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New Books in Jewish Studies

New Books in Jewish Studies

Marshall Poe

Interview with Scholars of Judaism about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
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Top 10 New Books in Jewish Studies Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best New Books in Jewish Studies episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to New Books in Jewish Studies for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite New Books in Jewish Studies episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Today I talked to Aliza Arzt about Turning the Pages: Conversations Through Time with Rabbi Isador Signer (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024)

In 1924, Rabbi Isidor Signer was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. He had been born in Romania and raised in Montreal. He would go on to lead congregations in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Somerville, Massachusetts; and Manhattan Beach, New York, until his death at age 53.

A century later, his granddaughter has selected and annotated two dozen of Rabbi Signer's sermons, delivered between the years 1923 and 1949. She has also solicited a contemporary response to each sermon, reflecting on Rabbi Signer's words from the perspective of a century's hindsight. Respondents include rabbis, professors, writers, and other deeply engaged Jews.

Rabbi Signer's career and sermons span the period from the aftermath of the first World War (one from 1924 eulogizes President Woodrow Wilson) to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Taken together, the sermons and responses in this volume provide an illuminating window on American Judaism in both the early 20th and early 21st centuries.

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

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In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the Bolshevik revolution. Sloin has written a social history at the grassroots level of Jewish society in Belorussia focusing on the intersections between Jewish radicalism, race and identity formation and political economy. It’s a unique and fascinating contribution to this field of study and a highly readable and insightful account of the transformations in Belorussian Jewish life in this period

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected].

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In her new book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017), Professor Sarah Imhoff explores the relationship between American identity and American Jewish depictions and definitions of masculinity. Professor Imhoff examines Jewish communal efforts to consciously create an American Jewish masculinity — one that is tied to the land, modeled on Protestant delimitations of masculine virtues — and she analyzes popular conceptions about and ambivalence toward the American Jewish male. Professor Imhoff explores the ways in which conscious efforts to forge a connection between the Jewish male body and the American land collide with anti-Semitic stereotypes, and with an emerging range of Jewish masculinities, in this multifaceted work.

Sarah Imhoff is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University.

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].

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In A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing Company, 2017), Nir Baram, award winning author and journalist, gives a fascinating account of his travels around the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Baram talks to a wide range of Palestinians living under occupation and Jewish settlers. It’s a unique book which gives attention to voices that upset dominant understandings of the conflict. It’s highly readable yet informative and involving and deserves a wide readership.

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected].

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New Books in Jewish Studies - Lewis Glinert, “The Story of Hebrew” (Princeton UP, 2017)
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04/11/17 • 34 min

For this episode, New Books in Jewish Studies interviews Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Linguistics.

His book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017), can be defined as a biography of Hebrew language that spans Millenia. The book includes a chronological description of the use and perception of Hebrew in different communities across the world, addressing questions related to the ways in which Hebrew has been represented and utilized by Jews of different backgrounds, Christian scholars and colonials, and modern day Israelis.

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New Books in Jewish Studies - Benjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday” (NYRB Classics, 2016)
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04/07/17 • 71 min

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible.

Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, had been translated into English, despite a long-standing recognition of their importance to philosophical debates in the period, including by Fondane’s contemporaries, such as Lev Shestov and Albert Camus. A new collection entitled Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays edited and translated by Bruce Baugh and published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, aims to rectify this.

Professor Baugh, who teaches Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, has written extensively on existential thought and continental philosophy, and is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003). Professor Baugh’s work on Fondane will be of interest to a wide variety of readers seeking a better understanding of a thinker whose work invites consideration alongside his better known contemporaries Walter Benjamin and the early Levinas, among others.

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Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work challenges perceptions and categorizations of what Jewish magic is, and what its place in the Judaism of late antiquity was. It thus promises to facilitate a reappraisal of the performative practices, the beliefs and rituals, on which Jewish life as we know it is founded. Professor Harari’s work carefully and systematically examines a wide variety of Jewish texts and artifacts, and reveals the extent to which the practice of magic is woven into Jewish ritual, thought, culture, from Late Antiquity through and beyond the Middle Ages.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at [email protected].

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At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust shaped the world they live in. It is, in a sense, designed to help students gain insight.

John K. Roth's new book Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Cascade Books, 2020) may become a required text in this course. His book is different than, I think, any other books I’ve discussed on the show. It is a reflection, a tribute, and perhaps a kind of valedictory all at once. John reflects on the people who have taught him, in all the different ways teaching can happen, and the lessons that he’s learned over decades of thinking and writing about the Holocaust. In doing so, he offers the reader an insight both into his own development and into the way historians, theologians, philosophers and artists have responded to the Holocaust over time.

It's a revealing book, sober, reflective and occasionally inspiring. Roth offers us an intellectual biography that puts his other work into context. But he also challenges his readers to be better scholars and better people while recognizing the world is far too big for one person to change.

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, published by W. W. Norton Press.

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A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on rich archival documentation in German, Arabic, English, and Hebrew, it traces the migration of Orientalist knowledge from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. The book examines how research – and researchers – were transformed as their encounter with the Orient shifted from a textual-philological exercise to a direct, physical engagement, marked by contradictions and tensions against the backdrop of the intensifying Jewish-Arab conflict.

Among its key themes, the book reveals how prominent Orientalist scholars extended their work beyond study rooms and libraries, engaging in efforts to foster Jewish-Arab understanding or collaborating with diplomatic and security institutions.

By shedding new light on the development of academic research in Mandatory Palestine and the early years of Israel, the book offers a compelling case study of the intricate relationship between "pure" scholarship and the political, social, and cultural challenges of the time. It also provides a fresh perspective on the roots of the Jewish-Arab conflict and the influential role of knowledge in shaping it.

Amit Levy is a Spinoza postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Israel Studies, School of Regional and Historical Studies, University of Haifa. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and migration and their impact on cross-cultural encounters. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Open University of Israel. His book A New Orient received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

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FAQ

How many episodes does New Books in Jewish Studies have?

New Books in Jewish Studies currently has 1242 episodes available.

What topics does New Books in Jewish Studies cover?

The podcast is about Religion & Spirituality, Podcasts and Judaism.

What is the most popular episode on New Books in Jewish Studies?

The episode title 'Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century" (Princeton UP, 2020)' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on New Books in Jewish Studies?

The average episode length on New Books in Jewish Studies is 57 minutes.

How often are episodes of New Books in Jewish Studies released?

Episodes of New Books in Jewish Studies are typically released every 2 days.

When was the first episode of New Books in Jewish Studies?

The first episode of New Books in Jewish Studies was released on Jan 30, 2009.

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