New Books in Jewish Studies

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Rutgers University Press, 2021) focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion....

Jeffery D. Long and Michael G. Long's Nonviolence in the World's Religions: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2021) introduces the reader to the complex relationship between religion and nonviolence. The meanings of both religion and nonviolence are explored through engagement with nonviolence in Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Jain, and Pacific Island religious tradit...

To date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar’s thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that covers Polqar’s thought in its entirety. Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020) aims to fill this lacuna by tracing and contextualizing both Polqar’s Islamic sources (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes)...

Survivors tells the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. As the epicenter of Polish resistance, Warsaw was subjected to violent persecution, the ghettoization of the city's Jewish community, the suppression of multiple uprisings, and an avalanche of restrictions that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed countless lives.  In Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation (Cambrid...

In his fascinating survey Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World (NYU Press, 2021), Brian Ogren explores the use of Jewish esoteric thought in colonial America by Quaker theologian George Keith, Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, the first Hebrew instructor at Harvard Judah Monis, and the seventh president of Yale Ezra Stiles, in sha...

The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture (Harvard University Press, 2021), a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Christian scriptural h...

In Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2020), Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain’s role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their...

Two of the most iconic thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) fundamentally disagreed on central issues in politics, history and philosophy. In spite of their overlapping lives and experiences as Jewish émigré intellectuals, Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying that she represented "everything that I detest most," while Arendt met Berlin's ho...

In her new book, The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto (Routledge, 2020), Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane uses previously unexplored personal accounts and archival documentation in order to examine life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. The book covers an important aspect of the experience of...

The Biblical Book of Esther reads like a classic fable, a drama of actors who are recognizable archetypes. There is Esther, the beautiful orphan who becomes queen, Ahasuerus, the buffoon king, Haman, the prototype of evil, and Mordecai, the wise, courageous, and loyal hero. The Book of Esther takes us to the heart of destiny’s moments: a beautiful but unlikely queen evolves into a Jewish leader. A...

Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust (Rutgers UP, 2021) is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children's experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously. Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning e...

In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 (Northwestern UP, 2021), Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cu...

As the rabbi of a Sephardic synagogue for over twenty years who is himself of Ashkenazic descent and trained in Ashkenazic yeshivot, Rabbi Haim Jachter has a unique vantage point from which to observe the differences in customs and halachot between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In Bridging Traditions: Demystifying Differences Between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews (Maggid, 2022), Rabbi Jachter applies...

In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown....

The emergence of self-government in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe has been a slow process, often encouraged by invitations of existing regimes and sometimes to escape state persecution. Nonetheless, the Jewish community has succeeded in establishing its autonomy as well as maintain a certain degree of control over its traditions. In this new episode, François Guesnet, Professor of Modern...

In Irma's Passport: One Woman, Two World Wars, and a Legacy of Courage (She Writes Press, 2021), Catherine Ehrlich explores her Austrian grandparents’ influential lives at the crossroads of German and Jewish national movements. Weaving her grandmother Irma’s spellbinding memoirs into her narrative, she profiles a charismatic woman who confronts history with courage and rebuilds lives—for herself a...

Questions relating to immigration are among the most heated topics on both sides of the Atlantic. Western societies have changed dramatically because of large-scale immigration in the last decades. Christians are also engaged in the discussion, attempting to find direction from the biblical texts. Overwhelmingly, persons in leading positions (both in the secular world and in churches and faith-bas...

Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization was first published in 1934. The editors of American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement, and Belief (Brandeis UP, 2020), a collection of readings, some essays, some chapters from books, see Kaplan’s work as a foundational moment in Jewish thought in America, and so they take their cue from that historical moment. The seventy-nine...

An unexpected fusion of two major western religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, has been developing in many parts of the world. Contemporary Christian movements are not only adopting Jewish symbols and aesthetics but also promoting Jewish practices, rituals, and lifestyles. Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus: Judaizing Evangelicals in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2021), is the first...

In her recent book on the Jewish community of Modena in Italy, Federica Francesconi tells a tale of contradictions. Segregated to the city’s ghetto in the 17th century, the Jewish merchants of the city nonetheless possessed an enormous presence in its economic, governmental and cultural milieu. By the start of the 19th century, these merchants even took center stage in Modena’s political scene fol...

Be, Become, Bless: Jewish Spirituality Between East and West (Maggid, 2019) presents a Jewish approach to transforming the way we see and live our lives. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Yakov Nagen about how he uses the weekly parasha as a springboard to converse with both Eastern spirituality and Western thinking, creating a synthesis that unifies "being" and "doing." Thought-provoking and origina...

In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp i...

Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv… The city, which is located in the western part of Ukraine, evokes a highly entangled past that contains references to a number of nations, ethnicities, empires, states, and communities. They have their own (hi)story and they claim their right to make this story visible.  Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019) focuses on the crossroads...

When France fell to Hitler's armies in June 1940, a flood of refugees fleeing Nazi terror quickly overwhelmed Europe's borders and spilled across the Mediterranean to North Africa, touching off a humanitarian crisis of dizzying proportions. Nelly Benatar, a highly regarded Casablancan Jewish lawyer, quickly claimed a role of rescuer and almost single-handedly organized a sweeping program of wartim...

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been com...