New Books in Jewish Studies

Rabbi Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990.In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton UP, 2021), Shaul Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenges he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Studies of World Religions at Harvard. His recent books include Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (Academic Studies Press, 2019), The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary to the New Testament (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021); and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press, 2023). His present book project is Zionism as Anti-Messianism: The Political Theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion and is the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue.Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-German Occultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Toward the end of the twentieth century, an unprecedented surge of writing altered the Israeli literary scene in profound ways. As fresh creative voices and multiple languages vied for recognition, diversity replaced consensus. Genres once accorded lower status—such as the graphic novel and science fiction—gained readership and positive critical notice. These trends ushered in not only the discovery and recovery of literary works but also a major rethinking of literary history. In Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making (SUNY Press, 2020), scholars consider how recent voices have succeeded older ones and reverberated in concert with them; how linguistic and geographical boundaries have blurred; how genres have shifted; and how canon and competition have shaped Israeli culture. Charting surprising trajectories of a vibrant, challenging, and dynamic literature, the contributors analyze texts composed in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic; by Jews and non-Jews; and by Israelis abroad as well as writers in Israel. What emerges is a portrait of Israeli literature as neither minor nor regional, but rather as transnational, multilingual, and worthy of international attention.Nancy E. Berg is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her previous books include Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq,, also published by SUNY Press. Naomi B. Sokoloff is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington. Her previous books include Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction. Together, Berg and Sokoloff are the coeditors of What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans), winner of the National Jewish Book Award for anthologies and collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group. Representative of the insidious nature of American anti-Semitism, recognizably Jewish names were often barriers for entry into college, employment, and professional advancement. College and job application forms were intentionally used as a means to “control” the Jewish population in a given college or institution. As such, many Jewish families legally changed their names in an effort to thwart pervasive anti-Semitism and discrimination. In A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (New York University Press, 2018), Kirsten Fermaglich nuances the misconceptions and common assumptions made about name-changers and engages in a rich and meticulously researched study examining this trend.Kirsten Fermaglich is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. Cordelia Heß's The Medieval Archive of Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden (de Gruyter, 2021), the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era.Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period.Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America.This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici reveal, they follow similar paths in their American experience.Heilman and Bilici immerse readers in three layers of discussion for each religious group: historical evolution, sociological transformation, and a comparative understanding of certain parallel beliefs and practices, each of which is used as a window onto the lived reality of these communities.Written by two sociologists, one a religiously observant American Jew and the other an American Muslim, Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another (U California Press, 2024) offers lively insider and outsider perspectives that deepen our understanding of American diversity and what it means to be religious in a modern society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Eyal Regev's The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale UP, 2019) is he first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the entire New Testament, this study examines Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Temple in the first century and provides both Jews and Christians with a better understanding of their respective faiths and how they grow out of this ancient institution. The centrality of the Temple in New Testament writing reveals the authors’ negotiations with the institutional and symbolic center of Judaism as they worked to form their own religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (T&T Clark, 2019), Kenneth Atkinson tells the exciting story of the nine decades of the Hasmonean rule of Judea (152 - 63 BCE) by going beyond the accounts of the Hasmoneans in Josephus in order to bring together new evidence to reconstruct how the Hasmonean family transformed their kingdom into a state that lasted until the arrival of the Romans.Atkinson reconstructs the relationships between the Hasmonean state and the rulers of the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic Empires, the Itureans, the Nabateans, the Parthians, the Armenians, the Cappadocians, and the Roman Republic. He draws on a variety of previously unused sources, including papyrological documentation, inscriptions, archaeological evidence, numismatics, Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudepigrapha, and textual sources from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods.Atkinson also explores how Josephus's political and social situation in Flavian Rome affected his accounts of the Hasmoneans and why any study of the Hasmonean state must go beyond Josephus to gain a full appreciation of this unique historical period that shaped Second Temple Judaism, and created the conditions for the rise of the Herodian dynasty and the emergence of Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Ayn Rand is a provocative and polarizing figure. Strongly pro-capitalist and anti-communist, Rand was a dogmatic preacher of her moral philosophy. Based on what she called "rational self-interest", Rand believed in prosperity-seeking individualism above all. Alexandra Popoff's deeply researched biography traces Rand's journey from her early life as a privileged secular Jew in pre-revolution St. Petersburg, through the deprivations of life in Crimea during the Russian Civil War, and across the world to a new life in the United States in the 1920s. These early experiences influenced Rand's views, which she expressed in her sharp critique of Soviet Russia in her first major novel, We The Living.In Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success (Yale UP, 2024) We follow Rand's extraordinary career in early Hollywood as an apprentice scriptwriter with Cecil DeMille and her evolution into an accomplished novelist of tightly plotted, intellectual stories. Her strong promotion of laissez-fair capitalism and creative, high achieving "supermen" willing to risk everything to achieve their goals came through in her two best selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Following her literary career Rand focused on her philosophical theory of Objectivism and became a cult-like figure to many of her devoted followers. Video: Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand from 1959. Recommended reading: Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency.For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.Interviewee: Jessica Roda is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

A common misconception has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is seen as the religion of love, and Judaism as the religion of law. Addressing this misinterpretation, Rabbi Shai Held argues that love is as integral to Judaism as it is to Christianity. In Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (FSG, 2024), Rabbi Held combines intellectual rigor, respect for tradition, and a commitment to equality. He demonstrates that love is foundational to Jewish faith, influencing perspectives on injustice, grace, family life, and responsibilities to others, including neighbors and even enemies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies