This book puts two of the most significant Jewish Diaspora communities outside of the U.S. into conversation with one another. At times contributor-pairs directly compare unique aspects of two Jewish histories, politics, or cultures. At other times, they juxtapose. Some chapters focus on literature, poetry, theatre, or sport; others on immigration, antisemitism, or health. Taken together, the essays in Promised Lands North and South: Jewish Canada and Jewish Argentina in Conversation (Brill, 202...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 536
The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one's last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible. A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) clarifies the world of late ancient Judai...
Aug 02, 2024•53 min•Ep. 535
For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an...
Aug 01, 2024•55 min•Ep. 131
In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike. Adara Goldberg's Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947-1955...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 534
Today I talked to Ewa Bacon about her book Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz (Purdue UP, 2017). In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek--newly graduated from medical school in Krakow--was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in February 1942. German big businesses brutally exploited the cheap labor of prisoners in the camp, and workers were dying. In 1943, Stefan, now a functionary ...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 1462
The earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by ...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 533
Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought (Brandeis UP, 2022) proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on ...
Jul 27, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 532
For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, ...
Jul 27, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 531
Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy (NYU Press, 2024), Jonathan Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, ...
Jul 26, 2024•59 min•Ep. 530
The nature and reliability of the ancient sources are among the most important issues in the scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is noteworthy, therefore, that scholars have grown increasingly skeptical about the value of these materials for reconstructing the life of the Teacher of Righteousness. Travis B. Williams' book History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness (Cambridge UP, 2019) is designed to address this new perspective and its implications f...
Jul 24, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 529
Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s (Stanford UP, 2016) is a genealogy of Hebrew poetry written in pre-state Israel between the beginning of World War II and the War of Independence in 1948. In it, renowned literary scholar Hannan Hever sheds light on how the views and poetic practices of poets changed as they became aware of the extreme violence in Europe toward the Jews. In dealing with the difficult topics of the Shoah, Natan Alterman's 1944 publ...
Jul 23, 2024•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 59
In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology o...
Jul 20, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 163
Joel, Obadiah, and Micah all prophesied not after a calamity struck but right before a potential crisis or during the crisis itself. Facing immanent catastrophe, the Jewish people had to decide where their loyalties lay. Join us as we speak with Rav Yaakov Beasley about his book Joel, Obadiah, and Micah: Facing the Storm (Maggid, 2024). He draws from the best of traditional and contemporary scholarship to guide us through the prophets’ trials and tribulations, providing historical overviews of t...
Jul 17, 2024•40 min•Ep. 161
Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, Yosefa Raz's book The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2023) reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, wh...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 160
Contemporary thought typically places a strong emphasis on the exclusive and competitive nature of Abrahamic monotheisms. This instinct is certainly borne out by the histories of religious wars, theological polemic, and social exclusion involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But there is also another side to the Abrahamic coin. Even in the midst of communal rivalry, Jews, Christians, and Muslim practitioners have frequently turned to each other to think through religious concepts, elucidate sa...
Jul 16, 2024•49 min•Ep. 228
How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO's relationship to Zionism and Israel In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete library to Israel. Palestinian activists and supporters protested loudly to international organizations and th...
Jul 15, 2024•28 min•Ep. 101
When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun. Burgenla...
Jul 12, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 528
Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2024), Rachel Z. Feldman details how ...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 527
The Hellenistic period was a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish priesthood. The waning days of the Persian empire coincided with the continued ascendance of the high priest and Jerusalem temple as powerful political, cultural, and religious institutions in Judea. The Aramaic Scrolls from Qumran, only recently published in full, testify to the existence of a flourishing but previously unknown Jewish literary tradition dating from the end of Persian rule to the rise of the Hasmoneans. In ...
Jul 08, 2024•52 min•Ep. 526
Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in ...
Jul 07, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 525
Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D., has been a leading rabbi and scholar of the American Jewish experience throughout his long career. Now Rabbi Emeritus of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, PA, he previously served as Rabbi of Temple Concord of Binghamton, NY, and Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Binghamton University (SUNY). Sussman also taught at Princeton, Hunter College, and Rutgers. He recently completed a term as Chair of the Board of Governors of Gratz Colle...
Jul 02, 2024•47 min•Ep. 524
Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, an...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 2023
In contrast to scholarly belief that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews envisions the transcendent, heavenly world as the eschatological inheritance of God's people, Jihye Lee argues that a version of an Urzeit-Endzeit eschatological framework - as observed in some Jewish apocalyptic texts - provides a plausible background against which the arguments of Hebrews are most comprehensively explained. Instead of transcendence to the heavenly world that will come after the destruction of the sha...
Jun 29, 2024•38 min•Ep. 159
Today we are going to explore a fascinating volume of the Yiddish library, the autobiography of Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn. Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both ...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 521
Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study sho...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 520
For a brief moment in the history of Acre, there was a Hebrew community that linked old and new settlements. It had a national-Zionist orientation and consisted of Jews of local and Mizrachic origin. This community is no longer visible in the cityscape, and its history has disappeared from the collective Zionist memory - but it played a role in building the Jewish national community in Palestine. The unusual history of Acre shows how it succeeded in attracting new, nationalist settlers. Anat Kid...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 519
Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using le...
Jun 15, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 209
Peter Bergamin’s, new book, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I. B. Tauris, 2019), is an intellectual biography of one of the most important propagators of the Maximalist Revisionist stream in Zionism ideology. The book positions Ahimeir within the contexts of the Israeli right and the Zionist movement in general, and corrects some common misunderstandings surrounding the man and his ideology. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at...
Jun 10, 2024•38 min•Ep. 22
Joseph A. Skloot joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, First Impressions: Sefer hasimdim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis UP, 2023). First Impressions uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book. In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in med...
Jun 08, 2024•56 min•Ep. 71
Asaf Elia-Shalev's book Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth (U California Press, 2024) tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a years-long political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ances...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 58
