New Books in Jewish Studies

In Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016) Devin Naar delves deep into the archives to produce this intimate and exciting portrait of Salonica’s Jewish community between the late 19th century until World War II, when the overwhelming majority of the population was deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Naar’s study takes readers into institutional hallways and homes of Jewish elites and ordinary citizens, revealing a community rapidly adjusting to changes in its relationship to political regimes claiming Salonika and its diverse residents as their own. Jewish Salonica offers readers an opportunity to consider Jewish communal agency and vibrancy in a period and place too often missing from modern Jewish historical narratives.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age. Weiss argues that this particular Jewish relationship to the divine is rooted in the most canonical of rabbinic texts even as he demonstrates that in ancient Judaism the idea of debating God was itself a matter of debate. By elucidating competing views and exploring their theological assumptions, the book challenges the scholarly claim that the early rabbis conceived of God as a morally perfect being whose goodness had to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action. Pious Irreverence examines the way in which the rabbis searched the words of the Torah for hidden meanings that could grant them the moral authority to express doubt about, and frustration with, the biblical God. Using characters from the Bible as their mouthpieces, they often challenges God’s behavior, even, in a few remarkable instances, envisioning God as conceding error and declaring to the protestor, “You have taught Me something; I will nullify my decree and accept your word.” 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 The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), Bryan K. Roby, fellow at the Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, traces the early history of Mizrahi struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Roby reexamines and destabilises our understandings of this period of Israeli history. This book is a highly original and compelling contribution that tells an unknown story of Mizrahi politicisation and rebellion that has ongoing consequences for contemporary political struggles in Israel/Palestine. 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

In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and womens, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction. She offers a nuanced analysis of this practice of Jewish writers speaking for or as other minorities. This book is a compelling contribution, bringing Jewish cultural studies into conversation with critical race theory in innovative and provocative ways. 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

In The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community (New York University Press, 2016), Jeffrey Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, returns to the neighborhood he studied in his first scholarly work four decades later to explore the changing neighborhood of Jewish Harlem, which in its heyday 175,000 Jews called home. In addition to tracing Harlem’s Jewish residents and the institutions they built, he also offers readers broader insight into Gotham’s urban planning and decades of complex often cooperative – relationships between the Jewish and black communities within this enclave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In this lively memoir, We’re In America Now: A Survivor’s Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2016), Fred Amram offers a series of stories documenting his childhood in 1930s Germany through his coming-of-age in New York City, after his family’s successful immigration to the United States in 1939. With clarity and a touch of humor, Amram provides well-crafted portraits of family members and a vivid sense of what it meant to be a child in Nazi Germany and a refugee in World War II America and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan, 2013), Alisa Solomon, Director of the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, traces how and why the story of Tevye the milkman, the creation of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a cultural touchstone. She examines the pre-history of the first adaptations, the core story of the development of the broadway musical, and the fascinating afterlife of the musical including adaptations in Israel and Poland. This book is a great read and the essential volume on Fiddler on the Roof. 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

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers and traces a transnational post-Holocaust network. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of Yiddish and Jewish cultures in the post-War era. 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

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr. Carsten Schapkow looks beyond the typical model of German-Jewish assimilation in response to emancipation in German lands a failed model, according to many to uncover the paradigm that Jews in Germany really spoke, wrote, and dreamed about during the long 19th century: the history of the Iberian Sephardic Jews as their model. From popular journalists and authors such as Heinrich Graetz and Ludwig Philippson to elite academics, from scientists to philosophers, Jews in Germany imagined their future according to their understanding of Jewish life under Muslims and Christians in Spain and Portugal during the so-called Golden Age and the period of la convivencia. According to their understanding of that era in Iberia, Jews had served as cultural mediators, their language and other skills enabling Jews to benefit the majority culture. Jews integrated into the majority culture, according to this view, without sacrificing their identity. They were able to make a difference not only within Jewish history, that describes this era as a Golden Age, but also be regarded as important participants in Iberian culture, diplomacy, science, and philosophy. Dr. Schapkow draws on an impressive variety of sources to prove his point. Dr. Schapkow spoke to New Books in Jewish Studies from Germany, sharing very interesting insights into both the history of Iberian Jews and the history of German Jews offering a window onto extraordinarily engaging questions. Read this exceptional book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobility and political refuge. While analyzing complex legal systems and the ways in which different nations viewed their extraterritorial subjects, Abrevaya Stein never loses site of the individual experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, by offering a series of case studies that range from Salonica during the Balkans War to 1930s Shanghai and Baghdad, she demonstrates how questions over citizenship and status were often determined by local politics and personalities and could lead to vastly different fates for these Jewish “proteges.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies