The College Commons Podcast

Stella Levi recounts her remarkable life on Isle of Rhodes, caught between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture Michael Frank’s essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, The TLS, and Tablet, among other publications, and his fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story. He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for nearly eight years. Frank is the author of What Is Missing, a novel, and The Mighty Franks, a memoir, which was awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The Telegraph and The New Statesman. Selected as one of the ten best books of 2022 by The Wall Street Journal, One Hundred Saturdays received a Natan Notable Book Award, two National Book Awards from the Jewish Book Council, and the Sophie Brody Award for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Frank lives in New York City and Camogli, Italy.

Jay Michaelson brings to life the charlatan and heretical Jewish leader Jacob Frank. The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jew­ish Mes­sian­ism to Eso­teric Myth - Winner, National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a visiting scholar at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. He holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination. His most recent book, The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Antinomianism to Esoteric Myth, was published by Oxford University Press and won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship. Dr. Michaelson’s scholarly work on Jewish mysticism and messianism has been published in journals including Theology and Sexuality, Modern Judaism, and Shofar, and anthologized in volumes including Queer Religion, Imagining the Jewish God, and Jews and the Law. Outside the academy, Dr. Michaelson is the author of nine books, including Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He directs the Hazon Jewish Meditation Retreat, and is authorized to teach in a Sri Lankan Buddhist lineage. He lives outside of New York City.

Tracing medieval women’s Biblical culture and how it differed from… the Bible. Bib­li­cal Women and Jew­ish Dai­ly Life in the Mid­dle Ages, winner of the 2022 JBC Award for Women’s Studies. Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten holds the Prof. Yitzhak Becker Chair for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She teaches in the Department of Jewish History and the Department of History. She is a social historian who specializes in the history of the Jews in medieval Germany and Northern France. Baumgarten has published three monographs, a dozen edited volumes, and many articles. She has held fellowships from the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as EHESS in Paris. She is an awardee of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award (2016) for outstanding Israeli researchers and of a European Research Council’s Consolidator’s Grant (2016-2022).

Author Susan Wider discusses genre-bending artist Charlotte Salomon's work and how it survived the Shoah to capture a life and time. It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding during World War II, winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Young Adult Literature Susan Wider is the author of It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding during World War II, winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Young Adult Literature. It’s My Whole Life is the first biography for teen and young adult readers about the art and life of German-Jewish artist and modernist painter Charlotte Salomon (1917 Berlin—Auschwitz 1943). The book is also finding a strong audience among adult readers of art and biography. Charlotte Salomon is remembered for her painted memoir, Life? or Theater? where she combined her 33,000-word manuscript, nearly 800 paintings, and a musical soundtrack, all hinting at a film storyboard or graphic novel-style presentation. It is thought to be the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust, and she produced it while confronting racism, genocide, psychological abuse, family suicides, and the strife of loving an older man. What she wanted most was to make a name for herself as an artist. Susan Wider’s articles, essays, and art reviews have been included in Orion, THE magazine, The Fourth River, and Wild Hope magazine among others. Before becoming a full-time author, she held senior management positions at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, The Santa Fe Institute, and Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. Earlier in her career she taught English for the French Chamber of Commerce in Normandy, France and worked as a violinist in professional chamber and symphony orchestras. Susan lives outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, where she shares the land with an assortment of hawks, snakes, woodpeckers, bobcats, coyotes, and a husband.

Author Sacha Lamb discusses their YA romp from the shtetl to the New World, and the supernatural odd couple at its heart. When The Angels Left The Old Country, YA category National Jewish Book Awards finalist. Sacha Lamb is a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow in young adult fiction, and graduated in Library and Information Science and History from Simmons University. Sacha lives in New England with a miniature dachshund mix named Anzu Bean. Their debut novel, When The Angels Left The Old Country, has won a Printz honor, Stonewall and Sydney Taylor Awards, and is a National Jewish Book Awards finalist in the YA category.

Author Ashley Goldberg imagines the human and communal cost of sexual abuse in the Jewish community. Abomination, Winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction Ashley Goldberg is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in New Australian Fiction 2021, Meanjin, Chiron Review and Award Winning Australian Writing among others. His work has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has been the recipient of the KYD/Varuna Copyright Agency Fellowship and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Fellowship. His debut novel, Abomination, was published by Penguin Random House Australia in May 2022 and won the Debut Fiction Prize at the National Jewish Book Awards.

Sarah Imhoff introduces us to Jessie Sampter who broke the Zionist mold. The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Dis­abled, Zionist - National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Women's Studies Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, disability, and American religion, as well as religion and law. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.

Author Laura Hobson Faure on how French Jews accepted, negotiated and even rejected American Jewish aid after the Holocaust. A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: the American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Writing Based on Archival Material. Laura Hobson Faure is a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1, where she holds the chair of Modern Jewish history and is a member of the Center for Social History (UMR 8058). Her research focuses on the intersections between French and American Jewish life, during and after the Holocaust. She is the author of A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: the American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Indiana University Press, 2022) which won a National Jewish Book award, and Rescue: The Story of Kindertransport to France and America (forthcoming, Yale University Press). She also co-edited L’Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives au XXème siècle. Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de violences (Armand Colin, 2014) and Enfants en guerre. « Sans famille » dans les conflits du XXème siècle ( éditions CNRS).

Author Dani Shapiro teases out the kaleidoscopic layers of Jewishness, loss, secrets and discoveries in her award-winning novel, Signal Fires. Signal Fires, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Both Signal Fires and Inheritance were winners of the National Jewish Book Award. Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani’s book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, has just been reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

Author Lisa Brahin shares her family’s riveting story of escape from the pogroms. Lisa Brahin is an accomplished Jewish genealogist, researcher and writer. Inspired as a young girl by Alex Haley’s ROOTS, she spent many summers audio taping the stories of her grandmother’s traumatic childhood during the 1917-1921 anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. Those tapes were the primary source for her historical family saga, TEARS OVER RUSSIA: A Search for Family and the Legacy of Ukraine’s Pogroms (Pegasus Books, 2022).   With a lack of previously published sources to turn to, Lisa used her genealogical skills to locate and interview former residents of her grandmother’s shtetl, Stavishche, Russia (which soon became Ukraine). Curators in four countries assisted her in finding unpublished documents, written in five languages, that would help to validate her grandmother’s tales. In 2003, she assisted in finding the lost location of the original manuscript Megilat HaTevah, which she considers to be one of the most important primary sources on the Ukrainian pogroms. On Jewishgen.org, the premier website for Jewish genealogy, she is a two-town project coordinator for the Yizkor Book Project (Holocaust Memorial Book Project). She has a special interest in using her skills in genetic genealogy to assist hidden child Holocaust survivors who are in search of their true identities and families.   Lisa hopes that TEARS OVER RUSSIA will inspire continued interest in family history research. She also hopes her book will shine a light on a forgotten and underrepresented period of Jewish history – between the years described in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and SCHINDLER’S LIST – that prefigured the horror that was to come.   Ms. Brahin is a 2022-2023 Jewish Book Council author. Photo Credit: Diana P. Lang Photography