Today, most Jewish thinkers have turned away from theology. And if they do, they look into one narrow window into the subject, writing a treatise into topics like the problem of evil or the nature of Jewish chosenness. Not so with today's guest, Michael Marmur. In his newest work, Living The Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Marmur explores dozens of the most pressing theological and philosophical issues in Judaism from the nature of Torah to the place of...
Jul 02, 2025•1 hr 2 min
An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history.The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 5 min
For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother heeding a command at all, something Dr. Brafman terms “reasons for” vs “reasons of” the commandments. In his newest book, Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Brafman looks closely at the second of these questions. After considering answers from some of the most important Jewish thinkers of...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Joseph and Aseneth: A Study in Manuscript Transmission (de Gruyter, 2025) expands a few verses from the book of Genesis into a novella-length work. It is increasingly used as a source for Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the Common Era. Scholarly attention has largely focused the work's provenance, the priority of a longer or shorter text version, and the implications for interpretation. But few have engaged with the work's manuscript witness and transmission. This study returns to the so...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Elana Gomel is a former senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she also served as department chair for two years. This book investigates the Russian community in Israel, analyzing the narratives through which Russian Jewry defines itself and linking them to the legacy of Soviet history. Gomel is also an award-winning fiction writer and the author of eight novels. The story of post-Soviet Jews in Israel illustrates a broader phenomenon of c...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Greek Bible Translations in Byzantine Judaism (Mohr Siebeck, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of the reception and transmission of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages. It is the fruit of some 40 years' research by Nicholas de Lange, who has collected most of the evidence himself, mainly from previously unpublished manuscript sources, such as Cairo Genizah fragments. Byzantine Judaism was exceptional in possessing an unbroken tradition of Bibl...
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital (Academic Studies Press, 2024) presents the hospital’s history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background...
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 23 min
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. The man most recognized for the movement’s success is the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah. While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendenci...
Jun 15, 2025•1 hr 10 min
NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Dave Margoshes’ novel, A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024)—which recently won a Saskatchewan Book Award and the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our m...
Jun 06, 2025•55 min
The Nazi threat emerges from Germany 1933 and shatters the small town life in Krasnik south of Lublin in eastern Poland. The teenager Mischa Stahlhammer manages to escape from a German work camp and joins Polish partisans. He survives by becoming a specialist in arming and disarming mines, the most dangerous of all missions. After the war he ends up in Sweden, meets Sonja, who also lost her family and youth in German concentration camps. Their son Semmy, born in Eskilstuna, tells the story of wh...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 27 min
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today Winner of the August Prize, the story of the complicated long-distance relationship between a Jewish child and his forlorn Viennese parents after he was sent to Sweden in 1939, and the unexpected friendship the boy developed with the future founder of IKEA, a Nazi activist. And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War (Other ...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restrictions that were imposed after 1914, especially in the United States, prevented most from reaching safe havens, and an unknown but substantial number o...
Jun 03, 2025•1 hr 34 min
For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother heeding a command at all, something Dr. Brafman terms “reasons for” vs “reasons of” the commandments. In his newest book, Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Brafman looks closely at the second of these questions. After considering answers from some of the most important Jewish thinkers of...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through its expressions in biblical-themed musical dramas, their literary sources, and the intellectual debates surrounding the works. Adi’...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 12 min
At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2025), Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings...
May 28, 2025•55 min
Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian crisis by our border. And there is a tiny minority of local and non-local activists who sacrifice themselves and who give help to the people that are ...
May 24, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 267
What many people don’t realize is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception there were rigorous debates about the nature and direction of the movement? Thinkers had argued about some of the fundamental questions around Israel. Where would a future Jewish state be located? What language would they speak? Should Israel come about through a slow evolution or a radical revolution? In his book, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Academic Studies...
May 23, 2025•56 min
Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2025) analyzes biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, studies of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and a multiplicity of modern expressions for a comprehensive history of Jewish responses to and justifications of their diasporas. It shows that Diaspora Jews through the ages insisted that God joined them in their exiles, that "Zion" was found in Babylon and Eastern Europe, and that, as citizens of the world, Jews could only ...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 32
Emotion lies at the heart of all national movements, and Zionism is no exception. For those who identify as Zionist, the word connotes liberation and redemption, uniqueness and vulnerability. Yet for many, Zionism is a source of distaste if not disgust, and those who reject it are no less passionate than those who embrace it. The power of such emotions helps explain why a word originally associated with territorial aspiration has survived so many years after the establishment of the Israeli stat...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 2 min
The late Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi (Warren Kenton 1933-2020) wrote The Kabbalistic Tree of Life (KS Books, 2025), a metaphysical scheme based on ancient, medieval and modern views of its principles, which describes the structure and dynamic of cosmic laws that operate throughout the four Worlds of Jacob's Ladder and humanity. Halevi also wrote The Anointed (KS Books, 2025), a fictional Kabbalistic novel about the destiny of one man and the fate of the world. Tune in as we speak with Jonathon Clark,...
May 20, 2025•24 min•Ep. 648
My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Littman Library, 2024), illuminated the dynamic interplay between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions-a theme that resonates deeply with our mission at the Unity Through Diversity Institute. From the outset, Rabbi Levine’s scholarship made clear that Hakham Tsevi’s life was shaped by both geography and intellectual inheritance. The map at the beginning of his ...
May 19, 2025•42 min•Ep. 647
Some two thousand years ago, as the story goes, a rabbi named Yochanan makes the epitome of pragmatic gambles—wagering the entire fate of the Jewish people. In dialogue with the soon-to-be Roman emperor Vespasian, Yochanan tacitly acknowledges the Romans’ planned destruction of Jerusalem in return for a plot of land in a town called Yavneh. There, after the razing of Jerusalem, Jews will join with their teacher to reenvision a new Judaism—one not based on Temple rites but on real life in exile—l...
May 18, 2025•51 min•Ep. 646
Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000). Doing most of his work in the middle of the 20th century, Schindler was either part of or directly responsible for the changes in Reform (and even American) Judaism that we see today. In his biography of Rabbi Schindler, Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (CCAR Press), Dr. Michael Meyer paints ...
May 16, 2025•45 min•Ep. 642
Told through a genre-defying blend of illustrations, photography, and found objects, Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir (Ten Speed Graphic, 2023) chronicles Joanna Rubin Dranger’s investigation into her Jewish family’s history, spanning time, space, and three continents in search of her lost relatives. As discolored photos are retrieved from half-forgotten moth-eaten boxes, Joanna discovers the startling modernity and vibrancy of the lives her family never spoke about—and the devastating viol...
May 15, 2025•34 min•Ep. 639
Rav Kook’s Vision: Halakhah, Secular Knowledge, and the Renewal of Judaism. Those of us who know something about Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook’s life and philosophy know about his being stuck outside of the Land of Israel during WWI, being the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and his encouragement of the secular Zionists who turned swamps into vegetation. But not many of us have analyzed the personal notebooks that the Rav left, commonly known as Shemonah Kevatzim (...
May 14, 2025•50 min•Ep. 642
Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation. After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal su...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 640
There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them ...
May 10, 2025•56 min•Ep. 641
Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-46 (Brandeis UP, 2025) records the experiences of Greek Jews who returned to their native country after World War II, when many went into hiding, fought in combat, became refugees, or were deported, some to Nazi death camps. Though they wanted more than anything to survive and come home, those who returned to postwar Greece faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of a civil war. Their stories, which rarely feature in disc...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 639
The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Press, 2019) is a comprehensive account of the Chelmno death camp. Chelmno was not only the first Nazi death camp, it also set a horrific example in establishing gas vans as the first mass use of poison gas to kill Jews. Chris Webb and Artur Hojan cover the construction and the development of the mass murder process as perfected by the Nazis. The story is painstakingly told from all sides, the Jewish inmates, some who survived the...
May 08, 2025•54 min•Ep. 220
Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Rosie's head is shaved and along with the loss of her beautiful hair, she loses the life she once cherished. Among the chaos and surrounded by hopelessness, Rosie realizes th...
May 07, 2025•54 min•Ep. 638
