New Books in Jewish Studies

In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington DC, has assembled a number of scholars to give a comprehensive account of German Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st century. This volume will be the essential text on the topic for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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

How was Jewish life affected by the First World War? How did Jews around the world understand, engage with, and influence the Great War and surrounding events? And why has the impact of World War I so often overlooked Jewish historical narratives? In this fascinating and important new edited volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Berghahn Books, 2017), Marsha L. Rozenblit, the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, and Jonathan Karp, Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University, have assembled a diverse collection of impressive studies by junior and senior scholars that, taken together, answer these crucial questions. The essays in this volume work against past scholarship that has either glossed past the First World War as unimportant to understanding Jewish history, or teleologically characterized it as a precursor to the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. Examining the conflict from a long chronological perspective and broad, global lens, the authors successfully argue that the Great War and the events surrounding it speak to deeply researched trends in Jewish Studies in new and exciting ways. Thematic threads like belonging, identity, citizenship, and transnational connections weave together case studies examining the Jewish experience in New York, Paris, Salonika, Baghdad, and beyond. This very welcome addition to Jewish historiography, and literature on the global experience of the First World War more generally, is not to be missed. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016), Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto, considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage through the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education. She highlights a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. The Marriage Plot is a brilliant and provocative work which will be referenced for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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

While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish associational files, as well as victim accounts and testimonies, Fogg pulls the reader into complex and dynamic history of destruction, dispossession and recovery. She reveals the great extent to which French authorities and civilians participated in looting and spoliation. Moreover, Fogg works against the commonly accepted narrative that Jews were passive victims to destruction who silently returned to the remaining tatters of their prewar lives, arguing that survivors were active participants in the restitution process who engaged French and international Jewish organizations to assist with rebuilding. Engaging, skillfully researched, and deftly written, Fogg’s new book will make a valuable addition to both undergraduate syllabi and the bookshelves of seasoned historians of the Second World War and France. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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 Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForeEdge, 2017), David E. Fishman, Professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, tells the amazing story of the paper brigade of Vilna. The paper brigade were ghetto inmates who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts, hiding them first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets. This is a rare work that tells an amazing story in a very readable way, informed by years of expert research. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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 Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in Israel. She suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. In this revised and updated edition Lavie connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War, providing an extensive afterword that focuses on the developments in Mizraḥi feminist politics and culture between 2014 and 2016 and its relation to Palestinians. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work 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

Telling the history of the Holocaust in Hungary has long meant telling the story of 1944. Raz Segal, in his new book Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), reminds us that this is only part of the story, and that focusing on 1944 misleads us about the nature of the violence in Hungary and in much of Eastern Europe. Segal’s book examines at a small area in the Carpathian mountains. By beginning in the 1800s, he is able to show that shared experiences and worldview shaped this area much more than national or religious differences. He then narrates the emergence of tensions in the interwar period. Finally, he explains how the vision of a greater Hungary cleansed of its minorities drove persecution, ethnic cleansing and death in the region during the Second World War. Segal uses this region to reexamine our assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence across Europe shared a common motivation and goal. Instead, he argues there were parallel Holocausts which differed in nature and motivation. And he calls into question our casual use of terms such as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘bystander,’ pleading for more nuance and care. In doing so, his examination of a small region in the Carpathians leads readers to big questions important across the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. 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 her new book, Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State University Press 2017), Rachel Harris presents one of the first comprehensive studies of the place and role of women in Israeli cinema and Israeli society more widely. Looking at a variety of films from the early days of Israeli cinema until today, Harris examines some of the particular challenges women in Israel face, including military service, ethnic and national discrimination (Mizrahi, Arab) and issues of labor and migration. Yaron Peleg is Kennedy-Leigh Reader in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is, Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Was the Hebrew Psalter purposefully shaped and arranged by editors to convey a particular theological message? Adam Hensley says yes. By examining the relationship between the Davidic covenant and the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, he suggests the editors understood these covenants as a theological unity, whose common fulfillment centers on an anticipated royal successor to David. Join us as we talk with Adam Hensley about his recent book: Covenant Relationships and the Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (T&T Clark, 2018). Adam D. Hensley is Old Testament Lecturer at Australian Lutheran College in Australia. His PhD was earned at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author ofThe Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). 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

What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory? In her new book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mary Fulbrook uses diaries, memoirs, and trials to recover the full spectrum of suffering and guilt. By exposing the disconnect between official myths and unspoken realities of post-war justice, Mary illuminates the changing public attitudes to perpetrators and survivors. Mary Fulbrook is a Professor of German History at University College London. Her numerous books cover modern Germany, its two dictatorships, the Holocaust, and questions of historical interpretation. She currently directs the AHRC Compromised Identities project on the character and personal legacies of perpetration and complicity. Fulbrook is also a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the former concentration camps Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora as well as the Editorial Boards of German Politics and Society and Zeithistorische Forschungen. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. 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 would Israelites have understood their nation’s covenant relationship with Yahweh? Dr. Robert Miller II offers a study of the Old Testament language of covenant within its ancient context, especially in light of Assyrian ideology. His study reveals that ‘covenant’ really meant ‘grace.’ Tune in as we talk with Robert Miller about this important theological concept Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (Gorgias Press, 2012). Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012), and The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations (2018). Robert teaches courses in Old Testament, the ancient Near East, and Archaeology. 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), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). 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

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of understanding the ourselves and the world around us. Todays interview seeks to uncover when, and how this began. In his ambitious new book, Philo’s Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (Academic Studies Press, 2017), Luis Cortest finds in Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic philosopher who lived in first century Alexandria, the origins of a philosophic curriculum and method that would frame many of the concerns of medieval philosophy. Though a long millennium separates them, after opening with Philo, the heart of the book is dedicated to a comparison of Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides in which Cortest uncovers a subtle genealogy that begins with Philo: how to read the Bible allegorically and do so through the lenses of Plato and Aristotle. All three thinkers ask: what is the role of religion in the establishment of politics and law, was the world created, what is God and does he shape world events? Rather than retrace the obvious, Philo’s Heirs encourages us to tease out the subterranean influences that animate the big questions of the western philosophic tradition and to think broadly, across large time periods and geographies, to answer these questions in our own day. Professor Luis Cortest is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the University of Oklahoma. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He can’t recall whether “the crisis” is in the humanities or with humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan, who complicates these often-asked questions in his new book Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories (Indian University Press, 2017). As we discuss, the title of this book is not an invitation to imagine an alternate history; rather, it is a provocation to notice how the key terms of this title get framed together in a variety of complicated, troubled, and sometimes dissonant ways — both by historians and by the protagonists of this history. A noteworthy and widely-read historian of German, Jewish, and Modern culture, Spector here targets the historiography of these fields and seeks to shake up the patterns and terms that have become all too stable within it. Modernism Without Jews? takes its readers through a series of case studies with short and dense chapters on Edith Stein, Sigmund Freud, Max Brod, the term “secularism,” Franz Kafka, and more. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about all of those figures, plus Hugo Bettauer’s satirical 1922 novel City Without Jews, Gershom Scholem’s multiple reframings of his Jewish, German, and German-Jewish identities, and the complicated, existential operations involved in framing relationships between texts and contexts, persons and histories. Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year. In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide during the Second World War. In the chapters of Ordinary Workers, readers will find a rich history of the social and political consciousness of railway workers in France that reaches back to the nineteenth century. Considering Vichy a turning point for cheminot political engagement and activism, the book accords an important place to the question of the resistance of railway workers to the transport of French Jews and other victims during the war. Ordinary Workers also shows that questions of integrity and commitment were paramount for this distinct labour group of thousands of men (and very few women) whose sense of professional identity was intimately tied up with the trains and rail lines they served. Their increased resistance during the Occupation included theft and protest. Sabotage, however, remained an extreme action for these workers who loved their machines and held colleague and passenger safety as high priorities. Drawing on a range of materials, including company archives, memoirs and postwar testimonies, as well as interviews the author conducted with cheminots throughout France, Ordinary Workers poses serious questions about the beliefs, everyday lives, and actions of a professional group whose experiences, choices, and stories connected French national spaces and politics during a most difficult period of the nation’s history. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

With rates of interfaith marriage steadily increasing since the middle of the twentieth century, interfaith families have become a permanent and significant feature of the religious landscape in the United States. In her recent book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Samira Mehta analyzes the depiction of interfaith families across a wide array of popular media and examines how interfaith families negotiate and blend their religious traditions within a single family unit. Mehta also examines how cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity interact and impact the religious praxis of interfaith families. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. 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 his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examines how ordinary Italians became willing perpetrators and actively participated in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943 and 1945. Levis Sullam challenges long held notions that Italians were largely resistant to deportations and protective of their Jewish neighbors. Through detailing the actions of ordinary Italians as they participated in arrests, looting and betrayals he dismantles the myth of italiani brava gente- the “good Italians.” This concise book does much to correct a tremendous blind spot in the history of the Holocaust in Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of Ladino writing may have a much earlier start date than scholars have previously thought. Borovaya makes her argument by focusing on the 16th-century vernacular literature of Moses Almosnino, a writer who was famous not only among Ottoman Sephardim, but also Jews and Christians throughout Europe. According to Borovaya, most scholars of Ladino literature of have placed the birth of genre in the 18th century, largely due to a false belief that works of high-culture were not composed in Ladino. She works against the assumption that Ladino was only used in popular, “folksy” writing, and the flawed categorization of high register Sephardi literature—like that of Moses Almosnino—as “Spanish” or “Castilian.” This tendency, Borovaya argues, wrongly implies that texts aimed at an educated audience were never written in the Ladino. Through in depth discussions of Almosnino’s epistles, chronicles, and travelogues, Borovaya convincingly shows that his vernacular literature belongs to the Ladino corpus. His work was widely read among Sephardi intellectuals from the 16th to 20th centuries, meaning that Ladino was indeed a language educated used in material written for the educated elite, and not just the popular masses. Ladino, Borovaya tells us, was similar to other languages (including Yiddish) in that it had multiple functional styles. Dr. Olga Borovaya is a Visiting Scholar at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (IUP). Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research. Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. 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 café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journalists, poets, and thinkers gathered in cafés to socialize, argue, create, and simply to be in a space that welcomed them. In A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), Shachar M. Pinsker, Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, provides a rich and detailed portrait of café life in six major centers of Jewish life and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book is a welcome addition to the study of European Jewish thought and culture, and to the understanding of the motive forces behind Jewish creativity during a period that included large-scale emancipation, immigration, and destruction in the Jewish world. David Gottlieb earned his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago in 2018. He serves on the teaching faculty of Claremont Lincoln University, and teaches for Orot: The Center for New Jewish Learning in Chicago. 