New Books in Jewish Studies

Nathan Schneider‘s monograph, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet (University of California Press, 2013), explores the timeless challenge of how to explain God. Are such explanations rational? Why are some attempts more popular than others? Indeed, can one really “prove” God? Isn’t it called “faith” for a reason? And what does Star Trek have to do with all of this? In addressing these questions, and many more, Schneider guides the reader through a rich land of storytelling, autobiographical reflections, and clever drawings. As the author submits in the book from its onset, don’t expect to discover which proof is right or why atheists are wrong. It turns out, in any case, that “proof” doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. Although proof can mean unimpeachable evidence, a proof can also be a work in progress (e.g., the proof of a text); or it can mean to tackle a challenge (e.g., to prove oneself). As Schneider convincingly argues, moreover, proofs for God have scarcely focused on mitigating doubt. They have been works of devotion and profoundly personal revelations. These proofs have also remained tied intimately to particular socio-historical contexts, but Schneider points out that despite this, the world of proofs is also a world of relationships and shared ideas in which Muslims, Jews, Christians, philosophers, and many others draw upon the ideas of one another. Schneider’s combined background in journalism and academia helps in rendering his complex and sometimes mind-boggling subject digestible to both general and scholarly audiences with polyvalent interests and beliefs about God. 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 medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth, or as an exegesis of rabbinical texts. In The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Harvard University Press, 2013), Josef Stern provides an entirely distinct reading of this singular work. Stern, William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, argues that for Maimonides, reason and religion are just one domain, not two that need to be reconciled; that biblical parable is a literary device used to articulate our incomplete understanding of truths about general welfare and individual happiness; and that Maimonides is primarily motivated by the question of what the best attainable human life can be given our embodied nature. The Guide is in effect a primer that trains the reader to tease apart the multiple meanings of biblical texts – even though these exercises will not yield knowledge of metaphysics and cosmology, including knowledge of God. Stern combines deep familiarity with Maimonides, his works, and his intellectual environment with expertise in contemporary philosophy of language in this major contribution to historical-philosophical scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films -largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson‘s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013). As she ventures across three continents to uncover the stories behind these films, we follow her adventures, eager to learn what happened, why, when – and what comes next. This page-turning exploration begins with the first-ever films made about the Nazi threat to Jewish life in the 1930s – artistically successful movies released to crowded theaters in the USSR, Europe, and the US. The power of film being what it is, some 1930s viewers learned the lesson of Nazi hatred and fled to safety when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. Immediately after the war, Soviet filmmakers again broke new ground when in 1945 they portrayed the Holocaust in “The Unvanquished.” The war just over, Soviet censors, Gershenson discovered, had no set policy and hardly knew how Stalin wanted them to respond. But the respected filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein supported the film, a movie featuring Jewish victims filmed on site in Kiev; it became one of the few Soviet movies that identified the Holocaust with Jews. Thereafter, the Holocaust would be a universal problem sans Jews that occurred anywhere but in the USSR. Among the stories that Gershenson relates, she raises the curtain on “Ordinary Fascism,” a blockbuster when it was released in the USSR in 1966. The three-hour black-and-white documentary montage, narrated by its famous director Mikhail Romm, apparently drew 20 million Soviets to cinemas before it was withdrawn. Gershenson describes Ordinary Fascism as “a real breakthrough,” “stunning,” and an explosion.” Romm’s irreverent, casual commentary to Nazi newsreels, footage, photos, and art explored the psychology of Nazism – and, viewers recognized, made Soviets reflect on themselves. Why did Soviet censors refuse to permit a book on the subject to be released? Censors explained that a film would be seen once and forgotten. A book, on the other hand, would start people thinking! As Gershenson explains: “Half of all Holocaust victims…were killed on Soviet soil, mostly in swift machine-gun executions. And yet, watching popular Holocaust movies…the impression is that Holocaust victims were mainly Polish and German Jews killed in concentration camps.” Her stories explain why Soviet filmmakers almost never shared the Soviet Holocaust experience on the screen. Gershenson’s book has a partner website. Here you can find video clips of featured films, with subtitles. 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 question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jewish atrocities, the great bulk of the army neither knew about nor participated in the Nazi genocidal program. In other words, the identified cases were isolated exceptions. Who was at fault? Why, the SS of course. This view was spread by German generals in post-war memoirs, by the German government and courts, and by the German press and the public that read it. The “Good Wehrmacht” image was influential: many people–including scholars of the war–in countries that had fought Germany could be found rehearsing it. In his eye-opening book Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard UP, 2013), Waitman Beorn challenges the “Good Wehrmacht” image. By focusing on a few units that participated in the invasion and occupation of Belarus in the late summer and fall of 1941, he is able to show without any doubt whatsoever that regular Wehrmacht forces not only participated in executions of Jews and others, but initiated them. The leaders of these units ordered them to aid the Einsatzgruppen in organizing mass murder and to actively hunt down “partisans” who were nothing but innocent Jews. Waitman does an excellent job of not only documenting Wehrmacht complicity, but also of trying to explain it. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

From her first book about the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Leora Batnitzky has been heralded as a rising star in contemporary Jewish thought and the philosophy of religion. Batnitzky, a professor of Jewish studies and chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the social construction of religion, the origins of Judaism, and her latest book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011). This interview originally appeared on Counterpoint with Jonathan Judaken on WKNO-FM. 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 first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken, 2013) offers readers an encounter with the great Yiddish author himself. Dauber writes in the rhythm of the language of Sholem Aleichem – Mr. How Do You Do – brilliantly structuring the book as a drama, with an overture, five acts, and an epilogue in ten scenes. He assumes the voice of a theater impresario, talking to his audience, just as the author Sholem Aleichem did, narrating his stories and reading them to the crowds whom he loved to entertain. The author Sholem Aleichem, most famous for his Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, was no Tevye, but rather a sophisticated and educated cosmopolitan businessman and writer. He possessed immense curiosity about every man, a unique ear for interesting stories, and the ability to connect with his audience; these talents ultimately united his life with Tevye’s. Although he could very well write in Russian and Hebrew, ultimately he chose Yiddish, the most natural language of the people whom he loved, to tell his universal stories of tradition confronting modernity and the struggles of people to deal with change. Read this engaging and very well written book to learn more about Sholem Aleichem and fall in love with this man and his writings. 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 conviction that the Messiah is coming is a promise of meaning. It is a source of consolation. It is a wellspring of creativity. It is reconciliation between what is and what should be. And it is perhaps our most powerful statement of faith–in God, in humanity and in ourselves.” –The Messiah and the Jews, Chapter 1: The Messiah is Coming Written for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike, Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman‘s The Messiah and the Jews: Three Thousand Years of Tradition, Belief and Hope (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013) makes the 3000-year-old Jewish view of the messiah accessible and relevant to today’s reader. Nearly unknown today, the Jewish concept of the Messiah–the promise of redemption–among Judaism’s gifts to the world -includes vivid accounts of the end of days, warriors, apocalypse, even the female heroine Hephzibah, mother of the messiah according to one rare but very important account. Rabbi Glickman shares the Jewish tradition of the messiah in a very readable book that includes many memorable descriptions that enrich the reader’s appreciation of Jewish tradition – explanations of traditions that readers may have experienced without having previously known of their relationship with Jewish yearning for the coming of the messiah. The book concludes with the concept that we can “make the vision of the universe redeemed a reality and provide a foretaste of redemption in our lives today. I recommend this book highly. Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman brings together, and to life, this three-thousand-year-old tradition. She explores for the English-language reader an astonishing range of primary and secondary sources many not accessible in English, explaining in an informative and even inspirational manner these teachings’ significance for Jews of the past, while at the same time she infuses them with new meaning for the modern reader, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

There are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadians. These are tiny–a realist might say “insignificant”–nations. But here’s the funny–though that doesn’t seem like the right world–thing. One of them is the focus of a persistent, virulent, worldwide prejudice, an intense hostility that is totally out of proportion with its size and, the realist would add, significance. And you know exactly which one it is. In his eye-opening book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (Little, Brown and Co., 2013), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen explores the historical origins of anti-semitism in Europe and its remarkable spread after the Second World War. It is, at least to me, a bizarre and discouraging story. There is, of course, no rational basis for anti-semitism per se. Yet it is everywhere, part of national cultures and discourses throughout the world. This is true where there are Jews (always in tiny numbers) and it is true where there are no Jews at all (as in most of the developing world). Goldhagen does a masterful job of describing the migration of anti-semitism from Europe to everywhere else and works hard to explain it. I don’t know if even he would say he succeeded in the latter task because, well, the entire phenomenon seems to defy rational explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust. If you do a search for the word “Holocaust” on Amazon (as I just did), you get 18,445 results. That’s just in English, and just books available right now on Amazon. Admittedly this is a poor search strategy to use if constructing a bibliography, but it gives you a decent approximation of the challenge you face in trying to learn about the Holocaust. Dan Stone, then, has done the field a great service in writing his book Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010. In this work, Stone attempts to provide a critical guide to the questions and interpretations most important to the field at this moment. In doing so, he summarizes an enormous amount of reading and learning into a couple hundred pages while offering his own thoughtful interpretations. This book is one of the first places to start if you want to get an overview of recent scholarship on the holocaust. A brief note about the sound quality of the interview. Skype was a bit wonky (to use the technical term) the day we did the interview, so the sound during the first ten or twelve minutes or so is just a bit fuzzy. After that it clears up and the remainder of the interview is crystal clear. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she directed that the portraits and landscapes that she and her husband had in their home be given to the Austrian Gallery. But after Adele died, life changed for Jews in Vienna: in 1938, the Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s henchmen commandeered Adele’s home and helped themselves to paintings and other works of art. Her family survived, barely. When the war ended, Austria kept the Klimts. When the battle to recover the Klimt portrait resumed in Los Angles in the 1990s, O’Connor interviewed Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who spearheaded the family’s legal case. Working with Altmann was attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer and passionate advocate in the battle to recover the painting. Listen to this interview for further details of The Lady in Gold and read the book to learn more. (See the Artsy page on Klimt; it’s terrific.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual perpetrators killed. His new book, then, seems like something of a departure. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (W. W. Norton, 2010), examines the labor camp at Starachowice, Poland. Starting before the Nazi invasion, Browning tracks the members of the Jewish community in the region throughout the war, from their initial encounters with Nazi presence through their deportation to Auschwitz to their eventual return (or not) to their homes after the war. The book engages deeply questions of survival, resistance and community and family in the life of the Jewish captives. But, as Browning suggests during the interview, the book is really a continuation of his previous strategy of using case studies to shed light on questions of broad significance. This time, by studying a labor camp, Browning is able to examine both the captives and those who held them prisoner. The result is every bit as rich as his previous work. Browning speaks as carefully and thoughtfully as he writes. We talked both about the story he tells in the book and some of the methodological issues he confronted in writing it. There’s more in the book than we could get to in an hour. I hope you’ll listen to the interview and then go out and read the 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

