New Books in Jewish Studies

The book of Acts is often misunderstood as reflecting anti-Judaism or promoting supersessionism. Jason Moraff, however, argues that Acts binds the Way, Paul, and the Jewish people together in a shared identity. Taking a historically situated approach, Moraff frames Acts' portrayal of the early church and Paul in relation to the Jewish people as participating in internecine conflict regarding the Jewish-tradition-in-crisis after the destruction of the temple. Join us as we speak with Jason Moraff about his recent book, Reading the Way, Paul, and 'the Jews' in Acts Within Judaism (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jason F. Moraff is assistant professor of biblical studies at The King’s University in Southlake, USA. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated. The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps for Tunisian Jews, brothels in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, and prisons and penal camps for Wehrmacht personnel. Most of these sites have not been described in detail in the existing historical literature, and a substantial number of them have never been documented at all. The volume also includes an introduction to the German prisoner of war camp system and its evolution, introductions to each of the various types of camps operated by the Wehrmacht, and entries devoted to each individual camp, representing the most comprehensive documentation to date of the Wehrmacht camp system. Within the entries, the volume draws upon German military documents, eyewitness and survivor testimony, and postwar investigations to describe the experiences of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners held captive by the Wehrmacht. Of particular note is the detailed documentation of the Wehrmacht's crimes against Soviet prisoners of war, which have largely been neglected in the English-language literature up to this point, despite the fact that more than three million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity. The volume also provides substantial coverage of the diverse range of conditions encountered by other Allied prisoners of war, illustrating both the substantial privations faced by all prisoners of war and the stark contrast between the Germans' treatment of Soviet prisoners and those of other nationalities. The volume also details the significant involvement of the Wehrmacht in crimes against the civilian populations of occupied Europe and North Africa. As a result, this volume not only brings to light many detention sites whose existence has been little known, but also advances the decades-old process of dismantling the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht," according to which the German military had nothing to do with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime's other crimes. Dallas Michelbacher and Alexandra Lohse are applied research scholars at USHMM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Prit Buttar's book Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom. Unlike the figures at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the men who were responsible for these killings have been largely forgotten. Karl Jäger was a senior SS figure who was in charge of the units that carried out most of them. He complained that his experiences caused him to suffer nightmares but continued to order his units to carry on and refused offers of sick leave on the grounds that he regarded it as his duty to remain in his post. He took refuge in compiling painstakingly detailed reports of the killings, listing the numbers executed at every location and breaking them down into men, women and children. T he roles played by other figures, from Himmler and Heydrich at the summit, through the ranks of men down to Martin Weiss and Bruno Kittel who were personally responsible for carrying out Nazi policies, are all described. Before the German invasion of Lithuania, two diplomats - Chiune Sugihara from Japan and Jan Zwartendijk from the Netherlands - recognised the great danger that lay ahead for the Jews of the Baltic region and did what they could to help them escape. Karl Plagge, a major in the army, did all he could to save Jews. What perhaps make the terrible story of the Baltic genocide unique is that the Nazi regime was able to rely upon collaboration by convincing the populace that the Soviet invasion of the area was the responsibility of the Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Sobibor Death Camp was the second extermination camp built by the Nazis as part of the secretive Operation Reinhardt--with intent to carry out the mass murder of Polish Jewry. Following the construction of the extermination camp at Belzec in south-eastern Poland from November 1941 to March 1942, the Nazis planned a second extermination camp at Sobibor, and the third and deadliest camp was built near the remote village of Treblinka. Sobibor was similarly designed as the first camp in Belzec, it was regarded as an 'overflow' camp for Belzec. This account of the Nazis' remorseless and relentless production line of killing at the Sobibor death camp tells of one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind. Chris Webb's painstakingly researched volume ranges from the survivors and the victims to the SS men who carried out the atrocities. The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2017) covers the construction of the death camp, the physical layout of the camp, as remembered by both the Jewish inmates and the SS staff who served there, and the personal recollections that detail the day to day experiences of the prisoners and the SS. The courageous revolt by the prisoners on October 14, 1943 is re-told by the prisoners and the German SS, with detailed accounts of the revolt and its aftermath. The post-war fate of the perpetrators, or more precisely those that were brought to trial, and information regarding the more recent history of the site itself concludes this book. There is a large photographic section of rare, previously unpublished photographs and documents from the author's private archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. This new edition of Steven Nadler's Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge UP, 2022), winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award for biography and translated into a dozen languages, is enhanced by exciting new archival discoveries about his family background, his youth, and the various philosophical, political, and religious contexts of his life and works. There is more detail about his family's business and communal activities, about his relationships with friends and correspondents, and about the development of his writings, which were so scandalous to his contemporaries. Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay, II, Professor of Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, winner of the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award for biography with Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999) and a Pulitzer Prize finalist with Rembrandt's Jews (2004). His books have been translated into over twenty languages. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise. In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in mediaeval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians. Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumours circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Dr. Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

On today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism. Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volumes Zionism - A View from the Outside and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford UP, 2019). In this comprehensive interview, Professor Dubnov draws from his current research project examining the interwar ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers. He provides a sweeping analysis tracing Zionism's diverse ideological currents and how they manifested from the movement's origins through the tumultuous events surrounding Israeli statehood in 1948 and into our present era. With his profound insights, Professor Dubnov illuminates the complex social, political and intellectual forces that shaped Zionism over decades, offering a nuanced perspective on this influential nationalist ideology's evolving place in regional and global contexts. This thought-provoking discussion promises a masterclass on the rich histories and ongoing reverberations of Zionisms. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

After So Much Pain and Anguish: First Letters After Liberation (Yad Vashem, 2016) comprises letters written by survivors and liberating soliders in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, reflecting their extreme mixed emotions. The survivors express their sigh of relief at liberation intertwined with the anguish of irreparable loss, and even utterances of hope for a better tomorrow. The letters articulate the first signs of life after liberation, giving moving accounts of suffering, loss and destruction. They convey cries of grief while displaying an outstretched hand from a devastated world longing to touch loved ones still whole. This collection is a raw and powerful body of firsthand testimony of the catastrophe that struck the Jewish people, forming an important record of the most horrific and ignoble period of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada (Maggid, 2024) you will find, alongside the traditional Haggada text, how American abolitionists and artists, pilgrims and presidents, rabbis and revolutionaries, jazz critics and generals found inspiration in the Exodus story. From Sojourner Truth to the struggle to free Soviet Jewry, Harriet Tubman to Harry Truman, Mark Twain to Martin Luther King Jr., the Jewish story of redemption has inspired Americans of all backgrounds, from the country’s inception to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Debby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit's life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists' and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit's fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner's The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State UP, 2024) brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg. This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more--including Ujifusa's great grandparents. That is their legacy. Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York's Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I (HarperCollins, 2023) is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa's story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war--and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the topic, he interrogates how these communities used discourses of prophethood and revelation to negotiate their place in the world. Han tracks the shifting contours of prophecy and contextualizes the emergence of orality as the privileged medium among rabbis, Manichaeans, and 'Jewish Christian' communities. He also explores the contemporary interest in divinatory knowledge among Neoplatonists. Offering a critical re-reading of key Manichaean texts, Han shows how Manichaeans used concepts of prophethood and revelation within specific rhetorical agendas to address urgent issues facing their communities. His book highlights the contingent production of discourse and shows how contemporary theories of rhetoric and textuality can be applied to the study of ancient texts. Jae Han is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies and the program for Judaic Studies at Brown University Michael Motia is a lecturer in the Religious Studies and Classics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (Syracuse UP, 2018) explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel-Palestine and North America. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm. In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Gustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the failed struggle to extradite war criminal Walther Rauff and to the years of the military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. By the 1970s, Israel seemed a strong pro-Western barrier to the expansion of communism and Islamic fundamentalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialise, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counsellors, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sandra Fox demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Scholars of biblical law widely hold that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have been never tested. Join us as we speak with Michael LeFebvre about his book, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law (Bloomsbury, 2019) a study that challenges the current consensus, and presents an alternative hypothesis. Michael LeFebvre earned his PhD at the University of Aberdeen. He’s a presbyterian minister living in Indianapolis, Indiana, and a fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians. L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months. Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012; paperback 2023) closely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity--and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions--during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony. The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Chiara Renzo's book Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity (Routledge, 2023) focuses on the experiences of thousands of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who lived in refugee camps in Italy between the liberation of the southern regions in 1943 and the early 1950s, waiting for their resettlement outside of Europe. It explores the Jewish DPs' daily life in the refugee camps and what this experience of displacement meant to them. This book sheds light on the dilemmas the Jewish DPs faced when reconstructing their lives in the refugee camps after the Holocaust and how this challenging process was deeply influenced by their interaction with the humanitarian and political actors involved in their rescue, rehabilitation, and resettlement. Relating to the peculiar context of post-fascist Italy and the broader picture of the postwar refugee crisis, this book reveals overlooked aspects that contributed to the making of an incredibly diverse and lively community in transit, able to elaborate new paradigms of home, belonging and family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What happens when beauty intersects with horror? In Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity (U New Mexico Press, 2023), Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through the making and viewing of art, we are--for better or for worse--changed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Haftorah Unrolled explores the weekly readings from the Prophets (known as the "haftorah") and their connections to the corresponding Torah portions. Sirote offers insights and explanations to help readers appreciate the depth and meaning in these readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Devash Megillat Esther (Hadar Press, 2024) includes the full Hebrew Megillah text, an original kid-friendly English translation, and carefully selected commentaries from 2,000 years of Jewish tradition brought to life in newly accessible ways. Devash unlocks sophisticated texts for learners of all ages and backgrounds, encouraging deep questioning and growth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Yaacov Nir's Establishment and History of the Cyprus Detention Camps for Jewish Refugees (1946-1949) (Cambridge Scholars, 2024) explores the nature of the severe conflict over immigration to Palestine during the post-Second World War period, and the British policy of deportation to Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949). It considers the perspective of actors such as the British Foreign Office, dominated by stubborn Ernest Bevin, and the Colonial Office, the Palestinian Jewish community and its underground Haganah and Palmach forces, the Palestinian Arabs, and the Colonial Cyprus authorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Rachel Gordan examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. For both Jews and non-Jews accustomed to antisemitic tropes and images, positive depictions of Jews had a normalising effect. Maybe Jews were just like other Americans, after all. At the same time, anti-antisemitism novels and “Introduction to Judaism” literature helped to popularise the idea of Judaism as an American religion. In the process, these two genres contributed to a new form of Judaism—one that fit within the emerging myth of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, and yet displayed new confidence in revealing Judaism's divergences from Christianity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Right to Reparations: The Claims Conference and Holocaust Survivors, 1951–1964 (Lexington, 2021) examines the early years of the Claims Conference, the organization which lobbies for and distributes reparations to Holocaust survivors, and its operations as a nongovernmental actor promoting reparative justice in global politics. Rachel Blumenthal traces the founding of the organization by one person, and its continued campaign for the payment of compensation to survivors after Israel left the negotiations. This book explores the degree to which the leadership entity served individual victims of the Third Reich, the Jewish public, or member organizations. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked. Spanning the entirety of the Holocaust and across the world, this sweeping history deepens our understanding. Dan Stone reveals how the idea of 'industrial murder' is incomplete: many were killed where they lived in the most brutal of ways. He outlines the depth of collaboration across Europe, arguing persuasively that we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as an exclusively German project. He also considers the nature of trauma the Holocaust engendered, and why Jewish suffering has yet to be fully reckoned with. And he makes clear that the kernel to understanding Nazi thinking and action is genocidal ideology, providing a deep analysis of its origins. Drawing on decades of research, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Mariner Books, 2023) upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. Stone draws on Nazi documents, but also on diaries, post-war testimonies and even fiction, urging that, in our age of increasing nationalism and xenophobia, we must understand the true history of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists fought to keep the defeated Ottoman Empire intact and the sultan in Constantinople, and Zionists sought to build on the wartime promise by the British government to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in face of opposition by Palestinians and pan-Islamists. The task of tackling these issues was made all the more difficult by accusations that Jews were not loyal to the British Empire and its goals, a view promoted by the appearance of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in English translation. British Jews and Imperial Service: Nationalism, Pan-Islamism and Zionism in Mandate Palestine and Colonial India (Bloomsbuy, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Chasin follows this web of divisive imperial politics, and nationalist and pan-Islamist aspirations in India and Palestine, through the lives and work of these three men whose efforts were coloured by the post-war fear of a declining empire that was being corroded from within. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

World War II and the Holocaust have been the subject of many remarkable stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is unique. It tells the previously unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a courageous Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Nazi occupiers. Assuming the identity of a Polish aristocrat, Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg (born Pepi Spinner) worked as a welfare official, served in the Polish resistance, and persuaded the SS to release thousands from the Majdanek concentration camp. Drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, both historians and Holocaust experts, have reconstructed the story of this remarkable woman. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges (Brill, 2016), Robin Baker provides a masterly reappraisal of Israel's experience during its Settlement of Canaan as narrated in the Book of Judges, which, he argues, subtly encrypts a grim forewarning of Judah's future. In its extensive treatment of otherness, the Book of Judges also explores the meaning of God’s covenant with Israel. Join us as we speak with Robin Baker about his monograph on the Book of Judges! Robin Baker is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the School of History, Archaeology and Philosophy, at University of Winchester, and Fellow of University College London. His latest monograph is Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and Busnachs and the doggedness they had in pursuing their debts. Julie Kalman writes about these two families–and their inter-familial business dealing and squabbles–in The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023). In this interview, Julie and I talk about the Bacris and the Busnachs, the strange relationships between Algiers, Britain, France and the U.S., and what “sanctions” and “debt diplomacy” looked like in the early nineteeth century. Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of history at Monash University. She has published widely on the history of French Jewry in the nineteenth century, and in the post-war period. She is also the author of Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press: 2017), and Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press: 2010). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Kings of Algiers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana UP, 2023), Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish and non-Jewish decision makers exiled from wartime east central Europe and the powerbrokers surrounding them? Usually, the creation of the State of Israel is cast as a story that begins with Herzl and is brought to fulfillment by the Holocaust. To reframe this trajectory, Cramsey draws on a vast array of historical sources to examine what she calls a "transnational conversation" carried out by a small but influential coterie of Allied statesmen, diplomats in international organizations, and Jewish leaders who decided that the overall disentangling of populations in postwar east central Europe demanded the simultaneous intellectual and logistical embrace of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a territorial nationalist project. Uprooting the Diaspora slows down the chronology between 1936 and 1946 to show how individuals once invested in multi-ethnic visions of diasporic Jewishness within east central Europe came to define Jewishness primarily in ethnic terms. This revolution in thinking about Jewish belonging combined with a sweeping change in international norms related to population transfers and accelerated, deliberate postwar work on the ground in the region to further uproot Czechoslovak and Polish Jews from their prewar homes. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race. They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said's notion of the "contrapuntal" analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali's "Recallable Book" shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism--revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity. Mentioned in the episode: Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977) Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought ( "the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming" ) Franz Boas, "Commencement Address at Atlanta University," May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about "the line of cleavage" Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911) W.E.B. Du Bois, "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace," (1945) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination IHRA definition of Antisemitism. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952) Natasha Levinson, "The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness," in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal) Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it) Recallable books: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) Read and Listen to the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker's twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as on the ways in which each text documents the writer's experience and in which fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. References to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers; the book explains them and shows how they form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of Gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how Gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

First published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford UP, 2017) was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the New Testament. For Christian readers The Jewish Annotated New Testament offers a window into the first-century world of Judaism from which the New Testament springs. There are explanations of Jewish concepts such as food laws and rabbinic argumentation. It also provides a much-needed corrective to many centuries of Christian misunderstandings of the Jewish religion. For Jewish readers, this volume provides the chance to encounter the New Testament--a text of vast importance in Western European and American culture--with no religious agenda and with guidance from Jewish experts in theology, history, and Jewish and Christian thought. It also explains Christian practices, such as the Eucharist. The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition is an essential volume that places the New Testament writings in a context that will enlighten readers of any faith or none. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination. Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic rescues, escapes, and ultimate survival. A true story of hope amid horrifying tragedy, Roman Dziarski's book How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis (Cherry Orchard, 2024) illustrates how war brings out the worst and the best in people, and how true humanity and heroism of ordinary people are revealed by their willingness to risk everything and help others. This story is about being human under the most inhumane conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2024) discusses the life and work of Leo Baeck (1873–1956) the rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust. The Jewish Imperial Imagination shows the myriad ways in which the German imperial enterprise left its imprint on his religious and political thought, and on modern Judaism more generally. This book is the first to explore Baeck's religious thought as political, and situate it within the imperial context of the period which is often ignored in discussions of modern Jewish thought. Baeck's work during the Holocaust is analysed in-depth, drawing on unpublished manuscripts written in Nazi Germany and in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. In the process, the book raises new questions about the nature of Jewish missionizing and the German-Jewish imagination of the East as a space for colonization. Feller thus develops the concept of the 'Jewish imperial imagination', moving beyond a simple dichotomy of ascribing to or resisting hegemonic narratives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that weighed expediency over ethical considerations and ignored individual acts of moral courage. Maxine Lowy draws upon hundreds of first-person testimonials and archival resources to explore Chilean Jewish identity in the wake of Pinochet's coup, exposing the complex and sometimes contradictory development of collective traumatic memory and political sensibilities in an oppressive new context. Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile (U Wisconsin Press, 2022) points to processes of community gestures of moral reparation and signals the pathways to justice and healing associated with Shoah and the Jewish experience. Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress, posing questions applicable to any nation emerging from state repression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Holocaust in Croatia (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity (including rare humane acts by those who helped to save Jews) and is complemented by a large bibliography offering an outstanding referential source to archival materials. As such, The Holocaust in Croatia stands as the definitive account of the Jews in Croatia, up to and including the criminal acts perpetrated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, adding significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class and modestly middle class New Yorkers of European ancestry, with few great luxuries in their lives, could enjoy a taste of culinary abundance. Under demographic changes, economic decay and high crime in the 1970s and 1980s, the world that produced Dubrow’s came apart. The Brooklyn branch of Dubrow’s closed in 1978, the Manhattan branch in 1985. But before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press (2023) and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, is editing an anthology of New Yorkers’ memories of the COVID-19 pandemic for Cornell University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Since the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the dispute over cultural and religious difference became. This is illustrated by the debates about the emancipation of the Jews and the Jewish experiences of equal rights and discrimination since the late 18th century. Through the history of contentious concepts such as assimilation, minority or majority, ethnicity, and roots, this book tells a story of plurality that extends to the present day. It describes a reality full of contradictions, in which it is necessary to endure the tension between equality and freedom. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill, 2023) offers comparative insights into the less trodden paths of the persecuted, illuminating the cultural and political context of the Balkan host countries, the response of local Jewish communities, and the reactions of common people and assorted criminals. The Balkans, often marginalized and loathed, emerges in hundreds of personal accounts of survivors gathered here, supplemented by extensive archival research, as a welcoming getaway, where thousands survived thanks to the Italian occupiers, illiterate peasants, and Communist-led Partisan resisters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Juan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century. Recovering the silenced voices of Jewish Argentines who supported Peronism from the beginning, Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) is a historical, sociological, and political analysis that describes the many positive changes experienced by the Jewish community as a direct result of Perón's presidencies. Perón and his wife Eva gave numerous speeches denouncing antisemitism, and Perón's Argentina was the first Latin American country to open an embassy in the newly established State of Israel. Arguing that no president before Perón so unambiguously rejected discrimination against Jews, Rein shows that many Jews secured more important posts in government in the 1940s and 1950s than in previous years, among them members of the Argentine Jewish Organization, which became a section of the ruling Peronist party. Deconstructing the myth of antisemitism during Perón's regime, Populism and Ethnicity looks deep into the heart of international memory for the truth behind Jewish-Argentine relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. As Marzouk explains in Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel (Mohr Siebeck, 2015), Egypt is portrayed as a monster in the book of Ezekiel because Egypt represents the threat of religious assimilation. Although initially the monstrosity of Egypt is constructed because of the shared elements of identity between Egypt and Israel, the prophet flips this imagery of monster in order to embody Egypt as a monstrous Other. In a combat myth, YHWH defeats the monster and dismembers its body. Despite its near annihilation, Egypt, in Ezekiel's rhetoric, is not entirely obliterated. Rather, it is kept at bay, hovering at the periphery, questioning Israel's identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Today I talked to Mara Josi about her new book Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature (Legenda, 2023). Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina. From December 1944, literary texts of this event have facili-tated a national and international understanding and recollection of 16 October 1943. They have been bearers of historical awareness, channels of memory; not only outcomes of remembrance but also active ingredients in the process of forging cultural memory. In this pioneering interdisciplinary study drawing from literary and cultural memory studies, Mara Josi shows how 16 ottobre 1943 by Giacomo Debenedetti, La Storia by Elsa Morante, La parola ebreo by Rosetta Loy, and Portico d'Ottavia 13 by Anna Foa have operated on the personal and the collective level: in other words, on the reader and on society. Mara Josi obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Before joining the University of Ghent as an FWO Post-doctoral Fellow, she was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a lecturer at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Daphna Sharfman's book Jerusalem in the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem, offering a perspective that is different from the usual political-strategic-military analysis. Although battles were raging in the nearby countries of Syria and Lebanon, and the war in Egypt and the Western Desert, the people who came to Jerusalem, as well as those who lived there, had different agendas and perspectives. Some were spies and intelligence officers, other were exiles or refugee immigrants from Europe who managed at the last moment to escape Nazi persecution. Journalists and writers described life in the city at this time. All were probably conscious of the fact that when the war came to an end, local rivalry and mounting conflict would take the centre stage again. This was a time of a special, magical drawn-out moment that may shed light on an alternative, more peaceful, kind of Jerusalem that unfortunately was not to be. This volume seeks to find an alternative approach and to contribute to the development of insightful research into life in an unordinary city in an unordinary situation. It will be of value to those interested in military history and the history of the Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

How should we think about violent accounts in the Bible? Why did Gandhi urge the Jews to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism during World War II? What is the reality behind buzz-words like asymmetric warfare and collective punishment that come up so often when discussing events in Gaza? What role should global opinion and the hostage crisis play in Israeli strategy? Is there a moral imperative to win? Jewish ethicist Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody discusses these questions and more in this discussion of his recent book Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality. This conversation examines how history and ethics bear on modern dilemmas in Gaza, and presents vital information and historical context for thinking about how to respond to the events of October 7. Shlomo Brody is the Executive Director of Ematai, an organization which provides guidance to Jewish families and rabbis surrounding morally difficult health issues such as end-of-life care and organ donation. He is also the Jewish Law Live columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He has previously served as the founding director of the Tikvah Overseas Student Institute and co-dean of Tikvah Online Academy, a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, and as a junior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. His writings have been cited in Israeli Supreme Court decisions and appeared in a wide variety of publications including First Things, Tablet, The Forward, and the Jewish Review of Books. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, he received rabbinic ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an MA in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University, and his PhD from Bar Ilan University Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of genuine engagement on the personal, cultural, and political levels -- but also as a person at times deeply affected by loss, dislocation, and marginalization. David Gottlieb earned his PhD, studying under Professor Mendes-Flohr in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in 2018. He teaches at Spertus Institute in Chicago, and is the author of the forthcoming Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies