New Books in Jewish Studies

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide (Bloomsbury, 2022) sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text.Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s inferential essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Hillel Goldberg opens this volume: “By commitment I am a hedgehog – I believe in a single central principle, the Torah. By temperament I am a fox, drawn to the wide Jewish intellectual horizon, buoyed by its diversity and ever-expanding reach.” The kaleidoscopic breadth of Jewish thought marks this volume on prayer, biblical interpretation, musar, theology, and biography – tributaries highlighting the mainstream, halakhah. Goldberg treats halakhah not as a concept but via its “small letters,” exemplified in the laws of mikveh and expressed in “Philosophy of Halakhah: The Prism of Mikveh” and “The Vilna Gaon’s Codes.” In Across the Expanse of Jewish Thought: From the Holocaust to Halakhah and Beyond (Ktav, 2022), Goldberg draws on his prior work on cross-cultural Jewish thinkers from Eastern Europe to gather multiple voices of Jewish thought under the canopy of the whole.Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

“How has it come to this? How has ‘Zionist’…become the dirtiest word to the international Left?” Susie Linfield poses that ripe question at the outset of her book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019). In the podcast, our discussion focuses on three prominent figures examined in The Lions’ Den: Isaac Deutscher, I.F. Stone, and Fred Halliday. And we explore present-day sentiments about Zionism among the Left amid the Gaza-Israel conflict. What’s needed in thinking about Zionism and about Israel, Linfield asserts in the conclusion to her provocative and timely book, is “realism,” not “pathology.”Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

With a charming, colorful presentation, multiple strands of commentary, and groundbreaking, interactive features, Torah, the Five Books of Moses (with Complete Haftarah Cycle) (Kol Menachem, 2011) transforms the text into an experience. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Chaim Miller about how his edition of Torah endeavors to uncover the spiritual potential and human relevance of its every line.Rabbi Chaim Miller was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in London, England and studied Medical Science at Leeds University. He published the best-selling Kol Menachem Chumash—Gutnick Edition, which made over a thousand complex discourses of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe easily accessible to the layman. His Lifestyle Books Torah, Five Books of Moses—Slager Edition was distributed to thousands of servicemen and women in the U.S. Army. In 2013, he was chosen by the Jewish Press as one of sixty “Movers and Shakers” in the Jewish world. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Chani and seven children.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

Beginning in August 1946, stateless and visaless Jews, most of them survivors of the Nazi death camps, who sought to immigrate to the Land of Israel were intercepted by the Royal Navy and deported to the nearby island of Cyprus, where they were detained in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Despite occupying a dramatic and fateful position in modern history, this saga has remained largely inaccessible due to the widespread dispersal of the primary sources and the linguistic difficulties presented by them. To address these problems, Yitzhak Teutsch's book The Cyprus Detention Camps: The Essential Research Guide (Cambridge Scholars, 2019) scrutinizes the scholarly literature, consulting hundreds of primary sources, many of them previously unknown, on three continents, bringing together interviews with scores of eyewitnesses, and translating foreign-language terms into English. The result is a comprehensive, meticulously footnoted guide that uses such tools as maps, a detailed timeline, and biographical entries to make this riveting saga accessible to a broad audience of scholars and general readers. 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 peculiar volume in the history of Yiddish literature, the Yiddish translation of the Christian bible written by Khaim Yekhiel, “Henry,” Einspruch, titled Der Bris Ḥadoshe, first published in Baltimore in 1941.The saga of Einspruch’s translation of the Christian bible is the subject of a new Yiddish drama, “The Gospel According to Chaim,” written by Mikhl Yashinsky, and recently produced by the New Yiddish Rep theater company in New York.Interviewee: Professor Naomi Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.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

American Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel’s existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinians. These now‑forgotten voices, which include an aid‑worker‑turned‑academic with Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti‑Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left‑wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history, identity, and ethics. They sometimes worked with mainstream American Jewish leaders who feared that ignoring Palestinian rights could foster antisemitism, leading them to press Israeli officials for reform. But Israeli diplomats viewed any American Jewish interest in Palestinian affairs with deep suspicion, provoking a series of quiet confrontations that ultimately kept Palestinian rights off the American Jewish agenda up to the present era.In Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 (Yale UP, 2023), Levin lays the groundwork for more forthright debates over Palestinian rights issues, American Jewish identity, and the U.S.‑Israel relationship more broadly.Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Steinsaltz Humash is the long-awaited English version of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s pioneering translation and commentary on the Torah. Like his monumental translation and commentary of the entire Talmud, the new Steinsaltz Humash includes a treasure trove of information to make the text clear, fascinating, and relevant to users of all backgrounds. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Meni Even Israel about his father’s Torah insights.Rabbi Meni Even-Israel serves as the Executive Director of the Steinsaltz Center, which oversees the teachings and publications of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, and has recently put out the app, Steinsaltz Daily Study.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

October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the "debacle."But, argues Uri Kaufman in Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East (St. Martin's Press, 2023), from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel. After nearly being routed, the Israeli Defense Force clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. In the war's aftermath both sides had to accept unwelcome truths: Israel could no longer take military superiority for granted--but the Arabs could no longer hope to wipe Israel off the map. A straight line leads from the battlefields of 1973 to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and all the treaties since. Like Michael Oren's Six Days of War, this is the definitive account of a critical moment in history.Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Executive Director of Unity Through Diversity Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Aviva Ben-Ur and Wim Klooster's edited volume Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World (Cornell UP, 2024)  represents the first collective attempt to reframe the study of colonial and early American Jewry within the context of Atlantic History. From roughly 1500 to 1830, the Atlantic World was a tightly intertwined swathe of global powers that included Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. How, when, and where do Jews figure in this important chapter of history? This book explores these questions and many others.The essays of this volume foreground the connectivity between Jews and other population groups in the realms of empire, trade, and slavery, taking readers from the shores of Caribbean islands to various outposts of the Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese empires.Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World revolutionizes the study of Jews in early American history, forging connections and breaking down artificial academic divisions so as to start writing the history of an Atlantic world influenced strongly by the culture, economy, politics, religion, society, and sexual relations of Jewish people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies