New Books in Jewish Studies
Interview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 55 minutes
- Episodes
- 1335
- Years Active
- 2009 - 2025
Peter Beinart, “The Crisis of Zionism” (Times Books, 2012)
In his new book The Crisis of Zionism, (Times Books, 2012), Peter Beinart, Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at The City…
00:47:05 |
Wed 13 Jun 2012
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work…
00:59:59 |
Wed 07 Mar 2012
Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa” (Indiana UP, 2011)
“Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn’t.” This was how one of the Soviet Union’s most famous jazz singers and actors, L…
01:01:24 |
Fri 09 Dec 2011
Charles King, “Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams” (W.W. Norton, 2011)
“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homel…
00:58:34 |
Mon 22 Aug 2011
Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, “This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (Wiley, 2011)
In their new book, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), the husband and wife team of Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin…
00:44:34 |
Fri 10 Jun 2011
David Shneer, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust” (Rutgers UP, 2010)
We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West fro…
01:10:04 |
Fri 29 Apr 2011
Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution” (Harvard UP, 2010)
For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “n…
01:16:18 |
Thu 10 Mar 2011
Jerry Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton UP, 2010)
I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disast…
01:09:46 |
Fri 25 Jun 2010
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bi…
01:01:20 |
Thu 17 Jun 2010
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew” (Yale UP, 2009)
I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a d…
01:03:58 |
Fri 26 Mar 2010
Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009)
One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, though…
01:11:30 |
Sat 23 Jan 2010
Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009)
By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfe…
01:08:58 |
Fri 20 Nov 2009
Tony Michels, “Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York” (Harvard UP, 2005)
I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But …
01:04:53 |
Fri 10 Apr 2009
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008)
Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. I…
01:18:51 |
Sat 07 Feb 2009
Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007)
Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calcula…
00:51:14 |
Fri 30 Jan 2009
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