New Books in Jewish Studies

The Book of Esther has inspired and impacted the American project since its very inception. Rabbis and ethicists, abolitionists and artists, preachers and presidents, have understood the text to speak to their moment. It has offered solace to immigrants, forged solidarity, impacted politics, and, in the spirit of Esther 4:14, roused individuals to realize that deliverance was not to come from some...

Galilee, the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its greatest triumphs. Matthew Silver's two volumes--The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades (Lexington Books, 2021), and The History of Galilee, 1538-1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War (Lexington Books, 20...

The original production of Fiddler on the Roof won nine Tony awards, held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical, and was adapted into a hit movie. But the musical itself was an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye Stories. Aleichem aimed to create a high literature for Yiddish-speaking readers, but his influence spread much further, to a new country, a new language, and a new medium...

The philosopher and biblical commentator Joseph Ibn Kaspi (1280–1345) was a provocative Jewish thinker of the medieval era whose works have generally been overlooked by modern scholars.  Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History (SUNY Press, 2019) by Alexander Green is the first book in English to focus on a central aspect of his work: Ibn Kaspi's philosophy of history. Green...

Rabbi Ari Kahn’s The Crowns on the Letters: Essays on the Aggada and the Lives of the Sages (OU Press, 2020) represents a major achievement in the study of the lives of our Sages, as well as in the study of rabbinic Aggada. This work is an immensely learned and deeply creative interpretation of many fundamental aggadot relating to the intellectual biographies of the Tannaim and Amoraim, including...

How did the concept of Israel impact early Jewish apocalyptic hopes of restoration? How diverse was Israelite identity in antiquity? Tune in as we talk with Jason A. Staples about his recent book, The Idea of Israel, in which he proposes a new paradigm for how the biblical concept of Israel developed in Early Judaism. Jason A. Staples (Ph. D., UNC-Chapel Hill) is a historian, author, speaker, jour...

oday I talked to Rabbi Wayne Allen about his book Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finall...

In The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020), Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include t...

There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his community, he accused his Jewish neighbors of the heinous crime. Over the course of two decades, he wrote a seven-volume conspiracy theory, building out the accusation and cementing it in history. Stanf...

What does the Bible say about ecology? As people face huge ecological challenges-including growing hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and plastic pollution-the groundbreaking Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee's Eco Bible (Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, 2020) dives into this question. Drawing on 3,500 years of religious ethics, it shows how the Bible itself and its great scholars embrace car...

Where did the idea of sin arise from? In The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2022), David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings. He argues that the fundamental idea of “sin” arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in...

The health care sector frequently emphasizes “Cultural competence”, an elastic concept that stretches from the simplest recognition of diversity of patient populations, to include policy implications of patients’ overall worldviews re the body, health, and decision-making. The issue, highlighted again in the recent U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, gained prominence during Covid-19 pandemic, w...

Layla Murad (1918-1995) was once the highest-paid star in Egypt, and her movies were among the top-grossing in the box office. She starred in 28 films, nearly all now classics in Arab musical cinema. In 1955 she was forced to stop acting—and struggled for decades for a comeback. Today, even decades after her death, public interest in her life continues, and new generations of Egyptians still love...

What are we to make of the Temple envisioned by Ezekiel? How can we better understand Ezekiel, chapters 40 through 48? One way, suggests Tova Ganzel, is by examining evidence from Babylonian sources. She argues that Neo-Babylonian temples provide a meaningful backdrop against which many unique features of Ezekiel's vision should be interpreted. Tune in as we speak with Tova Ganzel about her recent...

Thinking about learning Modern Hebrew, but waiting for the perfect grammar? The Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew by Giore Etzion is an integrated language course adopting an eclectic approach. The course contains 90 lessons combining authentic texts, grammar explanations, and exercises with audiovisual materials on the companion website with links to Israeli websites, videos, and mus...

Francine Friedman's Like Salt for Bread: The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Brill, 2021) is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather “exotic” Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bo...

Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House, 2015) is a fascinating and gripping examination of birth, sex and abuse during the Nazi era. Dr Chalmers’ unique lens on the Holocaust provides a stunning and controversial exposé of the voices of both Jewish and non-Jewish women living under Nazi rule. Based on twelve years of study, the book takes an inter-disciplinary view i...

How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2022) is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, enviro...

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nati...

Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel (Purdue UP, 2021) details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt's partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more...

The prophet Ezekiel speaks from a unique perspective: he resides in Babylonia, yet laments the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem; his prophecies range from furious messages of rebuke to comforting depictions of the future redemption of the Jewish people.  Join as we speak with Tova Ganzel about her recent commentary, Ezekiel: From Destruction to Restoration (Maggid, 2020). Dr. Tova Ganzel rec...

Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis (Lexington Books, 2022) by Matt Reingold, published by Lexington Books as part of its Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series, offers an incisive—and prescient, given the recent dissolution of the incumbent government—consideration of how political cartoonists in Israel broaden the conver...

What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious? Our species diverged from the great apes six to eight million years ago. Since then, our propensity toward spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when, and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us toda...

The shifting image of the Hasmoneans in the eyes of their contemporaries and later generations is a compelling issue in the history of the Maccabean revolt and the Hasmonean commonwealth. Based on a series of six Jewish folktales from the Second Temple period that describe the Hasmonean dynasty and its history from its legendary founders, through achievement of full sovereignty, to downfall, Vered...

A powerfully original thinker, Rav Kook combined strict traditionalism and an embrace of modernity, Orthodoxy and tolerance, piety and audacity, scholasticism and ecstasy, and passionate nationalism with profound universalism. Though little known in the English-speaking world, his life and teachings are essential to understanding current Israeli politics, contemporary Jewish spirituality, and mode...