New Books in Jewish Studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Rhiannon Graybill‘s Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible, revealing the male body as a source of persistent difficulty for the Hebrew prophets. Drawing together key moments in prophetic embodiment, Graybill demonstrates that the prophetic body is a queer body, and its very instability makes possible new understandings of biblical masculinity. Prophecy disrupts the performance of masculinity and demands new ways of inhabiting the body and negotiating gender. Graybill explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies, including Isaiah, Moses, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts, this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and horror films: Isaiah meets the poetry of Anne Carson; Hosea is seen through the lens of possession films and feminist film theory; Jeremiah intersects with psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria; and Ezekiel encounters Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Graybill also offers a careful analysis of the body of Moses. Her methods highlight unexpected features of the biblical texts, and illuminate the peculiar intersections of masculinity, prophecy, and the body in and beyond the Hebrew Bible. This assembly of prophets, bodies, and readings makes clear that attending to prophecy and to prophetic masculinity is an important task for queer reading. Biblical prophecy engenders new forms of masculinity and embodiment; Are We Not Men? offers a valuable map of this still-uncharted terrain. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

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 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 Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, explores the admiring and at times oppositional philosophical kinship between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the France’s greatest 20th century philosophers. One fundamental aspect of the Levinas-Derrida relationship is each man’s relationship to his Jewish identity and to Jewish text and tradition. Professor Hammerschlag delves into the resonances and far-reaching effects this relationship has for religion writ large, as well as for philosophy, literature, ethics, and political theology. 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 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

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in the wake of the events at Chernobyl. Lola has gone through the Bolshevik revolution, the Civil War, the Stalinist purges, deportation to Kazakhstan, and the Chernobyl disaster and these are her real-life memoirs that lay the foundation for the novel. The chapters telling Lola’s story are alternated with shorter interludes from the contemporary life of the second protagonist, Julia, a representative of the generation of millennials, who are struggling to come to terms with their idealistic views on life and politics amidst the changing world order. Alekseyeva, who is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, works on avant-garde cinema in the USSR, Japan, and France, and her academic interest in visual narrative techniques has deeply affected her work on the graphic novel. The story-telling in Soviet Daughter is rich and intense, and also full of supplementary comments and explanations of various aspects of Soviet everyday life; however, the novel is very easy to read and grasps the readers attention from the very first pages. To this, the sincerity of Alekseyeva’s intonation contributes greatly. She does not shy away from being very honest about issues such as inter-generational misunderstanding, conflicts within family, and difficulties of the migrant experience yet at the same time she persistently maintains the tactful balance between a personal story-telling and a nearly academic inquiry into the experience of several generations of Soviet Jewish immigrants in America. The precursors of Alekseyeva’s novel are works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Another major influence on Alekseyeva is actually Vladimir Mayakovsky, especially his work in Okna ROSTA. Soviet Daughter does, in fact, open by a quote from Mayakovsky. Julia Alekseyeva’s novel will be of much interest both to the broad readers audience, and also to the scholars of Soviet history, Jewish identity, and immigration. Into all of these themes it provides a fascinating insight. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflects upon wider, contemporary debates about food ethics. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In her most recent book, Holocaust: An American Understanding (Rutgers University Press), Deborah Lipstadt reviews and analyzes the emergence of Holocaust scholarship in the academy, and Holocaust consciousness in the American public, in the second half of the twentieth century. Professor Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, demonstrates that, even as the magnitude and the horror of the Holocaust became known in the United States, it became a decisive influence on American Jewish identity, and on American moral and political consciousness, during a turbulent period. Professor Lipstadt talks about the evolving understanding of the Holocaust, as well as the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, in this wide-ranging discussion. 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 midrash in 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 Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examines the complex histories of Jewish cultural patronage in Vienna. She offers a nuanced and compelling account of the cultural networks of the time. This book is an important contribution, which overturns established ideas about the Jewishness of Viennese cultural figures of this period. Shapira brings into question dominant ideas about assimilation, modernism and cultural interchange. This book will be an important reference on this subject for many years to come. 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 Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before they reach their subjects. This is one of the central concerns for Benjamin Schreier, Associate Professor at Penn State University, in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU Press, 2015). He calls for a critical study of identity and identification within his field, which should have broader applications in other identity-based investigations. Schreier provides a comprehensive and productive reevaluation of approaches to identity, which explores the meaning and power of the uses of identity in literary products. He puts his new approach into action through a rereading of key works and authors from an established Jewish American literary canon. On the other end of the spectrum, he tests the boundaries of the deployment of Jewishness when it does not align with the dominant assumptions in Jewish American literary study. In our conversation we discussed the place of Jewish American Literary studies within adjacent fields, the dominant scholarly practices of this field, racialized nationalist grounds of Jewishness, Abraham Cahan’s spectral Jew, the New York Intellectuals, the anxiety of Jewish identity in Philip Roth’s work, the irrepresentation of identity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and how to think about identity as an analytical category. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies