Victoria Khiterer's book Jewish City Or Inferno of Russian Israel?: A History of the Jews in Kiev Before February 1917 (Academic Studies Press, 2017) describes the history of Jews in Kiev from the tenth century to the February 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kiev Jewish community was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Russian Empire. This book illuminates the major processes and events in Kievan Jewish history, including the creation of the Jewish community, the ...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 517
In The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024), Glenn Dynner tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland between the two World Wars. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in ruins, and the youth seemed swept up in secularist trends as a result of mandatory public schooling and new Jewish movements like Zionism and Socialism...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 518
In the 1920s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the frin...
Jun 04, 2024•26 min•Ep. 121
When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holo...
Jun 03, 2024•41 min•Ep. 302
One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of early Christianity reverent to Israel’s scriptures. In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Josh...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 157
From a remote mountain village in the Caucasian mountains of Georgia came the most surprising discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls: a rare, beautiful, and valuable Hebrew Bible known as the Lailashi Codex. In ancient tradition, scribal art possesses supernatural powers. The provenance of this Codex is shrouded in mystery. Questions about the authorship and ownership surround this ancient work of treasure and secrets. The Codex, written as a labor of love by a scribe of rare skill, was hidden fro...
Jun 01, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 156
Is the purpose of the Book of Kings merely to provide a reason for the exile, or is there a greater message of hope? Tune in as we speak with Nathan Lovell about his monograph, The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: 1 and 2 Kings as a Work of Political Historiography (T&T Clark, 2022). Approaching the Book of Kings as a coherent narrative, Lovell argues Kings recalls the past in order to demonstrate what it means to be Israel in the present, encouraging...
May 29, 2024•21 min•Ep. 155
Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in a lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, features mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford UP, 2004-2017) volumes present the first translation ever made from a critical Aramaic text of the Zohar, which has been established by Professor Daniel C. Matt (along with Nathan Wolski and Joel He...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 516
"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this pol...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 515
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them wi...
May 27, 2024•44 min•Ep. 514
In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, and against the backdrop of the Bernie Sander's campaigns in the United States, Mahalel revisits the radical period of the 1890s and recasts Peretz as a...
May 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 513
During the Second World War, Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, occupied Poland, and Ukraine lived in communities with Jews and close to various Nazi camps and killing sites. As a result of this proximity, Mennonites were neighbours to and witnessed the destruction of European Jews. In some cases they were beneficiaries or even enablers of the Holocaust. Much of this history was forgotten after the war, as Mennonites sought to rebuild or find new homes as refugees. The result was a myth of ...
May 25, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 1444
Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz was one of the greatest rabbis of the eighteenth century. Even as a child, he was renowned as one of the rare geniuses of his time. Among the most revered Torah scholars of the last 300 years, Rabbi Eybeshitz was also a prolific writer, preacher, and Kabbalah master. His innumerable writings cover all areas of Jewish Learning, including the Talmud, Jewish Law, Homiletics, and Kabbalah. Carefully chosen selections of Rabbi Eybeshitz's writings have now been translated in...
May 24, 2024•31 min•Ep. 512
Arjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on time as the organizing principle behind all of reality is formative for these emerging concepts, which are expressed by the enigmatic phrase rāz nihyeh...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 511
In Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945 (Brill, 2019), Mirjam Rajner traces the lives and creativity of seven artists of Jewish origin. The artists - Mosa Pijade, Daniel Kabiljo, Adolf Weiller, Bora Baruh, Daniel Ozmo, Ivan Rein and Johanna Lutzer - were characterized by multiple and changeable identities: nationalist and universalist, Zionist and Sephardic, communist and cosmopolitan. These fluctuating identities found expression in their art, as did their wartime fate as refug...
May 22, 2024•2 hr 1 min•Ep. 510
While many have noted the general Jewishness of the Gospel of John, few have given it a seat at the ideologically crowded table of ancient Jewish practice and belief—until now. Join us as we speak with Wally Cirafesi, whose book, John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Brill, 2021), offers a reading of the Gospel of John as an expression of the fluid and flexible nature of Jewish identity in Greco-Roman antiquity. Wally V. Cira...
May 21, 2024•22 min•Ep. 154
Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, thes...
May 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 130
In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought. God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah (Magnes Pres...
May 20, 2024•41 min•Ep. 509
Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies (de Gruyter, 2024) apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman(n), and Abraham Schalit. In each case, it is argued that some seemingly trivial anomaly or infelicity, in a publication about such ancient characters...
May 19, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 508
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the Lubavitcher Rebbe, took an insular Chasidic group that was almost decimated by the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry. Join us as we speak with Rabbi Chaim Miller about his biography of the Rebbe, Turning Judaism Outward (Kol Menachem, 2014), a superbly crafted biography that draws on recently uncovered documents and archives of personal correspondence, painting an exceptionally h...
May 18, 2024•21 min•Ep. 507
In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, New Microhistorica...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 208
All can agree that the achievement of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) set the standard for subsequent works of "Jewish philosophy". But just what were the contours of philosophical-scientific inquiry that Maimonides replaced? A fairly large array of diverse texts have been studied, but no comprehensive picture has yet emerged. The newly discovered Hebrew dialogue published here, Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2023), has points of contact of various depth with most o...
May 11, 2024•32 min•Ep. 65
Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in ...
May 08, 2024•36 min•Ep. 119
The book of Acts is often misunderstood as reflecting anti-Judaism or promoting supersessionism. Jason Moraff, however, argues that Acts binds the Way, Paul, and the Jewish people together in a shared identity. Taking a historically situated approach, Moraff frames Acts' portrayal of the early church and Paul in relation to the Jewish people as participating in internecine conflict regarding the Jewish-tradition-in-crisis after the destruction of the temple. Join us as we speak with Jason Moraff...
May 08, 2024•27 min•Ep. 153
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 506
Prit Buttar's book Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom. Unlike the figures at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the men who were responsible for these killings have been largely f...
May 05, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 505
In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what ...
May 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 513
The Sobibor Death Camp was the second extermination camp built by the Nazis as part of the secretive Operation Reinhardt--with intent to carry out the mass murder of Polish Jewry. Following the construction of the extermination camp at Belzec in south-eastern Poland from November 1941 to March 1942, the Nazis planned a second extermination camp at Sobibor, and the third and deadliest camp was built near the remote village of Treblinka. Sobibor was similarly designed as the first camp in Belzec, ...
Apr 22, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 504
On today's episode of the New Books Network, we are privileged to have Professor Arie Dubnov joining us for an in-depth discussion on the multifaceted history and evolution of Zionism. Professor Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University and a preeminent scholar on Zionist thought and nationalist movements. His acclaimed works include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and the edited volumes ...
Apr 22, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 262
In 1290, Jews were expelled from England and subsequently largely expunged from English historical memory. Yet for two centuries they occupied important roles in mediaeval English society. England’s Jews revisits this neglected chapter of English history—one whose remembrance is more important than ever today, as antisemitism and other forms of racism are on the rise. In England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Dr. John ...
Apr 22, 2024•58 min•Ep. 120
