New Books in Jewish Studies

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well. While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany. Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 . Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as well as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, focuses on the changing form, fate, and function of messianism, law, exile, election and remembrance in three different temporal and intellectual frameworks: German-Jewish modernism, postmodernism and the current period. Liska’s book challenges and historicizes postmodern and contemporary takes on German-Jewish thinkers. She leaves us with a set of new and unanswered questions in this very interesting and provocative book. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new book Jew, part of the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” series at Rutgers University Press. In a set of absorbing case studies, Baker tracks the history of the word Jew from antiquity to the present. Among other topics, she writes about the debates concerning the terms Jews, Ioudaioi, and Judeans; the uses of yid in Yiddish; the emerging discourses about new Jews; and the genealogics of the twentiethcentury. In the course of her study, Baker exposes a number of problems that pertain to this key word, including the troubled relation between ethnicity and religion, the implications and impasses of translation, and the responsibility of the scholar in the face of the complex and often painful history of Jew. A compelling intervention in Jewish Studies, the book also opens provocative new avenues for research across the humanities and social sciences. For more information about Jew, a collection of fascinating responses can be read in the Marginalia Forum organized by Shaul Magid and Annette Yoshiko Reed for the LA Review of Books. Cynthia M. Baker is Professor of Religious Studies at Bates College, where she is also Chair of the Religious Studies Department. In addition to Jew, she is the author of Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford University Press, 2002). Mendel Kranz is a PhD student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Matthew Johnson is a PhD student in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Eddie Cantor was once among the most popular performers in the United States. He was influential and innovative on stage, radio, and film from the early twentieth century though the early 1960s. He is not widely known today, however, despite his importance in his time. In a new biography, David Weinstein discusses Cantor, his work, his times, and his politics. The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jewish Life in Performance and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2017) explains the many ways Cantor’s work was representative of the period, but also the ways he pushed the boundaries of entertainment during his career. Cantor was Jewish and unlike many of his Jewish contemporaries in the business, he did not hide or shy away from his background either in performance or in politics. In this episode of New Books in History, Weinstein discusses his biography of Cantor. He talks about Cantor’s career and his anti-Nazi activism and the importance of his Jewish heritage is shaping his career and political activism. Weinstein also discusses some of the more contradictory aspects of Cantor’s career, particularly his use of blackface. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expressed a powerful self-definition that echoes to the present day, where biographies, plays, “guides”, and academic works continue to abound. In place of a simplistic origin story or master narrative of a modernity that begins with Spinoza, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton University Press, 2012), tells the story of how Spinoza came to be understood as a cultural hero, a reception history of his image at many crucial junctures in Modern Jewish history. Rather than probing his philosophy or strictly philosophic influence, Schwartz studies a malleable “Spinoza” as a symbol that captures the ways in which Jews have sought to understand and define themselves. Beginning in 17th-century Amsterdam before moving to 18th-century Berlin, 19th-century Eastern Europe, and Israel and America in the 20th century, The First Modern Jew is a chronological narrative of modern Jewish history that moves seamlessly between a larger thematic thread and local histories of both the famous (Moses Mendelssohn, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Bashevis Singer) and the forgotten (Berthold Auerbach, Salomon Rubin, and Yosef Klausner). In so doing, it probes the porous boundary between history and memory: the history of Spinoza and the history of the memory of Spinoza. And thereby we can see Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” both because he was often projected as such and because he was a means by which people have asked the quintessential modern question: what does it mean to be me? Professor Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program at George Washington University. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is a crypto-Spinozist and his hero is Blinky the Ghost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Ian Black, the former Middle East Editor of the Guardian, offers a comprehensive view of the past and present of what would ultimately become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on a range of sources, the book aims to offer a balanced and clear narrative of a history that has become infamously contested. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us, or the latest episode of HBO’s High Maintenance, in addition to many popular memoirs, online forums, there is a new fascination with Hasidism. In a sense, this discourse centers around questions of religion and state, community and family, and “traditional life” in a modern context—larger themes that touch some of our most pressing problems. Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018) is the result of a monumental collaborative effort by seven scholars over the course of four years to compose the first total history of Hasidism. The team included David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodzinski. It shows the ways in which this movement, in its many distinct flavors, was fluid enough to adapt to its many geographies and new social, cultural, and political contexts. The book is structured chronologically in three sections (the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries), and tracks the movement as it unfolded, covering its origins and early figures, growth and variation, institutionalization, decay and destruction during the Holocaust, and subsequent resurrection in post-war Israel and America. Particular attention is paid to the social history of the local communities that arose around charismatic leaders (Rebbes and Tsadikim) and their courts, as well as Hasidic beliefs and practices. In today’s episode I had the opportunity to speak with Professor David Biale about the book and the research effort behind it. We discussed the theology, praxis, family life and communal structures of many Hasidic dynasties, and their relationship with the “outside world.” The volume is a treasure trove of stories and histories, filled with fascinating figures and political intrigues, that covers not only Hasidism but modern Jewish history more generally. Provocatively, we are left wondering: is piety compatible with modern life? David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of many other acclaimed books including Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought also published by Princeton University Press and a forthcoming biography of Gershom Scholem in the Jewish Lives series by Yale University Press. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is currently inventing a squirrel internet.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Who are the American Jews behind many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank? This is the question that Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, seeks to answer in her new book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Harvard University Press, 2017). By analyzing archival documents along with periodicals, internet sources, and a wealth of self-conducted interviews, Hirschhorn concludes that many American-Israeli settlers are not the messianic, ultra-right-wing fanatics that stereotypes suggest. Instead, the majority come from liberal American backgrounds, are highly-educated, and have conservative—but rarely Orthodox—Jewish backgrounds. What is more, she argues, their actions, motives, and self-conceptualizations are reflective of the evolution of American and Israeli Jewish identities over time. Sara Hirschhorn is University Research Lecturer in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and Sidney Brichto Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past? These are questions that Jeffrey Shandler, Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, grapples with in his new book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017) Shandler’s thought-provoking and skillfully written book addresses these problems through the lens of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. Specifically, he examines the wealth of material curated by the Shoah Foundations Visual History Archive, which houses a wealth of over 50,000 newly-digitized videos of interviews conducted with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Shandler analyzes this footage by reading “against the grain” and using the testimonies for purposes other than those intended by the Archive’s creators when it was founded in 1994. In addition to considering the collection in its entirety, Shandler underscores the significance of focusing on individual testimonies, as well. By guiding the reader through a captivating selection of case studies, he reveals how narrative, language, and spectacle have influenced, and been influenced by, new media practices. Jeffrey Shandler is Chair and Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing, it stands as a monument to both The Guide and to a career spent studying it. The book begins with an introduction that outlines its main arguments and method, and with chapters on Maimonides biography and intellectual context. It then divides the Guide into eight thematic sub-sections and provides a paraphrase and analysis of each in turn; it tackles the way Maimonides read the bible, synthesized physics and metaphysics, and espoused a new understanding of the Jewish tradition. The sections cover Maimonides’ philosophy of language and anti-anthropomorphic reading of the bible, his opposition to Kalām (Islamic theology) and theory of creation, and his theories of prophecy, metaphysics, providence and theodicy. The work ends with chapters on the Law, on politics, and True Knowledge. Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was born in Cordoba, Spain and lived his mature life in Fustat, Egypt, he was a Jewish communal leader and legal scholar, physician and philosopher. The Guide is his philosophic masterwork, undoubtably one of the most influential and perplexing works of any faith written in the Middle Ages. Tucked away in Professor Ivry’s analysis is a rich reflection on Maimonides’ intellectual milieu and a genealogy sourced in both the Jewish tradition and Greek thought. Uniquely, he uses Maimonides’ biography and psychology as analytical tools and sees the book as a reflection of a Maimonides’ torn in his loyalties, seeking guidance as much as offering it, as a “mature spiritual and intellectual autobiography.” While others may read The Guide strictly as a work of exegesis or politics, Professor Ivry takes Maimonides’ metaphysical claims seriously, and sees him as neither a total skeptic nor a strictly orthodox thinker. Rather, this commentary understands The Guide in the mode of a confession, as a tool to tease out and come to terms with the eternal tensions between Reason and Revelation, and to see “Maimonides [as] indebted to a philosophical tradition that contradicted his inherent faith.” Rarely has a summa, the mature reflections of a career steeped in philosophic thought, been made so accessible. Alfred Ivry is emeritus professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies as well as in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is renowned worldwide as both a scholar and a teacher, combining rich philological skills with a deep knowledge of Classical and Medieval philosophy; his career is now in its sixth decade. Moses Lapin is a perplexed graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies