New Books in Jewish Studies

In Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Brandeis University Press, 2015), Hillel Cohen, senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the outbreak of violence in Palestine in 1929. It was that year, not 1948 or 1967, that marked year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. Cohen’s method is not only to examine the events, but how the events get written down, as history, and remembered as memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (Columbia University Press, 2016), Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, looks at points of intersection between Jewish law and modern industrial foodways during the 20th century. In revealing the hidden kosher histories of products such as Coke, Jell-O and kosher meat, Horowitz highlights controversies over rabbinic authority and consumption in American Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappenheim in a matter-of-fact tone, as though by an ethnographer, the testimony also becomes a primary source for Jewish ritual practice during this period in German lands. It also speaks to Christian understanding of Jewish ritual and tradition.Read the essays in this special volume for the thoughtful questions that the experts raise and address. Turn the pages of the Haggadah to experience its beauty. During the interview we also discussed The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, 2011), edited by David Stern. This elegant reproduction of the most beautiful haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington reflects the work of the late 15th century southern German illustrator Joel ben Simeon. The illuminations that adorn the text are an ethnographers dream: they evidence the home ritual practices of the era and place. When the book was displayed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, objects from the Museums collection that are reflected on the pages of the haggadah accompanied the display. Essays by David Stern and art historian Katrin Kogman-Apel accompany the text of the Passover haggadah, providing a history of the haggadah for interested readers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Phillips Casteel, associate professor of English at Carleton University, explores the representation of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. She investigates the meaning of two episodes of trauma in Jewish history, the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust, for Caribbean and diaspora writers. Her focus on this under-explored Caribbean story serves as an alternative to the traditional U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Ever wonder what Kabbalah is really about? Or how you might have a close relationship with God? Is cleaving to God an expectation that might have been medieval but no longer is sought? Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Horwitz ‘s new book A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016) answers these questions and many more in an easily readable, even entertaining, highly authentic and scholarly manner. Divided into seven parts and twenty-eight concise chapters, with each chapter an ideal length to readily understand the topic, this book is perfect for the student of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as well as the casual reader eager to transform his/her spiritual options. Praised by critics as “a gateway into the world of Jewish spirituality . . . An important resource, very well done” and “carefully thought out and well researched, making a very complicated subject quite accessible,” Daniel Horwitz’s new book describes five major types of Jewish mysticism and includes a brief chronology of its development, with a timeline. Beginning with the Bible’s prophets, he moves through early mystical movements up through current expressions of Deveikut, or cleaving to God. Kabbalah and the ten sephirot are described and explained. The words and teachings about mysticism and exaltation of twentieth century giant Abraham Joshua Heschel are shared. Humor is part of the telling of stories by Horwitz, and clarity and understanding emerge. In fact, the book is like a private class or conversation with this compassionate, brilliant teacher: he sits across from you as you read a vital text and then he explains to you what it means and the context in which you want to understand it. The book has received very favorable reviews. Among them, see here. A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader is available via Amazon.com, Jewish Publication Society, and your independent bookseller Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Susannah Drake, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, investigates the representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings.  She argues that there was a close connection between accusations of Jews’ sexuality/carnality and their misguided textual interpretation.  We can learn from this ancient case study about the ways in which the representation of a group as sexually heretical is used to justify the use of force against that group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015), Marc B. Shapiro, the Weinberg Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, explores how segments of the Orthodox Jewish world rewrite the past by editing or erasing that which does not fit in with their contemporary world-view.  He surveys a variety of types of censorship, including the censoring of Jewish thought, Halakhah (Jewish law), and sexual matter.  The book asks us to reconsider the value of the concept of “truth” in Orthodox Judaism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Modern Biblical Studies usually begins from an assumption that there is an established original text and clear exegetical genres that extend from the original. Reception History is structured around the premise that they are investigating how individuals and communities have interpreted and deployed the original in later contexts. But what if there is no original text? What if the border between origins and receptions are unable to be clearly drawn? If this is the case, isn’t all of biblical studies reception history? Brennan W. Breed, Assistant Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, asks these provocative questions in Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Indiana University Press, 2014). After wrestling with questions of origins, borders, contexts, authors, and audiences, he offers a new general theory of reception history. He argues that instead of trying to contain texts and return them to their original context, we should understand them as mobile or nomadic. That would mean text’s significance are produced through movement and variation of interpretation. Of course, some readings have a stronger set of textual resources to justify an interpretive perspective. However, Breed argues that we should not prioritize the earliest applications of texts as the ‘true’ meaning. Breed’s nomadic reception history is illustrated through an analysis of Job 19:25-27 across time and space. From this example, we witness the broad spectrum of interpretations and how the text transforms across its historical and temporal trajectory. Breed’s theoretically rich and engaging methodology will be useful to anyone interested in how texts are interpreted and deployed in social life. 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

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that. The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself. Anyone who is interested in research about the Holocaust should read this book. And if you don’t do primary research, you should still read it–to get a better sense of how research is done, to get a better sense of places where our understanding of the Holocaust is still patchy, and to get a better understanding of one of the most important postwar institutions that dealt with refugees and displaced people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014), Caroline E. Light, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots. Light provides us with a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideas of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. This book highlights the importance of writing particularly regional histories of American Jewry.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies