New Books in Intellectual History

My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Littman Library, 2024), illuminated the dynamic interplay between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions-a theme that resonates deeply with our mission at the Unity Through Diversity Institute. From the outset, Rabbi Levine’s scholarship made clear that Hakham Tsevi’s life was shaped by both geography and intellectual inheritance. The map at the beginning of his book, as he notes, is more than a visual aid; it is a testament to the diverse worlds Hakham Tsevi traversed. What struck me most was Hakham Tsevi’s dual heritage. Raised in the Ashkenazi tradition, his formative years were marked by the customs and halakhic frameworks of Central and Eastern Europe. However, his sojourn in the Ottoman Empire brought him into close contact with the Sephardi world. This was not a mere footnote in his biography; it fundamentally altered his worldview and rabbinic outlook. The mere fact that he is called Hakham, a term of Rabbinic authority used by Sephardi Jews, yet insisted on only taking posts in Ashkenazi institutions, shows a menagerie of influences and appreciation for the diverse Jewish influences within halakhic practice. Rabbi Levine and I discussed how, despite his Ashkenazi roots, and adherence to his Ashkenazi traditions, Hakham Tsevi’s training among Sephardim left an indelible mark. This influence became evident in his encouragement for scholars to prioritize accessible texts and to remain wary of the potential misuse of mystical works-a stance that echoed the concerns of Sephardi rabbis as books became more widely available. And the Sephardic influence may also be seen in his approach to education – much in line with the Sephardic philosophy, he recommended a TaNaKh first and then mishna focused curriculum with Talmud coming only after true comprehension and Kabbalah only for those who are truly gifted and fully fluent in all the other texts. “Hakham Tsevi broke new ground. He adopted a decidedly oppositional orientation towards minhag and freely attacked long-standing Ashkenazi traditions. He imported into his halakhic decisions practices from the Sephardi milieu, and advocated for a Sephardi educational curriculum.” (Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine, p. 131) Hakham Tsevi’s life demonstrates that Jewish identity is not static; it is forged in dialogue, sometimes in tension, but always in pursuit of a richer, more inclusive heritage. As we continue our work at the Unity Through Diversity Institute, Hakham Tsevi’s example inspires us to embrace complexity, to learn from one another, and to honor the multiple strands that make up the fabric of Jewish life. “Before his tombstone was destroyed by the Nazis, it was adorned with the image of a gazelle, a tsevi. Moving swiftly and confidently from one field to the next, Hakham Tsevi was attacked often by adversaries who thought themselves wiser or more capable. Perhaps some of them were. But those adversaries never stopped him from speaking his mind, rendering his legal decisions, or publishing his rulings. In fact, they often compelled him to act or react…Students of halakhah remember him by the answers he generated; students of history, by the questions.” (Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine, conclusion) I am grateful to Rabbi Levine for shedding light on this remarkable figure and hope we find this passion to challenge the norm and raise the difficult questions in more leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system. Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2025) analyzes biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, studies of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and a multiplicity of modern expressions for a comprehensive history of Jewish responses to and justifications of their diasporas. It shows that Diaspora Jews through the ages insisted that God joined them in their exiles, that "Zion" was found in Babylon and Eastern Europe, and that, as citizens of the world, Jews could only live throughout the world. The result is a convincing assertion that lament has not been the most common Jewish response to diaspora and that Zionism is not the natural outcome of either Jewish ideology or history. David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he has also served as Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics for many years. As Librarian, he is at the helm of the most extensive collection of Judaica-rare and contemporary-in the Western hemisphere. He is the author of several books on Rabbinic Judaism and its texts, the social and religious history of Jews in antiquity, and Jewish rituals and their development. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence. Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe’s foremost source on Ottoman Greece. Yet as Richard Calis reveals, Crusius’s massive—and largely untapped—archive has much more to tell us about how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference. In particular, Crusius’s work illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius’s records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks’ own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans’ orientalist views of the Ottoman world. They also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fueled by Crusius’s fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world. A lively intellectual history drawn from a forgotten archive, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece (Harvard UP, 2025) is also a perceptive character study, in which Crusius takes his place in the history of ethnography, Lutheran reform, and European philhellenism. Richard Calis is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University, who specializes in the history of science and intellectual history Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations. Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press, 2025) expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved. Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Rasheedah continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”  In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of “hatred,” and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground. Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Rav Kook’s Vision: Halakhah, Secular Knowledge, and the Renewal of Judaism. Those of us who know something about Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook’s life and philosophy know about his being stuck outside of the Land of Israel during WWI, being the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and his encouragement of the secular Zionists who turned swamps into vegetation. But not many of us have analyzed the personal notebooks that the Rav left, commonly known as Shemonah Kevatzim (eight collections). Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Professor Marc B. Shapiro author of the acclaimed new book, Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook (Littman Library, 2025). Our conversation ranged from the philosophical underpinnings of Rav Kook’s thought to its relevance for modern Orthodoxy and contemporary Jewish life. Using the notebooks and other information Marc B. Shapiro’s Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New offers a window into the philosophical heart of Rav Kook’s approach to halakhah and secular knowledge, using Rav Kook’s own words to illuminate his radical, yet deeply rooted, vision for modern Judaism. I found it important to use those words and quotes when discussing the topic with Professor Shapiro. Rav Kook’s words speak volumes – and you’ll hear them throughout the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely? In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria Closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up a new poetics which challenges received ideas about modern Arabic poetry Rereads along transnational lines the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ Offers a substantial rethinking of key terms in comparative literary studies — translation, translatability, vernacular —as seen through the lens of everyday poetics Describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works Expands the scope of postcolonial poetry in the globalised age by factoring in relationships between first-, second-, and third-world literary cultures This book distinguishes a Syrian style of qaṣīdat nathr (prose poem) as a piece of collaborative performance called shafawiyya, vernacularised poetic speech. It describes the poetic lineages, stretching from early Syrian independence to the 21st century, whose task it was to bring poetic expression closer to everyday life.

These poets are shown cultivating genres and translational practices rooted in a plebeian civilian identity that counters both heroised images of the prophet-poet and stern authoritarian rule. A comparative analysis is provided to understand shafawiyya poetics as a transnational mode of creative engagement. This analysis includes aesthetic affinities and instances of transmission between Arabic poetry and poetries written in formerly Soviet countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria). From this vantage point, matters of perennial debate in comparative literature - vernacular, translatability, postcolonial poetry - are shown from a new perspective.

The book closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up the new poetics and challenge received ideas about modern Arabic poetry. It describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works. Behar rereads the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ along transnational lines, offering a substantial rethinking of the key terms in comparative literary studies as seen through the lens of everyday poetics. Daniel Behar is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in comparative analysis of modern Arabic poetry, theories of translation, and socialist literary imaginaries in Syria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history