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 Beyond Post-Zionism (SUNY Press, 2015), Eran Kaplan locates the post-Zionist debates, which have brought into question some of the core tenets of Zionist ideology, within the context of the changes that Israeli society and culture have undergone over the past three decades. Beyond Post Zionism also explores some of the key post-Zionist arguments—that Zionism at its core was a colonialist and orientalist movement—by offering a new analysis of key Zionist and Israeli texts from a perspective that emphasizes the historical conditions behind the rise of the Jewish national movement and its growth. One of the book’s core arguments is that Post Zionism was an ideology that arose out of the optimism of the last two decades of the previous century, when economic and political developments led some in Israel to assert that Jewish nationalism and the Jewish state were historical anachronisms standing in the way of integrating Israel into the global market and the new world order. In Beyond Post Zionism Kaplan suggests that the series of political crises that Israel has experienced in the new millennium may suggest that the state and its institutions may yet be relevant in the lives of contemporary Israelis just as early Zionism had been for many Jews in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, while holding the promise for a resolution of the conflicts that have consumed public life in Israel from its inception. Yaron Peleg is the Kennedy-Leigh Reader in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). 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 Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, presents the first in-depth study of what is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories. From Heine’s ironic lizards to Kafka’s Red Peter and Siodmak’s Wolf Man, this monograph brings together Jewish cultural studies and critical animal studies to ferret out these writers’ engagement with the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were identified. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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 Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. This biography suggests that the ‘non-Jewish’ Communist Jew was not as irreconcilably opposed to the ‘Jewish’ Jew as has previously been thought. It is an extraordinary work that will be referenced for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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

Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish history. In it, Professor Eliyahu Stern recontextualizes a group of Jewish thinkers who sought to understand the ways in which Jewish identity could be interpreted not in terms of law, tradition, and ritual practice, but, after an engagement with the thought of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, in terms of land, labor, and bodies. “Jewish materialists” asked what it meant to be a Jew in a period when rabbinic authority waned, and the physical pressures of poverty and anti-semitism dominated daily life, a time when to be religious was an economic choice. The central chapters of the book focus on several different forms of materialism – what Stern terms social, scientific, and practical materialisms – best captured in the works of figures such as Rabbi Joseph Sossnitz, Moses Leib Lilienblum, and Marxists Aaron Shmuel Lieberman and Isaac Kaminer. Using vast archival sources, Stern builds out this new framework and uncovers the ways in which, without an understanding of their materialist context these thinkers have been misrepresented by their biographers and in their collected works, often as a result of their posthumous adoption by competing ideologies. Rather than framing this narrative as a lachrymose story of secularism, the inevitable rejection of religion, Jewish Materialism highlights how this group of thinkers found renewed meaning in the Bible and Kabbalah, and it discovers a Jewish genealogy that took notions physicality and social justice seriously. The consequences of this intellectual revolution foreshadows with profound effect the competitive marketplace of Jewish political ideologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only did they leave a legacy of distinctly Jewish materialist thought, but a reinterpretation of the Jewish intellectual tradition as well. After reading this book it is hard not to see the events of the 20th Century in a new and richer light, and to ask, what are the stakes of Jewish identity? Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History at Yale University. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He often describes himself as a young Hannibal Buress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

People have long been captivated by stories of dragons. Myths related to dragon slaying can be found across many civilizations around the world, even among the most ancient cultures including ancient Israel. In his book The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations, Robert Miller chronicles the trajectories and transformations of this myth, and brings out the major role of dragon slaying in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about an age-old, fascinating topic: dragons! Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His other books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), and Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012). Robert teaches courses in Old Testament, the ancient Near East, and Archaeology. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author ofThe Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). 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

Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Waitman Beorn gives us a detailed overview of the Holocaust precisely here, in what he well called “the Epicenter of the Final Solution.” Waitman does an excellent job of describing Eastern European Jewry, the crooked path the Nazis took in deciding to attempt to obliterate it, the various ways in which they put that horrible decision into practice, and the ways the Jews resisted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. In his new book Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2016), Yaron Peleg explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work 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

“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017) . The title carries a measure of Chaouat’s characteristically ironic, self-deprecatory, yet polemical tone. So, Chaouat wonders, in both winking reference to the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish tribalism and self-involvement, and at the same time in all sincerity, whether “Theory” – in particular the canon of philosophy, literature, and social thought that grew largely out of Heideggerian roots and which continues to find contemporary purchase – is able to use its own tools to deal with today’s resurgent strains of anti-Semitism. In this episode, Chaouat discusses several recent events in French letters, including the 2010 publication of writer, diplomat and French Resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto Time for Outrage and novelist Salim Bachi’s literary op-ed, “Moi, Mohammed Merah,” a fictionalized account of the 2012 Toulouse attacks, told from the point of view of the murderer. We also talk about earlier influential figures, such as Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and discuss how the vocabularies they invented, which they used to retool ideas of evil, transgression, and “our common inhumanity,” come to be recoded in service of a new “moralistic turn.” Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. 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 her new book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018), Rebecca Erbelding examines the War Refugee Board created by FDR in 1944 near the conclusion of World War II. At the center of the books narrative, she places the numerous efforts to save Jews from Nazi control areas. The book also highlights the young and dedicated individuals who made up the War Refugee Board and how their passion and zeal led to the rescue of tens of thousands of innocent people. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that although America started too late in their efforts save the Jews of Europe, the War Refugee Board made a significant impact and should be viewed as a success. 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 did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015). Walke’s research is based largely on post-war oral histories and memoirs, and her sources include a number of interviews that she conducted herself. Walke examines the experiences of Jewish youth in a variety of contexts, including prewar daily life, ghetto persecution and survival, as well as participation in Soviet partisan units. In doing so, she reveals the complex interplay of (and at times, tension between) her subjects’ Jewish and Soviet identities. Walke highlights the enduring impact of 1930s Soviet policies of interethnic equality and solidarity, showing how memories of this period continue to frame survivors’ recollections of persecution and its aftermath decades later. Walke’s well-researched book not only deepens our understanding of genocide in Belorussia, but also speaks to the value of postwar testimony as a crucial resource for scholars of Jewish experiences before and after the violence of the Holocaust. Anika Walke is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a contentious figure, especially when it comes to his political activism. In the opinion of many, he did not go far enough in his political work, while others criticize his autobiographical work as euphemistic. Reason enough for Stephan Resch, Senior Lecturer for German Studies at the University of Auckland, to take a deeper look into Stefan Zweig’s work. 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 was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution? In Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shira Klein skillfully narrates the historical developments that belie this myth, and the complex process that have led to its perpetuation. By examining the experiences of Italian Jews during the Second World War from a wide chronological lens, Klein shows how the particular history of Italian Jews in the century prior to the Holocaust helped to mold their positive perception of Italy during and in the aftermath of genocide. Drawing from oral testimonies as well as unpublished memoirs, Klein reveals how a uniquely Jewish Italian patriotism was fostered in the decades leading up to (and even during) Fascism. Through their allegiance to Italy, she explains, many Jewish exiles and survivors themselves helped to spread the myth of Italian innocence. Shira Klein is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman University. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 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 Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Babylonian Talmud, the most studied book in the Jewish canon. Professor Wimpfheimer focuses on one excerpt from the Talmud, showing how its reception, exegesis, and editing represents a process of reflexive critique and legal reasoning. ​A valuable text for scholars and general readers alike, The Talmud: A Biography helps the reader gain new appreciation for the Talmud as a dense tapestry of religious thought, philosophy, law, and ethics that continues to influence not only the Jewish religion, but religious and secular cultures and institutions worldwide. David Gottlieb will receive his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in June. 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 Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the parts, a sustained effort to explore human identity and difference. In centuries past, Avoda Zara has been a flashpoint in Jewish-Christian relations. It was partly due to its content that the Talmud was subject to burning and censorship by Christian authorities. Wasserman develops a twenty-first-century reading of the tractate that aims to reposition it as part of a broader quest to understand what connects human beings to each other and to the world around them. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about studying Poland. It was an engaging chat with a young woman very interested in exploring Poland and the relationship between Poles and Jews in contemporary Poland. Erica Lehrer‘s Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013) is the flower of that research, and it has been worth the wait. In the popular imagination, one of the most common tropes about contemporary Poland is that it is a land where Anti-Semitism thrives without any Jews. Sadly, the current PiS government’s policies regarding Polish history have only reinforced that judgment, but the story is much more complex, and in fact the first two decades of the post-Communist order saw a revival of interest in Jewish culture among Poles. At the same time, the end of Communism has also made traveling to Poland less daunting, with Jewish travelers among those eager to make sense of their heritage. Erica’s book is a thoughtful exploration of these phenomena. Through the book we learn about a wide variety of heritage tourism from group tours for young Jews where the Holocaust and the inhospitality of Poland to Jews is the focus to individuals who are captivated and intrigued by the complexity of the lengthy history of Polish and Jewish relations. At the same time we are introduced to Poles who have become stewards of Jewish culture as well as Poles who have rediscovered their own Jewish heritage. It is a fascinating book that is all the more important to read right now. It was a pleasure to talk to Erica Lehrer about her book. 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 his new book, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), Professor Michael Brenner, a historian of Jews and of Israel who teaches both at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at American University in Washington, DC, offers a history of the Zionist idea, and the debates over its embodiment in 70 years of Israeli statehood. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work 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

In When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017), Michal Kravel Tovi, associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, offers an intimate, insightful ethnography of the current field of Jewish conversion in Israel. It highlights the complex and often conflicted nature of an intimate, individual religious performance that is at once and the same time also one of the most pressing political issues in contemporary Israeli sociopolitics. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work 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

In today’s episode, I am joined by Joshua Parens to discuss his innovative and engaging book Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy (University of Rochester Press, 2016). While one may easily confuse the book with something narrow or parochial—who is Leo Strauss and of what relevance is medieval political philosophy?—our discussion proved to be anything but. In arguing against the commonly held belief that Medieval Philosophy was simply a synthesis of Greek thought with the Bible, Parens reads the works of Alfarabi and Maimonides, two of the most influential pre-modern philosophers, through the works of Leo Strauss, the foremost political thinker of the 20th century. This subtle layering makes for an exciting braided text, cross-pollination between epochs that contextualizes these thinkers on their own terms as well as genealogically. For Parens, the “theological-political problem” at the core of Leo Strauss’ work is neither strictly one of reason or of revelation but rather at the heart of metaphysics—of being and the relationship between morality and philosophy. In working out Strauss’ unfolding thinking on this problem the reader is guided through competing visions of the study of medieval philosophy and the manner in which Strauss re-centered the work of political thought from a scholastic setting to that of the Islamic world. At its heart lies the question of what Leo Strauss means by “political philosophy,” and thereby a long history from Plato through Maimonides and Alfarabi to the present day. Joshua Parens is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas. He edits the series Rochester Studies in Medieval Political Thought. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes, shipwrecked, from a desert island somewhere in the Mediterranean. 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 we are joined by Kevin Simpson, the author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). In Soccer under the Swastika, Simpson recovers a largely forgotten history of the sports during Holocaust. Through a close reading of wartime memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and records from camps across Europe including Thereseinstadt and Auschwitz, Simpson illustrates the politicization of sports by the Nazi regime, traces the diverse histories of soccer in the Nazi camp system, and shines a light on the lives to the various sportsmen who competed behind the barbed wire. He discovers a complicated sports system that simultaneously existed to entertain the inmates and the Nazis, created a privileged class of athlete-prisoners that frequently received better rations and treatment, and ultimately restored the humanity of athletes that took to the fields and the spectators that enjoyed watching them play. The histories Simpson uncovers span Europe, centering on the Jewish clubs, like Hakoah Vienna, that dominated European soccer in the interwar period, but also encompassing teams as far west as the Netherlands and deep in Soviet Ukraine. Throughout his analysis, Simpson emphasizes the individual agency of soccer players who used their sport to maintain their identities in spite of Nazi persecution, reestablish their Jewish communities in displaced persons camps after the war, and even find spaces for joy and triumph inside of the death camps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Mira Balberg‘s Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2017) delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. Balberg traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, reinventing them as a site through which to negotiate intellectual, cultural, and religious trends and practices in their surrounding world. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to generate a non-sacrificial version of Judaism, she argues that the rabbis developed a new sacrificial Jewish tradition altogether, consisting of not merely substitutes to sacrifice but elaborate practical manuals that redefined the processes themselves, radically transforming the meanings of sacrifice, its efficacy, and its value. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. 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 How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bernuth’s book joins together a historical analysis of early modern and modern German and Yiddish literature to give us a compelling and insightful account of the history of these stories. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative (3). Khmelnytsky’s seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is—depending on your point-of-view—an event of national liberation, treacherous factionalism, murderous pogrom, or personal vendetta, (again) with plenty of overlap. And the image of the Cossack warrior, the free horseman on the open steppe, serves as many narratives, right up to the present day with Mr. Putin’s twenty-first century Ukrainian land grab. On today’s podcast, Professor Glaser speaks about this remarkable figure and the issues at stake. Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, and also Director of the Jewish Studies Program at UCSD. Dr. Glaser is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russias Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (2012), and editor, with David Weintraub, of Protelpen: Americas Rebel Yiddish Poets (2012). She has also written a number of scholarly and popular articles including a recent piece for the New York times about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. 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 did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, explores these questions in her new book, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wallach examines an array of cultural texts including film, artwork, periodicals, and fiction in order to determine the different circumstances in which individuals sought to pass as non-Jewish, openly reveal their Jewishness, or were exposed as Jewish against their will. The concepts behind this complex history of private vs. public identities, Wallach demonstrates, can be applied beyond a study of Jewishness in the Weimar era, and can also shed new light on the way that scholars consider gender and sexuality as well as racial stereotypes outside of German and Jewish contexts. Kerry Wallach is Chair and Associate Professor of German Studies at Gettysburg College. She is also an affiliate of their Judaic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs, and serves on the editorial board of Indiana University Press German-Jewish Cultures book series. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert Park mobilized ideas and ideologies about Jews to conceptualize the big themes of modernity. Goldberg shows for example how inherited schemas, which had historically painted Jews as both backwards “Orientals” and, at the same time, as ultra-modern cosmopolitans, were mobilized consciously and unconsciously to serve different sociological theories. That is, as Goldberg illustrates, because of their contradictory and ambivalent status within the European imagination, the Jew became a central object of study and a key symbol for social theorists, a symbol that they found useful for thinking through the contradictions and ambivalences of nationhood and citizenship in France, economics and power in Germany, and urbanization and assimilation in the United States. As Goldberg writes, in a phrase borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, “Jews were good to think.” In this episode, we talk about Durkheim’s reactions to the reactionary right, and how his view about Jews may have informed other aspects of his thought; we talk about the Chicago schools idea of assimilation, which, as Goldberg argues, begins with recognizing the “marginal man” as a key character of the Modern era and ends with a vision of diversity and collaboration; we talk about the two different ways Karl Marx depicted Jews and their relationship to capital and to European history; and we talk about how the Jew or rather, the figure of the Jew continues to serve “as an intermediary for self-reflection in our own time.” Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bonnie Anderson explores the life of a remarkable 19th-century activist who dedicated herself to changing society for the better. Even as a young girl growing up in Russian-occupied Poland, Rose questioned the limitations imposed her by the beliefs of her time. As a teenager, she resisted the demands of her community and set out on her own by moving to Berlin. From there she made her way to London, where she encountered Robert Owen and embraced his philosophy. Upon her move to the United States in 1836 she became a public speaker and activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others to change public opinion and advance reform. Though Rose saw her efforts to end slavery vindicated with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ill health forced her to return to England just a few years later, where she continued to campaign for women’s suffrage up to the end of her long life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Motti Inbari accesses recently obtained archival materials and personal correspondence in order to depict the dominant personalities of ultra-Orthodox movements from the late 19th through the 20th centuries, and ​how those movements continue to confront and resist modernity. Inbari, associate professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, provides historical, psychological, and ideological perspectives on these complex and often competitive movements in Jewish religious life, in both Israel and the Diaspora. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. 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

Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure, its leadership and perhaps most controversially, the role of women in the movement. Unlike other historians who have attributed the rise of Hasidism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to either social, political, or economic crises, Rapoport-Albert refuses to ignore the spiritual dimensions and efforts on the part Hasidism to renew religious practice. While others see a strict periodization in which there was a self-conscious founding and institutionalization, here we are given the sense of an organic pietistic movement informed by the Kabbalistic tradition but open to society rather than ascetic, and nurtured by a productive opposition. Moreover, rather than conceding to the common characterization of Hasidism as a folkish and populist movement, Hasidic Studies complicates this picture by uncovering a Hasidism that was shaped around its charismatic leaders. Throughout, the question of sources plays a central role, and rather than ignore as biased the attempts of Hasidim to write their own history, Rapoport-Albert excavates from these documents crucial evidence embedded unconsciously or matter-of-factly. The second half of the book attacks the apologetic representations of Hasidism as either egalitarian or proto-feminist – as giving women a new sense of “spiritual agency”—by showing them to be excluded from leadership as a rule and a family life divorced from traditional structures. Often Hasidism has been cast as a continuation of early modern heretical movements, particularly the messianic movement that arose around Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Rapoport-Albert argues that Hasidism was in fact a retreat towards stricter traditional values, particularly regarding the prominent position given to women in the Sabbatean movement and its sexual mores. In Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbtai Zevi 1666 – 1816, a study of the life and afterlife of the messianic movement that arose around the messianic figure of Sabbtai Zevi, Rapoport-Albert sees female spirituality as its hallmark. Here women act as a key to the movement as a whole and in understanding its relationship to normative Judaism. The book suggests a movement with a feminist-like agenda in which women play an integral part of the messianic community—as leaders, prophets, and spiritual activists—in its reading into the nature of heresy, mysticism, and community in the early modern period. The two books are intertwined, not only thematically and as foils to one another, but by a methodological sophistication and sensitivity as well; Professor Rapoport-Albert presents a perspective deeply embedded in primary sources, that shines new light on modern Jewish history. Ada Rapoport-Albert is Emerita Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he sometimes wonders about the nature of political structures in the local cat community. 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 Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Harvard University Press, 2018), Eric T. Jennings reveals the fascinating history of the Martinique Corridor, a pathway travelled by thousands of political refugees who fled mainland France in the early years of the Second World War. Jennings deftly describes the array of obstacles faced by individuals seeking escape to Martinique, from difficulty dealing with French bureaucracy, to the perils of traveling by sea in wartime, to hostile reception by locals and officials after disembarking at shores of the French colony. Unable to reach their intended destinations in North, Central, and South America, many of refugees found themselves trapped on the island. According to Jennings, this led to numerous accidental and fruitful encounters between the motley crew of refugees (which included numerous renowned artists and intellectuals) and prominent local thinkers. Their unlikely interactions fostered new waves of thinking about racism and colonialism. Eric T. Jennings is a professor of history at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with Victoria College. He is the author of numerous publications including Vichy in the Tropics(Stanford University Press, 2004), Curing the Colonizers: Hydroptherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Duke University Press, 2006), and Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 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 do immigrant populations navigate between ancestral ties and connections to their new homes? How do their plural histories create layered identities, and how do those identities change over time? Adriana M. Brodsky, Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, explores answers to these questions through an examination of Sephardi immigrants in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Argentina. Her book, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2016), paints a complex picture of the myriad forces that worked to construct Sephardi Argentine identity from without and within. Brodsky problematizes the groups identity (or identities) from a variety of lenses to show how Sephardi immigrants in Argentina have a history that is both fractured and united. She analyzes the structural layout of Jewish cemeteries, communal associations, Zionism, women’s movements, and educational and marriage patterns, ultimately revealing that the Sephardi community while was often divided based on regions of origin, it also actively and strategically came together in times of political need. Her fascinating study speaks to the importance of studying the diversity of Jewish immigrant populations in Argentina and beyond. Adriana M. Brodsky is Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well. While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany. Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 . Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon. 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 German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as well as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, focuses on the changing form, fate, and function of messianism, law, exile, election and remembrance in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism and the current period. Liska’s book challenges and historicizes postmodern and contemporary takes on German-Jewish thinkers. She leaves us with a set of new and unanswered questions in this very interesting and provocative book. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. 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