New Books in Jewish Studies

Leon Wiener Dow’s most recent work The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers readers intimate, informative, and at times provocative reflections on halakha, or Jewish law. The author makes nuanced philosophical and theological observations on the ideas and actions that define a halakhic life, and grounds his ideas with rich personal anecdotes that are woven throughout. Wiener Dow’s lively, captivating style of writing draws the reader into his powerful discussion of the roles that community, language, tradition, and evolution play in the halakhic journey. Leon Wiener Dow received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University and rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Professor David Hartman. He is currently a research fellow and faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. Robin Buller is a Ph.D. 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

Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and duration of this period mark it as the most devastating attack on the Jews of pre-modern Christian Europe. While many historians have written studies about 1391-92 from isolated perspectives, in the face of an overwhelming number of local archives found throughout the peninsula, and the complexity of those sources, a unified narrative has, until now, remained a desideratum. In this methodological tour-de-force, Professor Gampel tells the story of Spanish Jewry and their relationship to royal power by reading state records and the almost daily correspondence of the royal family against the grain, telling the story of the subjects of these sources imbedded in the thick context of their composers. The book is divided into two sections that mirror its title. The first is a detailed study of the violence of 1391-92 arranged according to the geographic regions of the peninsula—the Kingdoms of Castile, Valencia, and Aragon, Catalonia and the island of Majorca. Using a rich array of archival sources and in dialogue with contemporary historiography, Professor Gampel painstakingly sets out the limits of what we can know about the riots, both of the victims and the perpetrators, detailing each episode chronologically, in order to form a picture of the period as a whole. Central to the book is the question of how and why those tasked with protecting the Jewish communities failed to do so. To this end the second section is centered around three members of the Aragonese royal family—King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti—and their response to the violence as it unfolded. Here we see the Jewish community as one of many competing interests the royal family faced, and thereby can better appreciate the contingencies of history. The two sections together provide both a deep macro and micro study of this crucial time in Jewish and Spanish history, exposing us not only to the story and context of the too often voiceless victims, but the lives of those in power as well. Its a narrative of tragic violence and the failure of the Royal Alliance, grounded in extensive historical research stripped of none of its drama. Professor Benjamin R. Gampel is the the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You can hear more from him in his video lecture series on the history, society, and culture of medieval Sephardic Jewry. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friends call him young Farabi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small town or camp. In doing so you may miss the debates of diplomats and politicians. But you get a much better idea of how people actually experienced the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s new book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a superb example of this trend. Bartov spent two decades immersed in archives across the world. He knows his characters, Polish, Jewish, German and Ukrainian, inside and out. His explanations for their actions and descriptions are fully convincing because they are so fully imagined and described. It is because of this attention to detail that his conclusions are so sobering. He describes policeman, soldiers, neighbors and victims living lives that were intertwined. The killers here were not engaged in some anonymous, industrial process. Instead, they killed maids, and seamstresses, former classmates and colleagues. They lived in a world where the killing is only one aspect of their lives, one often subsumed in the routine of their jobs, in the community of card playing and drinking, and in their romantic adventures. They lived in a world where there was never a shortage of people willing to shoot to kill. It’s a wonderful book, one that I recommend highly. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth—with his arrival in Jerusalem in 1923. Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis University Press, 2018) situates Scholem’s thought in the context of his biography, by skillfully reading Scholem’s self-fashioning against the grain and together with materials held in his archive. With particular focus on his conflicted and shifting relationship to Germany and German thought and language, Zadoff contributes to the ever-growing scholarship about Scholem. Zadoff moves beyond Scholem’s early ambivalence towards German culture as he sought a Jewish future in Israel during the inter-war years. Despite his early rejection of Jewish-German assimilation and his idiosyncratic Zionist dreams, we find that not only was his world-view framed in reference to Germany—of his youth, the Holocaust, and the after-war years—but this relationship becomes a barometer to understand his evolving thought. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on Scholem’s early period in Jerusalem, his political activities there, relationship to the Hebrew Language, and to the Hebrew University. The next section is about Scholem’s response to the Holocaust and his pivotal role in collecting and reclaiming manuscripts and books that were looted from the Jewish communities of Europe. The last, and perhaps most revealing section, focuses on Scholem’s “return to Germany,” during the last part of his life, particularly his involvement in the Eranos seminars. Zadoff begins the book by asking how the images of Scholem in Israel and Germany could be of the same person, at home he was known as a fiery intellectual, demanding German teacher, and scholar of the kabbalah, while in Germany he was a literary personality and a nostalgic link to German culture of the pre-War years. At its conclusion, we are left with a well argued narrative that does not strip its subject of its complexity. Noam Zadoff is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and of History, and the Director of Olamot Center at Indiana University, Bloomington. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an avid lepidopterist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. 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

In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research, delves into the archives of the Yiddish press to reveal the passionate and tumultuous world of Yiddish cultures in New York and Warsaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Portnoy describes this world as Yiddishland, a nation in which all the high and low expressions of culture not only occurred but were carefully and colorfully relayed by Yiddish journalists, including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer and his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. A treasure for both researchers and general readership, Bad Rabbi brings to life the passionate, chaotic, and sometimes violent communal life of the Yiddish-speaking urban world that flourished prior to World War II on both sides of the Atlantic, and that was documented by some of Yiddish culture’s keenest eyes and finest writers. 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 davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—from bold, new angles. Rather than using the diary as a historical source, Goldberg’s book centers on the diary as its subject. In addition to closely analyzing the more well-known diaries of Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan, Goldberg incorporates a wide variety of lesser-known first-person narratives into his work, showing the widespread nature of diary writing as a cultural phenomenon during the part. Combining the methods of history, literary studies, and psychology, this impressively interdisciplinary book asks: how did the unfolding of the Holocaust changed victims inner selves? His answers to this question expose the tensions between creation and destruction, and the duality of helplessness and agency, that characterize this genre. Amos Goldberg is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, 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

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue that social action and Jewish action go hand-in-hand. The book offers both inspiration and guidance, weaving together passages from Torah and Talmud, insights from contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish civic leaders, and practical advice drawn from the authors many years of advocacy, activism, and civic collaboration in their home community of Charlotte, North Carolina. In this episode, we discuss how the idea of minyan can work as a model for social movements; we discuss the stages congregations can follow to embark on a civic project; and, we discuss how to avoid community division while still encouraging healthy debate — which, along with supporting the needy, is as authentic and ancient a Jewish tradition as one can find. Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016), Jessica Marglin skillfully narrates how Jews and Muslims navigated the complex and dynamic legal system of pre-colonial Morocco. The book, based on Marglin’s doctoral dissertation conducted at Princeton University, traces the history of a Moroccan Jewish family, the Assarafs, ultimately revealing that the boundaries surrounding the states Jewish and Islamic court systems were much more porous than previously thought. Drawing from a vast wealth of archival material from private and public collections across four continents (and in upwards of seven languages), the author shows how increased foreign intervention in this period dramatically changed how Jews engaged with Moroccan law and society. In doing so, Marglin inserts her study into major debates about legal practices and modernity taking place in the fields of North African History and Jewish History alike. Jessica Marglin is the Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, 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

In Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has assembled a hugely impressive selection of scholars to delve into varied topics related to Jews and Leftists politics. The volume is characterised by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities and sheds considerable light on contentious themes. 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