In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that wei...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 481
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class and ...
Feb 25, 2024•32 min•Ep. 251
The Holocaust in Croatia (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity (in...
Feb 25, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 480
Since the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the disput...
Feb 24, 2024•53 min•Ep. 158
The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill, 2023)...
Feb 24, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 479
Juan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century. Recovering the silenced voices of Jewis...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 478
Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. As Marzouk explains in Egypt as a Monst...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 146
Today I talked to Mara Josi about her new book Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature (Legenda, 2023). Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina. From December 1944, literary texts of this eve...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 141
Daphna Sharfman's book Jerusalem in the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem, offering ...
Feb 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 477
How should we think about violent accounts in the Bible? Why did Gandhi urge the Jews to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism during World War II? What is the reality behind buzz-words like asymmetric warfare and collective punishment that come up so often when discussing events in Gaza? What role should global opinion and the hostage crisis play in Israeli strategy? Is there a moral imperative to win? Jewish ethicist Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody discusses these questions and more in this discussion of h...
Feb 14, 2024•55 min•Ep. 96
In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of genuin...
Feb 12, 2024•51 min•Ep. 171
Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousa...
Feb 10, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 476
On this week's episode, Modya and David discuss the Torah portion of Mishpatim (Ex. 21:1-24:18) through the lens of the character trait of nekiyut, or cleanliness. In this Torah portion, the divine articulation of detailed laws helps to establish a culture in which physical, spiritual, and moral cleanliness are upheld on an individual and collective basis. What does this mean for how we, today, confront temptation, cultivate care for our physical selves, and support collective efforts toward ele...
Feb 08, 2024•36 min•Ep. 18
Between Romania's entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the comb...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 475
When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today. Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire a...
Feb 05, 2024•51 min•Ep. 31
Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived t...
Feb 02, 2024•47 min•Ep. 474
Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, Anton Weiss-Wendt's On the Margins: Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia (CEU Press, 2017) is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940-41 are among the issues addressed in the book ...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 473
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 whic...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 205
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....
Jan 27, 2024•41 min•Ep. 472
“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 con...
Jan 22, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 10
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 Medica...
Jan 19, 2024•21 min•Ep. 471
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 ...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 470
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 Na...
Jan 17, 2024•59 min•Ep. 469
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 Direct...
Jan 16, 2024•21 min•Ep. 468
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 suppo...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 467
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, argue...
Jan 15, 2024•58 min•Ep. 466
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 ...
Jan 13, 2024•45 min•Ep. 465
Why did no other ancient society produce something like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community could have created a literary corpus so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable. For Jacob Wright, the Bible is not only a testimony of survival, but also an unparalleled achievement in human history. Forged after Babylon's devastation of Jerusalem, it makes not victory but total humiliation the foundation of a new idea of belonging. Lamenting the destruction of their home...
Jan 13, 2024•56 min•Ep. 142
In discussing this week's Torah portion, Va'era (Ex. 6:2-9:35) in light of the character trait of Decisiveness, Modya and David ponder big questions: Do we have untrammeled free will? Or are there limits -- and how would we know? What is the right balance between decisiveness and the weighing of options? How can we make decisions more mindfully -- being cognizant of their effects on others? Pharaoh's hardened heart, Moses and Aaron's determination, and the Israelites' crushed spirits after centu...
Jan 12, 2024•38 min•Ep. 14
The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism, shaping the worldview of Jewish people during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. In his book, Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism: From the Temple to the Mishnah (Indiana UP, 2023), Yair Furstenberg examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at th...
Jan 10, 2024•38 min•Ep. 464