You may have heard of a fellow named Ivan or John Demjanuik. He made the news–repeatedly over a 30 year period– because he was, as many people probably remember, a Nazi war criminal nick-named “Ivan the Terrible” for his brutal treatment of Jews (and others) in the Sobibor death camp. The trouble is, as Richard Rashke points out in his new book Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals (Delphinium, 2013), Demjanuik was not a Nazi, was not “Ivan the Terrible,” and, though he was certainly a guard at Sobibor, it’s not entirely clear what he did (though it was likely very bad). Again and again he was brought to trial for his alleged crimes. Again and again the courts failed to agree on what he had done. Demjaniuk was and remains something of a mystery, a vital mystery that we badly want to solve but cannot. After all, we need to know who is a war criminal and who is not. What’s most interesting about Demjaniuk–at least to this reader–is the moral complexity of his story. As Rashke shows, he was repeatedly compelled to make life and death choices as he tried to stay survive in Stalinist Russia, in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, and even after the war. He had options, but they were almost always bad ones, and often deadly ones. He was a “collaborator” to be sure. But, Rashke asks, what exactly is a “collaborator”? Could he have chosen differently and hoped to survive? Could he have acted “morally” in the context within which he found himself? Rashke says “yes.” Listen in and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Many people have probably heard of Betty Friedan, Bela Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin, all stars of Second Wave Feminism. They were also all Jewish (by heritage if not faith). As Melissa R. Klapper shows in her new book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), this was no accident. Freidan et al. inherited a rich tradition Jewish women’s activism in the U.S. These women did not burn their bras (it’s not clear that any feminists did, actually), but they did fight for the vote, for birth control, and for peace. In this interview, Melissa explains why, how, and to what extent they succeeded. 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 end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution. We now know much more about the mechanics of destruction in the East, about the interaction between center and periphery in planning and carrying out mass killings, and about the interaction between Germans, local inhabitants and Jews. Twenty years later, historians have begun to integrate these new studies into broad reexaminations of the Holocaust. Donald Bloxham has written one of the best of these. His book, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford UP, 2009), is a remarkable attempt to put the Holocaust into the broader context of global history. It’s analytical rather than narrative. Its arguments are careful and always attentive to nuance and complexity. And Bloxham demonstrates a deep understanding of research on the Holocaust and in the broader field of Genocide Studies. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, you will come out of this book having reconsidered what you thought you knew about the Holocaust and about European history in the first half 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

The 1970s and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict are quite possibly the two most depressing subjects an academic could study. With shag carpeting, disco, Watergate, malaise defining the former and an internecine and (seemingly) eternal clash characterizing the latter who on earth would want to study those topics in one monograph? Well, Gil Troy is up to that task. The McGill University history professor not only took up this unenviable task, he has penned a remarkable work, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford University Press, 2012). On the surface, Troy details Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s iconic 1975 speech at the United Nations that took issue with that body’s definition of Zionism as racism. The author’s work, however, is much more than the history of a speech. Troy expertly depicts the history of the contemporary Western left as it pertains to Israel and Zionism while also detailing the work and life of an American original, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. If you are at all interested in contemporary US political history or the modern Middle East–this is a must read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Are you looking for a good Hanukkah gift? A good Christmas gift? Heck, any gift? Or maybe you just want to read a terrific book? Well I’ve got just the ticket: Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin‘s, El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel (Basic Books, 2012). Stavans and Scheinkin team up to perform a minor miracle: they not only tell the story of hispanic crypto-Jews (conversos, marranos) in the Old and New Worlds, but they do it in the most entertaining, compelling way possible–with a great, moving, thought-provoking, and often funny (yes, funny) mystery. This is how popular history should be done. El Iluminado is–or should be–a model for all those scholars who want to bring their work to the public. I strongly urge you to take a look at the book and perhaps give it to someone you love. 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 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Gross’s interpretation of what happened–that radically anti-Semitic Poles murdered the Jews with little prompting from the Germans–was simply correct. But was it? This is the question Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tries to answer in The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Columbia University Press; East European Monographs, 2005). After an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the sources (which are imperfect at best), Chodakiewicz concludes that we don’t and will never know exactly what happened on that horrible July day in Jedwabne, but it was certainly more complicated and mysterious than Gross imagines. Chodakiewicz puts the massacre in its wider context or, perhaps more accurately, contexts. These include: Jedwabne itself, Polish life there, Jewish life there, the interaction between the two communities in the town, the Soviet occupation, the coming of the Germans, German policies toward Poles and Jews, the Polish resistance, Polish anti-Semitism, Polish anti-Communism, and the intersection of the two (“Zydokomuna“). No punches are pulled: Chodakiewicz places much of the blame for the atrocity squarely on the Poles (or, rather, some faction of them) in Jedwabne. But he puts their actions–insofar as we can know them–into a much wider frame and therefore helps us understand why they did what they did. 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 Crisis of Zionism, (Times Books, 2012), Peter Beinart, Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at The City University of New York, questions the long-term viability of the American Jewish community’s support for Israel. Beinart feels that liberal American Jews are feeling increasingly distanced from Israel as a result of Israel’s handling of its conflict with the Palestinians. In our interview, we talked about whether Barack Obama is America’s first “Jewish President,” how Debbie Wasserman Schultz let Democrats know when and whether they could applaud for Binyamin Netanyahu, and how Beinart’s critics have reacted to his arguments. Read all about it, and more, in Beinart’s controversial new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention. In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT Press, 2011), Robert Barsky casts a great deal more light upon Harris’s story. Exploring his involvement in the Avukah student group in the 1930s and 40s, Barsky shows how Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but also shaped the destinies of several influential thinkers. He also traces the course of the revolutionary programme of linguistic enquiry that Harris laid out, inspired by the example of theoretical physics, and how this ongoing work came to be regarded as eccentric by practitioners of the dominant contemporary research trends. In this interview, we discuss the utopian ideals of socialist Zionism, and the influence of Harris upon Chomsky’s political thought. We look at the contradictory facets of Zellig Harris as an individual. And we consider whether rationality is an unreasonable assumption, when it comes to inter-personal dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

“Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn’t.” This was how one of the Soviet Union’s most famous jazz singers and actors, Leonid Utyosov, concluded his memoirs. Utyosov was referring to his ironic relationship with the city of his birth and the source of so much of his material over the years: the city of Odessa, which he both ridiculed for its decadence and celebrated for the magic of its legends. Nostalgia and paradox are at the center of a new book by Jarrod Tanny, Assistant Professor of History at UNC Wilmington, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Indiana University Press, 2011). As the title indicates, the book is immersed in Jewish language — particularly Jewish humor — and Tanny delivers readers an inspired analysis of Odessa’s role in Soviet history as a city that fueled cultural irreverence throughout the humorlessness of the Tsarist and Soviet ages. Given the rather grim reputation left by Russian monarchy and communism, Tanny’s book is a refreshing and essential reminder that levity has played a central role in Soviet (and now Russian and Ukrainian) identity. City of Rogues and Schnorrers is at times a story of indirect resistance, but it’s also a chronicle of the evolution of Jewishness, first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. And more than a narrative only about Jewishness, Tanny’s book studies the cultural infusion that occurred in Old Odessa, explaining how Soviet culture at large came to take pride in Odessa’s mythology as a national treasure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

“Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America,” wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it’s not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much a modern city with its right-angled streets, buzzing markets, and cultural bricolage. “What Twain saw in the streets and courtyards of Odessa,” writes Charles King in his Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams, (W. W. Norton, 2011), “was a place that had cultivated like his homeland a remarkable ability to unite nationalities and reshape itself on its own terms, generation after generation.” However, what Twain failed to see King continues “was the city’s tendency to tip with deadly regularity over the precipice of self-destruction.” Odessa has always been a city of in-betweens. A Russian imperial outpost as it gestured to the north and a “window the Middle East” as it looked south. A Russian city that is closer to Vienna and Athens than Moscow and St. Petersburg. A city that is “in Russia but not of it.” King’s chronicles Odessa’s contradictory attributes and their impact on its identity. He asks how Odessa survived as a city of Enlightenment and Holocaust, high culture and revolutionary violence, multiculturalism and ethnic hatred, a bastion of freedom and victim of military occupation. In all, King concludes that Odessa is one of those cities where perpetually “teetering between genius and devastation may be the normal state of 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 their new book, This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), the husband and wife team of Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin recount their experiences working as reporters in Jerusalem during the eventful last decade. Myre, the editor of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and his wife Griffin, Pentagon Correspondent at Fox News, tell gripping stories from individuals involved in the conflict, as well as from their own struggles in raising a young family in the midst of bus bombings and terror attacks. In our interview, we talk about Ariel Sharon’s affinity for Pringles, openly bringing automatic weapons into banks, and kidnappers who let their victims hold their weapons. Read all about it, and more, in Myre and Griffin’s engaging new book. Please become a fan of New Books in Public Policy on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition. Take the media. Most people know that Jews, though hardly alone, built much of the film industry. Fewer people will know, however, that Jews–again, though hardly alone–were central to the birth of photojournalism. Robert Capa, arguably the most famous photojournalist of the last century, was, for example, born Endre Friedmann. In his fine book Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2010), historian David Shneer explores the ways in which Jews were instrumental in the creation of Soviet photojournalism and the ways in which their Jewishness–acknowledged or unacknowledged, accepted or completely rejected–affected the way they did their jobs and how they experienced what they saw and shot. The book is about identity as much as it is about photography (though it is about that as well). These pioneers of photojournalism were Jews whether they liked it or not. It said so on their passports. Yet they struggled with what that meant and how it should (or shouldn’t) influence their art. David does an excellent job in explaining how they negotiated Jewishness through revolution, socialism, Stalinism, world war, and the destruction of Eastern European Jewry itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

For us, every “nation” has and has always had a “culture,” meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word “nation,” this idea of “culture” or “a culture” is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meaning gained currency in English only in the nineteenth century. In a way, that’s not surprising: the nineteenth century was the era of high-nationalism and, as we’ve said, every “nation” had to have an essence that distinguished it from all others. That essence came to be called “culture.” This nation-culture equivalency, however, presented some nationalists with a problem, particularly if their “nation” had what looked to be several cultures. Jews are the archetypal example. They were spread all over the place, spoke many languages, and practiced many customs. There was nothing to unite them except Judaism–itself hardly unified. If you believed in a Jewish nation, then you had to believe that there could be a “Jewish culture.” But what would it be? In his fascinating new book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2010), Kenneth Moss explores the ways in which Eastern European Jewish culture-builders attempted to answer this question in the Russian Revolutionary era. As Ken points out, there was no simple answer. Rather, there were a lot of competing answers (Yiddishist, Hebraist, Socialist, etc.). But there was also a lot of deep, deep thought about what it meant to build and have a culture. These thinkers knew what we have forgotten, namely, that all cultures are made. They knew this because they were making one. Whether we admit it or not, we are too… Please become a fan of “New Books in Jewish Studies” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I confess I was attracted to this book by the title: Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, 2010). Capitalism is a touchy subject; Jews are a touchy subject. But capitalism and the Jews, that’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t suggest you try this, but just imagine what would happen if you started a water-cooler chat with “Hey, what do you think of capitalism and the Jews?” Not pretty. So, being a bit curious, I wanted to know who would write a book with said title and what they could possibly say that wouldn’t get people calling for their head. Well, here’s what I found out. The book was written by Jerry Muller who, I can tell you with all earnestness, is a very bright fellow, an excellent (and witty) writer, and someone with a load of interesting things to say about capitalism and Jews. Don’t worry, it’s not what you think. Muller’s book is no spittle-encrusted diatribe against greedy, hook-nosed, money-lenders. But neither is it the kind of book that ignores the (too often considered embarrassing or offensive) facts, the central one here being that Jews are, as Muller well puts it, good at capitalism. There is no Judeophobia or Judeophilia to be found in these pages. Rather, there is a fascinating, meditative, and enlightening account of the historical relationship of capitalism and the Jews, predominately in Europe over the last thousand or so years. This book is full of cool-headed, convincing arguments about controversial, oft-asked historical questions: Why are Jews good at capitalism? What made European Jews different from other diaspora communities? What role did the Jews play in the evolution of capitalism? What attracted some Jews to socialism? Why do we think–wrongly as it turns out–that there was an affinity between Jews and communism? How did Jews themselves react to the strong association between capitalism and their faith? How did Christians react to the same association? If you read this book, and I hope you do, you will be able to sensibly answer all these question. And really, you have no reason not to read it because it is a model of brevity. It’s rare that you find so much packed into so few pages. But that’s what you’d expect, I suppose, out of a very bright fellow, excellent writer, and someone with a load of interesting things to say… Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out. France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides–the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals–used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I’ve got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You’ve heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn’t (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope, the professions were not for him. He loved the American folk legend Woody Guthrie (of “This Land is Your Land” fame). In fact, he wanted to become the next Woodie Guthrie. So he more or less left his Jewish roots, changed his name to Bob Dylan, and immersed himself in American folk music. Most Americans know this story and others like it. In fact, it seems like a peculiarly American story. But, as you will read in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s fascinating The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (Yale, 2009), it’s not. It can be found in–of all places–Ukraine. The story of the Jews in Ukraine is not exactly a happy one (cf. “pogroms”). The relationship between Jews and Ukrainians has always, it seems, been one of mutual mistrust. Therefore it is all the more surprising to find a tradition of Jewish literati who devoted themselves body and soul to the cause of Ukrainian culture and the foundation of a Ukrainian state. But that is in fact what Yohanan has uncovered. The Anti-Imperial Choice discusses five Jewish-born authors who “adopted” (so to say) the Ukrainian movement in favor of the dominant imperial culture (Russian, German, etc.). They were a minority (Jews) and they elected to affiliate with a minority (Ukrainians). Yohanan does a masterful job of describing the ways in which these authors fused Jewishness and Ukrainianess into a significant literary canon in the Ukrainian language. Remarkable and food for thought indeed. Let me also add that the book is wonderfully written. It is always amazing to me to see someone write with this level of mastery in a second language. Actually, I think English is Yohanan’s fourth or fifth language (which makes it that much more amazing…). By the way, it’s our 100th show! Thanks to everyone who’s supported NBH. Please become a fan of the show on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic. The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form: did German culture produce the Nazis or did Nazis produce German (or rather “Nazi”) culture. In his eye-opening book Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard, 2009), Alan Steinweis succeeds in shedding new light on this subject by carefully studying an old topic–the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938, aka, “Kristallnacht.” He shows that it is difficult to argue that the Nazis alone prosecuted the attack. It would be much more reasonable to say that they “provoked” it or, even better, “unleashed” it. Steinweis points out that what might be called “spontaneous” (or at least not party-directed) assaults on Jews had been occurring with some frequency over the years preceding the Kristallnacht. The Nazis my have facilitated these spasms, but they did not create the paranoia that drove them–that, it seems, was a element of German culture. Importantly, the Nazi leaders–and above all Hitler and Goebbels–knew that all they needed to do was give the word and the anti-Semetic pressure building up within the German public would be released. In November 1936, Herschel Grynspan’s assassination of a low-level German diplomat gave them the pretext they needed to give that word. They did, and the floodgates of Judophobia opened. The Nazis didn’t create violent German anti-Semitism; they reflected it and took advantage of it. As H.L. Menchen might have said, the Germans got the government they wanted and deserved to get it good and hard. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain “elements” needed to be sent for re-education (the Kulaks), others to build new socialist cities (Magnitogorsk), and still others back to where–ethnically speaking–they “belonged” (Baltic Germans). Thus when the Germans attacked, the Bolsheviks were ready to move their “assets” out of the way. Sort of. In To the Tashkent Station. Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell UP, 2009), Rebecca Manley does a fine job of telling the tale of how they evacuated millions of people as the Germans advanced in 1941 and 1942. Though the Party had plans (the Bolsheviks were great planners…), everything did not, as the Russians say, go po planu. As the enemy advance, threatened people did what threatened people always do–they ran off (or, as the Soviet authorities said, “self-evacuated.”). The Party was not really in a position to control this mass exodus as many members of the Party itself had hit the road. Of course some Soviet citizens stayed put, comforting themselves with the (false) hope that the Nazis were really only after the Jews and Communists. But most didn’t, particularly if they had sufficient blat (“pull”) to get a train ticket to a place like Tashkent. Under Communism, everyone is equal. In the real world, everyone isn’t, as many Soviet citizens found out. Some were allowed to leave, others weren’t. Some were given shelter, others weren’t. Some were fed, others weren’t. In this time of crisis, all of the dirty secrets of Communism were revealed. This is not to say, of course, that it wasn’t a heroic effort. It was, and a largely successful one. The Party managed to save much of its human and physical capital, and this fact contributed mightily to its eventual triumph in the war. Moreover, it saved millions of Jews from certain death, a fact that deserves to be acknowledged more often than it is. There are, then, many reasons to be thankful the Soviets bugged out as fast as they did. And there are also many reasons to be thankful Rebecca Manley has told us the story of how they did it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived in New York were apolitical, or rather feared politics having come from a regime that punished open political activity (Tsarist Russia). These immigrants, then, learned socialism on American shores. Their teachers were Jewish members of the Russian intelligentsia who themselves had fled Tsarist oppression in the 1880s. These Russian Jews were radicals, but not necessarily socialists. So, interestingly, they learned socialism–or at least a new brand of socialism–on American shores as well. But who taught the Russian Jews socialism? Tony has the answer: German socialists who had immigrated to the Lower East Side (a.k.a Kleindeutschland) in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. So the chain of transmission begins in Germany with the rise of the German Socialist Democratic Party (1860s), moves to New York with the immigration of German socialists to the Lower East Side (1870s), picks up after the arrival and conversion of the Russian Jewish radicals to German-style populist socialism (1880s), and ends with the flowing of the Yiddish labor movement in New York (1890s-1900s). What a story! Along the way Tony introduces us to a huge cast of colorful characters, explains the origin of the modern Yiddish literary language, gives us a peek at the lively Yiddish periodical press, and shows us Jewish socialists fighting for the rights of workers along side their gentile brothers and sisters. Misconceptions are destroyed, myths exploded, and stereotypes dashed. Read all about it! Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. It’s a good story, and some of it’s even true. The reality, of course, was much more complex as we learn in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s excellent Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 (Cambridge UP, 2008). The drafting of Jews into the Russian army was not really an act of oppression, but, as Petrovsky-Shtern argues, integration. By calling up Jews, the government was de facto recognizing them as full-fledged subject of the empire, the equals of other imperial minorities and even Russians themselves. Of course they were subject to discrimination. But they were not simply victims: the Jewish soldiers changed the culture of the army just as the army changed what it meant to be Jewish within the empire. As Petrovsky-Shtern points out, all this was part and parcel of the process of making both entities–the Jews and empire–modern. So, did your bubbe tell you the story about the wicked Russians press-ganging your poor great grandfather Moishe and then forcibly converted him to Christianity? Read this book and find out what really happened. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in world history. The perpetrators were meticulous record keepers, and at the conclusion of the war many of their archives fell into Allied hands. The German record, however, is not the only record of the Holocaust. As Samuel Kassow shows in his moving Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana UP, 2007), the victims themselves made an concerted effort to document what was being done to them at the hands of the Nazis. Kassow tells the story of a group of Warsaw-based Jewish activists who built a secret organization–Oyneg Shabes–to collect and archive information about Jewish life (and death) under Nazi rule. Knowing that they would eventually be found out or killed, the members of Oyneg Shabes buried their archives so that they might be found after the war. As it happened, almost all of them were murdered. Yet their brave plan worked: some of the hidden archives were found. And in them we can hear them tell their own story. Thanks to Samuel Kassow for giving them voice in this excellent book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies