New Books in Jewish Studies

I wish I had seen Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt's Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) six months ago. I taught a course in the fall titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." It's a course I've taught several times. It's a good course, co-taught with Professor of Theology. But it's a course that would have been better if I had read this book the summer before I taught it.Laura HIlton and Avinoam Patt have collected a series of essays designed specifically for high school and university level instructors who teach the Holocaust. Some of them aim to bring teachers up to speed on the most recent research about specific areas of the subject. Others look at specific kinds of sources and offer advice on how teachers might use them in the classroom. Some of them offer new interpretations, others cover well-established material concisely and effectively. Depending on their own backgrounds and interests, teachers will find some of these essays more valuable than others.  But every teacher will emerge from this book having learned something new and having new ideas about how to communicate their subject and their passions to their students.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

During World War II, with apocalypse imminent, a group of well-known Jewish artists and scientists sidestepped despair by challenging themselves to solve some of the most difficult questions posed by our age. Many of these people had just fled Europe. Others were born in the United States to immigrants who had escaped Russia's pogroms. Alternately celebrated as mavericks and dismissed as eccentrics, they trespassed the boundaries of their own disciplines as the entrance to nations slammed shut behind them. In Stargazing in the Atomic Age (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Anne Goldman deftly interweaves personal and intellectual history in lucent essays that throw new light on these figures and their virtuosic thinking. In sentences that mingle learning with self-revelation, juxtaposition becomes an instrument for making the familiar strange, leading us to question our assumptions about who these iconic characters were and where their contributions can lead us. In these pages, Albert Einstein plays Mozart to align mathematical principles with the music of the spheres. Here, too, Grace Paley and Saul Bellow contemplate the dirt and dazzle of the New York and Chicago streets from their walk-ups while dreaming up characters whose bravura equals the panache and twang of vernacular speech. Nearby, Marc Chagall eludes the worst of World War II by painting buoyant scenes on the ceiling of the Paris Opera in brilliant stained glass no less exuberant than the effervescent jazz of George Gershwin's own Rhapsody in Blue. In these essays, Goldman reminds readers that Jewish history offers as many illustrations of achievement as of affliction. At the same time, she gestures toward the ways in which invention and art that defy partisanship might offer us an example as we enter a newly divisive era.R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I think this is the fifth time I've interviewed John K. Roth for the podcast (and the second for Carol Rittner). He has always been relentlessly realistic about the challenges, intellectual, practical and emotional, that Holocaust Studies poses.  Advancing Holocaust Studies (Routledge, 2020), however, reads differently. Published in a world wracked by political and ideological conflict, the essays here struggle to reconcile the time, energy and devotion Holocaust scholars have poured into their subject with the seeming failure to change real world behavior and attitudes. The essays are personal and honest. They ask hard questions about the value of Holocaust Studies about whether or how it needs to change to confront modern challenges.Rittner and Roth have done their usual wonderful job in finding and publishing an important group of essays. It says nothing about their work to suggest that the essays provide more questions than answers.   Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

For many years, the historical-critical quest for a reconstruction of the origin(s) and development of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch has been dominated by the documentary hypothesis, the heuristic power of which has produced a consensus so strong that an interpreter who did not operate within its framework was hardly regarded as a scholar. However, the relentless march of research on this topic has continued to yield new and refined analyses, data, methodological tools, and criticism. Join us as we speak with Dr. Roy E. Gane about the book Exploring the Composition of theExploring the Composition of the Pentateuch (Eisenbrauns, 2020), edited by L.S. Baker Jr., Kenneth Bergland, Felipe A. Masotti, and A. Rahel Wells, a volume that investigates new ideas about the composition of the Pentateuch arising from careful analysis of the biblical text against its ancient Near Eastern background.Covering a wide spectrum of topics and diverging perspectives, the chapters in this book are grouped into two parts. The first is primarily concerned with the history of scholarship and alternative approaches to the development of the Pentateuch. The second focuses on the exegesis of particular texts relevant to the composition of the Torah. The aim of the project is to foster investigation and collegial dialogue in a spirit of humility and frankness, without imposing uniformity.In addition to the editors, the contributors include Tiago Arrais, Richard E. Averbeck, John S. Bergsma, Joshua A. Berman, Daniel I. Block, Richard Davidson, Roy E. Gane, Duane A. Garrett, Richard S. Hess, Benjamin Kilchör, Michael LeFebvre, Jiří Moskala, and Christian Vogel.Tune in as we speak with Roy E. Gane about new approaches to the composition of the Pentateuch!Roy Gane is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Languages at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI. He contributed a chapter and wrote the introduction for Exploring the Composition of the Pentateuch, and has published many other works, including Cult & Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy, and the NIV Application Commentary for Leviticus and Numbers.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

What does it mean that our single greatest source of medieval Islamic government documents comes from the attic of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo?This is the seeming paradox that Marina Rustow, director of the renowned Geniza Lab at Princeton University, has been trying to make sense of for years. In 1896, twin sisters and Scottish philologists Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson transported fragments from the geniza (or worn text repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo to their dear friend Solomon Schecter, a Talmud scholar at Cambridge University. The Hebrew-language fragments of the Cairo Geniza would go on to revolutionize the study of medieval Jewry: in 1970, German-Jewish Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein dubbed the Cairo Geniza “the Living Sea Scrolls” for its remarkable insight into the social world of medieval Jews.But flip the documents over, and the world of the Geniza is hardly just a Jewish one. In her new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rustow examines the previously neglected lines of Arabic found on some of the Geniza’s Hebrew-language documents: Fatimid-era petitions and decrees that defy the adage that the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents and preserved even fewer.No Fatimid state archive exists in the Middle East today. But the Cairo Geniza’s fragments—which passed through the hands of tax collector and chancery secretary, paper pusher and vizier alike—force us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that the pre-Ottoman Middle East was defined by weak or informal institutions. Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to fully understand it.Listen in to learn more—and stick around to the end to hear Marina’s favorite fact about daily life in medieval Cairo!Notably mentioned in this episode: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken Books, 2011) Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Volumes I-VI (republished with University of California Press, 2000) S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (Faber & Faber, 1964) Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and the director of the Princeton Geniza Lab.Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

A remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City (FSG, 2017) is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this "most private of public servants" finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today's Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his grand Armenian-tile-clad buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to the cultural fluidity that has historically characterized Jerusalem at its best.A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers the ramifying layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (Academic Studies Press, 2019), Shaul Magid examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.Shaul Magid is the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and has written extensively on Jewish Thought, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and American Jewish Culture.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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020) is the first in-depth analytical history of a prisoner society during the Holocaust. Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Rather than depict the world of the prisoners as an atomized state of exception, it argues that the prisoner societies in the Holocaust are best understood as existing among the many versions of societies as we know them. This book challenges the claims of Holocaust exceptionalism and insisting that we view it with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prisoner society Terezín produced its own social hierarchies, but the contents of categories such as class changed radically: seemingly small differences among prisoners could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half year of the ghetto’s existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. The shared Jewishness of the prisoners was not the basis of their identities, but rather, prisoners embraced their ethnic origin. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis.Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick. Hájková has co-edited the yearbook Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente between 2006 and 2008. A special issue of German History on “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma” appeared online this summer. She has also edited family wartime diaries from the Communist resistance in the Holocaust. She is on Twitter at @ankahajkova. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women (Indiana University Press, 2020), Michal Raucher explores the ways ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel make decisions about their reproductive lives. Although they must contend with interference from doctors, rabbis, and the Israeli government, ultra-Orthodox women find space for―and insist on―autonomy from them when they make decisions regarding the use of contraceptives, prenatal testing, fetal ultrasounds, and other reproductive practices. Drawing on their experiences of pregnancy, knowledge of cultural norms of reproduction, and theological beliefs, Raucher shows that ultra-Orthodox women assert that they are in the best position to make decisions about reproduction.Conceiving Agency puts forward a new view of ultra-Orthodox women acting in ways that challenge male authority and the structural hierarchies of their conservative religious tradition. Raucher asserts that ultra-Orthodox women's reproductive agency is a demonstration of women's commitment to ultra-Orthodox life and culture as well as an indication of how they define religious ethics. Michal Raucher is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of Israel studies, the anthropology of women in Judaism, and religious authority.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

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew from that experience. As a veteran of the First World War, Fraenkel survived the initial purge resulting from the implementation of measures designed to bar Jews from practicing law in the Third Reich. Though his legal practice suffered, Fraenkel persisted in defending people prosecuted by the Nazis, and enjoyed success in a number of cases. While the increased restrictions and growing reach of the police state ultimately forced Fraenkel to emigrate in 1938, his experiences as a lawyer played a major role in the development of the “dual state” theory of dictatorship, the only analysis of totalitarianism written from within Nazi Germany and the cornerstone of Fraenkel’s contributions to the field of political science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies