New Books in Jewish Studies
Interview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 56 minutes
- Episodes
- 1339
- Years Active
- 2009 - 2025
Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his famil…
01:01:26 |
Thu 12 Nov 2020
V. Nesfield and P. Smith, "The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel's Literary Works" (SUNY Press, 2019)
An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis …
00:49:47 |
Wed 11 Nov 2020
N. Chare and D. Williams, "Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
The Sonderkommando--the "special squad" of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau--comprise one of the most fascinating and troublin…
00:53:13 |
Mon 02 Nov 2020
Rachel Manekin, "The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia" (Princeton UP, 2020)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over three hundred young Jewish women from Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) fled their communities and sought refu…
00:53:02 |
Wed 21 Oct 2020
Bernice Lerner, "All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world wars could not compar…
00:45:38 |
Fri 16 Oct 2020
Karen Taliaferro, "The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Religious freedom debates set blood boiling. Just consider notable Supreme Court cases of recent years such as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission or Little Sisters of the Poor v…
01:20:09 |
Tue 13 Oct 2020
Jewish Architecture: A Stage for Jewish Liturgy
Jewish religious architecture is central to the Jewish religion. Across the centuries, Jewish temples and synagogues have been treated as symbols of hope, representations of collective memory, and fo…
00:28:03 |
Mon 12 Oct 2020
R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewish American Literature" (MLA, 2020)
In this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it me…
01:03:47 |
Fri 09 Oct 2020
Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memory" (Indiana UP, 2016)
The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current ce…
00:33:57 |
Thu 08 Oct 2020
Alan Brill, " Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter" (Lexington, 2019)
How do Judaism and Hinduism compare as religions? Beyond the academic merits of comparative religion, what can adherents to one of these faiths gain by learning about the other?
Alan Brill's new book…
00:37:27 |
Fri 02 Oct 2020
Alan L. Mittleman, "Does Judaism Condone Violence?: Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition" (Princeton UP, 2018)
What exactly does the word “holy” mean in various religious traditions? What is the opposite of it in translations from the Hebrew? Is the antonym of “holy” in the Old Testament not, as many of us as…
01:01:06 |
Tue 29 Sep 2020
Karen E. H. Skinazi, "Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2018)
Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. In Women of Valor…
01:01:04 |
Mon 21 Sep 2020
Kenneth Austin, "The Jews and the Reformation" (Yale UP, 2020)
Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale Universit…
00:37:37 |
Mon 21 Sep 2020
Aaron Koller, "Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
In Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Aaron Koller, professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, prov…
01:00:42 |
Fri 18 Sep 2020
Matthew Thiessen, "Jesus and the Forces of Death" (Baker Academic, 2020)
Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encoun…
00:37:11 |
Fri 18 Sep 2020
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, "Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism" (SUNY Press, 2020)
Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (SUNY Press, 2020), edited by Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, combines powerful first-person accounts with incisive scholarly analysis to understand the phenom…
00:41:50 |
Fri 11 Sep 2020
Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020)
The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes…
00:52:10 |
Wed 09 Sep 2020
T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust" (Berghahn, 2020)
In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns ou…
01:05:34 |
Tue 08 Sep 2020
Assaf Gavron, "The Hilltop" (Scribner, 2015)
Mordantly funny and deeply moving, The Hilltop about life in a West Bank settlement has been hailed as “brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and “The Great Israeli Novel [in which] Gavron stak…
00:50:56 |
Mon 07 Sep 2020
Tamar Herzig, "A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019)
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Tamar Herzig, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, the Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E Curiel Institute for European …
01:03:53 |
Fri 04 Sep 2020
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