, cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination. Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths. Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of antisemitism in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent. This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies