New Books in Jewish Studies

Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods.In Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016), Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner's life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew.Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews--the freest in history--to be fully American and fully Jewish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What does the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible have to say about nomads and nomadism in the ancient Near East? This episode explores nomadism in the Judaic religious tradition through the eyes of the authors of the Old Testament.Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford UP, 2020), Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote.The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.Julia Elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Matthew Thomas, theologian and biblical scholar, explains how the Bible got to be the Bible, how confident we can be in its historicity, and on what authority we can trust such judgments. We talk about the languages of the Scripture and their transmission over time, and how we see the emergence of the documents that would later become the Bible already in first-century Christian communities.Professor Thomas teaches Biblical languages and the history of the Bible, Patristics, and Early Christian interpretation of the Scriptures, especially Pauline Theology, at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage (Academic Studies Press, 2022), Hélène Jawhara Piñer presents readers with the dishes, ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic principles that make up a sophisticated and attractive cuisine, one that has had a mostly unremarked influence on modern Spanish and Portuguese recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Rabbi Ron Kronish spent thirty years directing the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), an interfaith organization devoted to promoting dialogue in Israel. Utilizing the tools of interfaith dialogue, the ICCI became a “council of organizations…as a tool in peacebuilding throughout the 1990’s, until 2015.” (From the introduction.)In Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2022), Kronish interviews six diverse individuals whose remarkable work in peacebuilding in Israel-Palestine has contributed to creating an atmosphere conducive to developing better relations between Jews and Arabs.In our interview, Kronish highlights the important work conducted by his subjects, and brings to light important though perhaps little known efforts of men and women committed to creating peace in a troubled region.Phil Cohen is a rabbi in Columbia, MO. He's also the author of Nick Bones Underground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like: How can we explain the fascination and intense identification of Israelis with the Bible? What does it mean to live in such close proximity with the Bible, and What kind of story can such a life tell? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Tzafrir Barzilay explores the origins of the charges of well poisoning leveled at European minorities in the later Middle Ages. Barzilay 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.Tzafrir Barzilay is a Senior lecturer in the Department of History at Bar Ilan University.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

The early 1930s constituted an ambiguous moment for the roughly three million Jews that resided in the Polish Republic. On the one hand, as recent scholars have emphasized, Polish Jews found numerous opportunities to partake in flourishing cultural and political projects that spanned the ideological spectrum from Zionism to Yiddishism to Polish integrationism to various brands of socialism. In addition, Josef Pilsudski’s government – while by no means an ally to Polish Jewry – was the lesser of two evils compared to the explicitly anti-Semitic Endecja regime that ruled the country by the end of the decade. At the same time, however, trouble lurked around every corner. Polish Jews found their earning opportunities deeply limited, due to both economic depression and a widespread social prejudice that blocked them from getting jobs. Even more concerning, the rise of fascist politics – in Poland and abroad – made clear the fledgling state’s weaknesses, and cast a shadow of doubt over any sense that acceptance would prevail over national hatred. Polish Jews now grappled with the possibility that Jewish life in Eastern Europe might not be feasible going forward. What was to be done amidst these precarious circumstances? How was one to plan for the future, both as an individual and as a member of a minority community? How was one to handle the anxiety of unclear and multifarious dangers?In his new volume An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard UP, 2021), Kenneth Moss has resurrected the mentalité of those that struggled daily with these questions, illustrating what it meant for Polish Jews to grope for meaning in the face of constant uncertainty and real dread. To accomplish this task, Moss has assembled and examined an astounding breadth of documents produced by people from throughout Polish Jewish society. Readers will find analyses of Polish Jewish intellectual luminaries like Max Weinreich, Jacob Lestschinsky and Chaim Grade, each of whom allowed recent events to influence and mutate their understandings of Jewish life and community. Moss also shines a light on more common Jews that no less vociferously sought to forge practical and pragmatic solutions to their increasingly dire situations. The result is a monograph dedicated to the daily experience of minority life in the modern world; a world permeated by a sense of unease at what tomorrow might bring. James Benjamin Nadelis a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Today I talked to Alex Lahav about his edition and translation Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022).Zvi Preigerzon wrote memoirs about his time in the Gulag in 1958, long before Solzhenitsyn and without any knowledge of the other publications on this subject. It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the harsh reality of Soviet Gulags. Even after the death of Stalin, when the whole Gulag system was largely disbanded, writing about them could be regarded as an act of heroism. Preigerzon attempted to document and analyze his own prison camp experience and portray the Jewish prisoners he encountered in forced labor camps. Among these people, we meet scientists, engineers, famous Jewish writers and poets, young Zionists, a devoted religious man, a horse wagon driver, a Jewish singer of folk songs, and many, many others. As Preigerzon put it, "Each one had his own story, his own soul, and his own tragedy." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies