New Books in Jewish Studies

The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. In Priesthood, Cult, and Temple in the Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran: Analyzing a Pre-Hasmonean Jewish Literary Tradition (Brill, 2023), Robert Jones analyzes how Israel's priestly institutions are represented in these writings, and he demonstrates that they are essential for understanding the Jewish priesthood at this crucial stage in its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today?Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D., has been a leading rabbi and scholar of the American Jewish experience throughout his long career. Now Rabbi Emeritus of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, PA, he previously served as Rabbi of Temple Concord of Binghamton, NY, and Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Binghamton University (SUNY). Sussman also taught at Princeton, Hunter College, and Rutgers. He recently completed a term as Chair of the Board of Governors of Gratz College in Melrose Park, PA, where he continues to teach. A prolific writer, Sussman has chosen a selection of his sermons and essays, Portrait of an American Rabbi: In His Own Words (Xlibris US, 2023), to share and chronicle his life as a rabbi and scholar. His thought-provoking sermons and articles provide fresh insights, inspiration, and an historical context to American Judaism at the turn of the twenty-first century and are a true “Portrait of an American Rabbi.” Rabbi Sussman and his wife, Liz Zeller Sussman, have five children and three grandchildren. They reside in suburban Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In contrast to scholarly belief that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews envisions the transcendent, heavenly world as the eschatological inheritance of God's people, Jihye Lee argues that a version of an Urzeit-Endzeit eschatological framework - as observed in some Jewish apocalyptic texts - provides a plausible background against which the arguments of Hebrews are most comprehensively explained. Instead of transcendence to the heavenly world that will come after the destruction of the shakable creation, Lee suggests the possibility of a more dualistic new world. By first defining Urzeit-Endzeit eschatology, Lee is then able to explore its place in both pre and post 70 CE Second Temple Judaism. In examining Enoch, the Qumran Texts, Jubilees, the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch and finally the Book of Revelation, Lee compares a multitude of eschatological visions and the different depictions of the transformation of the world, judgement and the new world to come. Bringing these texts together to analyse the issue of God's Rest in Hebrews, and the nature of the Unshakable Kingdom, Lee concludes that Hebrews envisions the kingdom as consisting of both the revealed heavenly world and the renewed creation as the eschatological venue of God's dwelling place with his people.Jihye Lee is Assistant Professor in New Testament at Sudo International University in Seoul, South Korea. She also serves as Education Pastor at Amen Baptist Church, which is also located in Seoul. In addition to writing A Jewish Apocalyptic Framework of Eschatology in the Epistle to the Hebrews: Protology and Eschatology as Background (T&T Clark, 2021), she has published additional studies of Hebrews in the journal Novum Testamentum.Information about the Novum Testamentum article that is mentioned in the podcast may be found here.Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.Michoel Rotenfeld has translated Goldenshteyn’s autobiography into English and provided an extensive introduction and helpful notes throughout the text. Rotenfeld’s translation, The Shochet: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Ukraine and Crimea, was published in 2023 by Touro University Press.Michoel Rotenfeld is a historical researcher and the associate director of Touro University Libraries.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). 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

Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

For a brief moment in the history of Acre, there was a Hebrew community that linked old and new settlements. It had a national-Zionist orientation and consisted of Jews of local and Mizrachic origin. This community is no longer visible in the cityscape, and its history has disappeared from the collective Zionist memory - but it played a role in building the Jewish national community in Palestine. The unusual history of Acre shows how it succeeded in attracting new, nationalist settlers.Anat Kidron and Shuli Linder Yarkony's book The Jewish Community of Acre in Mandatory Palestine: The Story of a Forgotten Community (de Gruyter, 2024) seeks to illuminate the complexity and diversity of the Zionist enterprise in relation to the Arab and mixed towns of Mandatory Palestine by raising questions about the relationship between the "history of a place" and "national history." By describing the failure of the Hebrew settlement in the Mandate territory of Acre, the book views the Zionist project as a fascinating intersection between the dreams of those who created the leading narratives and between local interests and the unique geographical conditions of the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using lessons. Here, what are denoted as borderline historical events, demonstrating both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful materials. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg's and Robert Conquest's classic works of the 1960s to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and their change during a full half-century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Peter Bergamin’s, new book, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I. B. Tauris, 2019), is an intellectual biography of one of the most important propagators of the Maximalist Revisionist stream in Zionism ideology. The book positions Ahimeir within the contexts of the Israeli right and the Zionist movement in general, and corrects some common misunderstandings surrounding the man and his ideology.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