New Books in Jewish Studies

Debby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit's life and presents a stunning collection of her art.Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists' and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit's fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres.This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner's The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State UP, 2024) brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg.This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more--including Ujifusa's great grandparents. That is their legacy.Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York's Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I (HarperCollins, 2023) is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa's story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war--and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jae Han investigates how various Late Antique Near Eastern communities—Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and philosophers—discussed prophets and revelation, among themselves and against each other. Bringing an interdisciplinary, historical approach to the topic, he interrogates how these communities used discourses of prophethood and revelation to negotiate their place in the world. Han tracks the shifting contours of prophecy and contextualizes the emergence of orality as the privileged medium among rabbis, Manichaeans, and 'Jewish Christian' communities. He also explores the contemporary interest in divinatory knowledge among Neoplatonists. Offering a critical re-reading of key Manichaean texts, Han shows how Manichaeans used concepts of prophethood and revelation within specific rhetorical agendas to address urgent issues facing their communities. His book highlights the contingent production of discourse and shows how contemporary theories of rhetoric and textuality can be applied to the study of ancient texts.Jae Han is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies and the program for Judaic Studies at Brown UniversityMichael Motia is a lecturer in the Religious Studies and Classics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century.Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (Syracuse UP, 2018) explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel-Palestine and North America. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm.In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Gustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the failed struggle to extradite war criminal Walther Rauff and to the years of the military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. By the 1970s, Israel seemed a strong pro-Western barrier to the expansion of communism and Islamic fundamentalism. 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 decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialise, recreate, and experience Jewish culture.Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counsellors, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sandra Fox demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Scholars of biblical law widely hold that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have been never tested.Join us as we speak with Michael LeFebvre about his book, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law (Bloomsbury, 2019) a study that challenges the current consensus, and presents an alternative hypothesis.Michael LeFebvre earned his PhD at the University of Aberdeen. He’s a presbyterian minister living in Indianapolis, Indiana, and a fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians.L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.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 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months. Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012; paperback 2023) closely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity--and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions--during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony.The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies