Delving into a traditionally underexplored period, this book focuses on the treatment of Greek Jews under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the years leading up to the Second World War. Almost 86% of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust, leading many to think this was because of Metaxas and his fascist ideology. However, the situation in Greece was much more complicated; in fact, Metaxas in his policies often attempted to quash anti-Semitism. The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-19...
Nov 26, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 456
Alex Zablotsky is the Managing Director of PJ Library, a philanthropy that donates millions of books on Jewish themes to children around the world every year. We talk about the confluence of Jewish and universal themes, the similarities and differences between PJ Library and its Israeli sister, Sifriat Pajama, which shares hundreds of thousands of picture books in Arabic, as well as in Hebrew, the process by which books are chosen, and the importance of sharing books on Jewish themes with non-Je...
Nov 25, 2023•45 min•Ep. 124
In this week's episode, Modya and David discuss parshat Va-Yetzei (Gen. 28:10-32:3) and its lessons for the middah (character trait) of patience. Is the patriarch Jacob a model of patience, or does his predilection for deceit suggest a person too eager to get what he wants? What does the matriarch Leah teach us about the relationship between patience and acceptance of what is? Does the matriarch Rachel provide her own lessons? Modya and David look to these tangled, archetypal personalities and r...
Nov 23, 2023•26 min•Ep. 7
On today’s episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward magazine, about the situation in Israel and Gaza. She notes that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, shattered the paradigm of how Israel and even the Arab world understood what Hamas was all about. The result has been a deep sense of shock and mourning among Israelis for those who have lost loved ones or had them taken hostage. At the same time, some Jews...
Nov 22, 2023•37 min•Ep. 132
For thousands of years, the Jewish people lacked a political state; yet, what can we say about the Jewish tradition of statesmanship? What makes it distinctive, and what can we learn from it? In Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship (Encounter Books, 2023) , Rabbi Meir Soloveichik investigates ten Jews, from King David all the way to the foundation of Israel, what we can learn from their examples, and how history can provide hope amidst recent events in Israel. Rabbi Dr. Me...
Nov 21, 2023•54 min•Ep. 89
The Jewish nation begins with a collection of twelve brothers and half-brothers, linked through their father, Jacob. From these close familiar beginnings, each develops into a distinct tribe, with unique characteristics and destinies that have indelible imprints on the rest of Tanakh. Tribal Blueprints: Twelve Brothers and the Destiny of Israel (Maggid, 2020) examines each of Jacob's sons, revealing their individual stories in Genesis and the impact of their shifting places within the family. Ho...
Nov 20, 2023•54 min•Ep. 455
In I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Academic Studies Press, 2013), based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean ...
Nov 19, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 454
The Rabbinic Sages of the Tannaitic era were fixated on memory and terrified of forgetfulness. In promulgating their own interpretations of Jewish law, the Tannaim not only took seriously Moses’s admonitions to remember and not forget, they painstakingly constructed a system of laws thar recognized that helped create and enhance a powerful and dynamic memory form. The rabbis also knew, however, that people are fallible and they’re going to forget. To try to ensure communal coherence within the e...
Nov 16, 2023•44 min•Ep. 453
Today I talked to Steven B. Bowman about his book Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel (Wayne State UP, 2022). Sepher Yosippon was written in Hebrew by a medieval historian noted by modern scholars for its eloquent style. This is the first known chronicle of Jewish history and legend from Adam to the destruction of the Second Temple, this is the first known text since the canonical histories written by Flavius Josephus in Greek and later translated by Christian scholars int...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 452
In this week's episode, David and Modya discuss where patience may be found within the Torah portion of Toldot. As they look into the text and are challenged to find examples, it brings them face to face with their own patience or at times lack thereof. Modya Silver is an author and psychotherapist based in Toronto. David Gottlieb is Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...
Nov 15, 2023•42 min•Ep. 6
Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return: Conv...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 451
The book of Kings tracks the division of Israel's kingdom into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah, narrating each one's demise. Yet Kings is no mere history; the sacred record holds a message still relevant for God's people today. Tune in for part two of our interview with Walter Maier III, this time on volume 2 of his commentary on Kings, which covers chapters 12-22. Walter Maier III earned in his PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages, and is Profes...
Nov 12, 2023•17 min•Ep. 137
The book of Kings in the Bible records more than 380 years of the history of Israel and its monarchy, from the last part of David’s rule to the end of the kingship in Judah, and emphasizes the role of prophets along the way. Join us as we speak with Walter Maier III about the first of his two-volume commentary on 1 Kings, covering chapters 1-11, the rise and failures of Solomon’s kingship. Walter Maier III earned in his PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages, and is Professor of E...
Nov 11, 2023•15 min•Ep. 137
In this week's episode, Modya and David discuss the Torah portion of Hayyei Sarah and what it teaches about the middah (trait) of patience. They note the kindness, generosity, and grace of the matriarch Rivkah, and the relationships between these traits and the trait of patience. They explore the water that plays a central role in this Torah portion, and water's fundamental link to patience: its ability to wear away, drop by drop over great spans of time, any obstacle before it. And they begin b...
Nov 09, 2023•39 min•Ep. 5
In the ancient Mediterranean world, individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure physical afflictions. Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Megan Nutzman argues that the inevitability of sickness and injury made people willing to experiment with seemingly beneficial techniques, even if they originated in a foreign cultural or religious tradition. With circumstances of close cultural contacts, such as pre...
Nov 05, 2023•53 min•Ep. 19
The obvious riddles and difficulties in Exodus 3:13-15 and 6:2-8 have attracted an overwhelming amount of attention and comment. These texts make important theological statements about the divine name and the contours of the divine character. In his book Making Sense of the Divine Name in the Book of Exodus: From Etymology to Literary Onomastics (Eisenbrauns, 2017), Austin Surls attempts to move beyond atomistic readings of individual texts and etymological studies of the divine name toward a ho...
Nov 05, 2023•26 min•Ep. 135
In this volume entitled Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2023), Carson Bay focuses on an important but neglected work of Late Antiquity: Pseudo-Hegesippus' On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), a Latin history of later Second Temple Judaism written during the fourth century CE. Bay explores the presence of so many Old Testament figures in a work that recounts the Roman-Jewish War (66–73 CE) and the destruction of Jerusalem i...
Nov 04, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 134
In concluding their focus on the trait of equanimity, Modya and David are joined in conversation by Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute and the author of several books on Mussar, the Jewish ethical self-development discipline. Modya, David, and Alan focus on the Torah portion of Vayera in the Book of Genesis, especially in light of the difficult times being experienced as this episode was recorded. They address numerous questions, including: How do you practice equanimity in dark times...
Nov 02, 2023•51 min•Ep. 4
In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf con...
Oct 29, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 450
In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: “After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘Thes...
Oct 26, 2023•44 min•Ep. 201
In this episode, Modya and David dive into Lekh Lekha, the Torah portion in which the story of the patriarch Abraham begins to unfold, and consider what lessons this narrative holds for developing our equanimity. Here we see Abraham as both a flawed and faithful person, as a wanderer and a warrior, and as someone who follows the command to embark on a journey whose destination is unknown. In what ways are we like Abraham? How does he instruct us on how to identify what is consequential and what ...
Oct 26, 2023•43 min•Ep. 3
In this episode, psychotherapist and author Modya Silver and scholar David Gottlieb explore parshat Noaḥ, seeking wisdom in the story of the Flood, and the conduct of both God and Noah, about how one can develop and maintain equanimity under even the most difficult circumstances. The hosts also discuss what the narrative of the Tower of Babel, and how selfishness and overreach can undermine our ability to rise above events that are inconsequential, whether good or bad. See also: The Heart of Tor...
Oct 24, 2023•41 min•Ep. 2
Yanki Tauber's The Book of Genesis with Commentary and Insights from 500 Sages and Mystics (Open Book Press, 2022) features a new foundational English translation of the first book of the Bible, an anthology of commentaries representing the full spectrum of Jewish learning spanning 33 centuries, and an abundance of illustrations, maps, and infographics. Never before has the English reader been given direct, unmediated access to this wealth of moral, legal, philosophical, mystical, and psychologi...
Oct 24, 2023•56 min•Ep. 449
In the past week, the entire world has been focusing on the murderous attack by the Hamas organization against the State of Israel and Israel's response to these actions. Hamas has killed 1,300 civilians and soldiers, including children, the elderly, and women. Furthermore, the methods used by Hamas in their killings have displayed an unprecedented level of cruelty, including acts of desecration of the living and the dead, sexual violence, and harming children. Additionally, they have abducted 1...
Oct 24, 2023•52 min•Ep. 51
In this first episode, author and psychotherapist Modya Silver, and David Gottlieb, Director of Jewish Studies at Spertus Institute, begin a yearlong project of seeking guidance on self improvement in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, with the help of R. Menahem Mendel Lefin's Cheshbon haNefesh: A Guide to Self-Improvement Through Character Refinement. This book, one of the classics of the Jewish practice of Mussar, or ethical self-improvement, provides guidance on how to methodically develop ...
Oct 23, 2023•44 min•Ep. 1
When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men's gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a ...
Oct 23, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 448
Excavating and interpreting Paul’s thought, belief, ideas, and mission from his authentic letters and those otherwise attributed to him remains an ongoing effort in scholarship, with several competing perspectives vying for prominence. Matthew Thiessen advances an important reading of Paul within first-century Judaism, which he conceives not as a monolith of theological positions but rather as a spectrum of ideas that comfortably included Paul’s new belief in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and Paul’s...
Oct 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 131
In her book, Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023), Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicates the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora from the vantage point of the putative homeland, engaging both diasporic and Zionist models simultaneously through language, geography, and im...
Oct 21, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 56
In Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Stefan C. Ionescu examines the process of economic Romanianization of Bucharest during the Antonescu regime that targeted the property, jobs, and businesses of local Jews and Roma/Gypsies and their legal resistance strategies to such an unjust policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
Oct 20, 2023•2 hr 41 min•Ep. 447
In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021). A visiting professor of modern Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, Magid also is rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Sea View, N.Y. Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s, was assassinated in New York in 1990 yet, as Magid told me, and...
Oct 19, 2023•46 min•Ep. 5
