New Books in Jewish Studies

The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this description and the reality of everyday life. In this gap resides a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority, to some degree denied full benefits of equal urban citizenship. Much of the...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held b...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex history of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hanebrink shows how Fascists, Conservatives and...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In this interview, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discusses her first book, Holiness and Transgression Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth, with Rachel Adelman. Translated by Eugene Matansky and published by Academic Studies Press in 2017, it was originally written in Hebrew as Ke...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The murder of two-thirds of European Jews, referred to by many as the Holocaust, did not begin June 22, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, or September 1, 1939, with the beginning of WWII, or with 1938 Kristallnacht, or even with the 1933 rise of Hitler. Accordin...

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1842 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholars...

A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is...

The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press, 2022), Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controll...

Why do some scholars sacrifice truth and logic to political ideology and peer acceptance? With courage and intellectual integrity, queer scholar-activist Corinne Blackmer stages a pointed critique of scholars whose anti-Israel bias pervades their activism as well as their academic work. In contrast to the posturing that characterizes her colleagues’ work, this work demonstrates true scholarship an...

By its very nature, the ideals of religion entail sin and failure. Judaism has its own language and framework for sin that expresses themselves both legally and philosophically. Both legal questions―circumstances where sin is permissible or mandated, the role of intention and action―as well as philosophical questions―why sin occurs and how does Judaism react to religious crisis―are considered with...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Th...

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient r...

Most of our information about Herod the Great derives from the accounts found in Josephus' Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Together they constitute a unique resource on one of the most famous personalities of ancient history. But from where did Josephus get his information? It is commonly agreed that his primary source was Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod's court historian, though the extent to whic...

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtne...

The book of Exodus played a significant role in forming the identity of the Jewish people, with exodus traditions appearing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. As the paradigmatic act of redemption, the exodus event is featured prominently not only in Israel’s prophetic corpus, but also in literature throughout the Second Temple period. The storyline of Exodus even provides the narrative framework f...

Since its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to a countrywide sociopolitical movement with representation in the Israeli legislature. But how did it get here? How does it differ from other Islamic movements in the region? Particularly, what ar...

Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature of the Human Soul uses Aristotle's De anima to theorize on two of the most discussed and most controversial philosophical debates of the Renaissance: the nature of human intellect and the obtaining...

Throughout a hugely productive intellectual career spanning more than half a century, the Austrian-born philosopher Martin Buber returned repeatedly to the question of Israel’s divine election. Buber, who left Nazi Germany to settle in Mandatory Palestine in 1938, found in chosenness a historically enacted and contested concept that could either the world under divine kingship, or divide and alien...

Jerusalem’s Old City is normally understood to be split into four quarters: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter. Those designations can be found on maps, on guidebooks, on news articles, and countless other pieces of writing about the city. But as Matthew Teller points out in his latest book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old...

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men an...

Gabel's eatery is always open, feeding hungry hearts, bodies, and souls. When Strad, a young man at odds with life, wanders in, an uncanny encounter propels him on a journey to the hidden Fifth-Dimension of Altruego. He meets a people with ancient roots and a mysterious mission, whose curious customs and odd-sounding ideas somehow snap the missing puzzle pieces of Strad's life into place. Tune in...

Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton Uni...

In From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature (Indiana UP, 2019), Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak,...

Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and is working on a book project on sex, risk, and rabbinic text.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-stu...

Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel's leadin...