New Books in Jewish Studies

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 state.Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers UP, 2023) expertly demonstrates how the energy propelling the Zionist project originates from bundles of feeling whose elements have varied in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. Beginning with an original typology of Zionism and a new take on its relationship to colonialism, Penslar then examines the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices over the course of the movement’s history. The resulting portrait of Zionism reconfigures how we understand Jewish identity amidst continuing debates on the role of nationalism in the modern world. Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was in inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Penslar has published a dozen books, most recently Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. Penslar is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Professor Cathleen Chopra-McGowan examines some the incongruities of our Bible in the context of the Ancient Near East, showing how the stories and traditions of Israel resembled and borrowed from those of Babylon and Assyria. She compares the Genesis narrative to two others, the epics of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis, especially discussing the universal flood narrative and rationale for sacrifice to show the evolution of our ancestors’ religious practice and thinking about God. Professor Chopra-McGowan teaches courses in the Religious Studies Department at Santa Clara University, including Near Eastern languages, literatures, history, and archaeology, as well as uses of the Bible in contemporary society. Professor Chopra-McGowan’s faculty webpage at Santa Clara University. The earthquake that interrupted our talk St. Crispin’s Day Speech by Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, 1989) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Historian John Jeffries Martin traces narratives of the Apocalypse over the last 500 years in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions in his new book, A Beautiful Ending. This discussion about the culture of Apocalypse follows (and is the second part of) an interview we began on the New Books in History Podcast which was a historical discussion. Professor Martin is an Early Modern Historian at Duke University. His earlier books include Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). He is also editor of several books, including The Renaissance World (2007), which I remember reading as a graduate student. Professor Martin’s faculty website at Duke University Professor Martin’s books on Amazon.com First Half of this Interview: New Books in History Thomas More, Utopia (1516) E. S. O. Martin, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse: Howard Zinn and Christopher Columbus on The Sopranos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Matthew Thomas, theologian and biblical scholar, explains how the Bible got to be the Bible, how confident we can be in its historicity, and on what authority we can trust such judgments. We talk about the languages of the Scripture and their transmission over time, and how we see the emergence of the documents that would later become the Bible already in first-century Christian communities. Professor Thomas teaches Biblical languages and the history of the Bible, Patristics, and Early Christian interpretation of the Scriptures, especially Pauline Theology, at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and is working on a book project on sex, risk, and rabbinic text.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Dr. Michael Coogan is lecturer on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and the director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum. He is the author of God and Sex, The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, and numerous textbooks on the Old Testament. He joined me on the phone to talk about his brand new book, God’s Favorites: Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness, out from Beacon Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Shulem Deen is a writer, journalist, and author of the award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return. He is a regular contributor to the Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Joan Micklin Silver's groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young, Orthodox Jewish woman who arrives in New York City from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reunited with her already-assimilated husband, Gitl finds they now have little in common and she is forced to adjust to a new way of life. Hester Street achieved international critical and commercial success, and Kane received a Best Actress nomination at the 1976 Academy Awards.  Marking the film's 50th anniversary, Dr. Julia Wagner's landmark book Hester Street (Bloomsbury, 2025) is the first to focus exclusively on Micklin Silver's film. Wagner examines how, despite the sexism and prejudice that Micklin Silver faced, a low-budget, black-and-white, female-led, independent production with Yiddish dialogue became an unexpected box-office hit. Through close analysis, Dr. Wagner highlights the importance of Hester Street as a milestone in cinema and affirms Micklin Silver's status as a unique voice in the history of American film-making.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Since October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed a massive American Jewish uprising in support of Palestinian liberation. Through sit-ins in Congress or Grand Central Terminal, through petitions and marches, thousands of Jews have made it known the Israeli state is not acting in their name. This resistance did not come out of nowhere. Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (Verso Books, 2025) returns us to its roots in the “red decade” of the 1930s and, from there, traces the history of American Jewish radicals and revolutionaries to the present day.Benjamin Balthaser delves into radical Jewish novels and memoirs, as well as interviews with Jewish revolutionaries, to unearth a buried if nonetheless unbroken continuity between leftist Jewish Americans and the diasporic internation­alism of today.Covering more than just the politics of anti-Zionism, Citizens of the Whole World explores the Jewish revolutionary traditions of Marxist internationalism, Jewish solidarity with Third World struggles, and relations between Jewish and Black radicals during the Civil Rights era.Balthaser’s book stages an intervention into current anti-Zionist politics, suggesting activists can learn from past struggles to help form a future politics in a world after Zionism. Benjamin Balthaser's critical and creative work explores the connections among radical U.S. social movements, racial and class formation, internationalism, and culture. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Radical Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as American Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Boston Review, Jacobin, Shofar and elsewhere. He is currently associate professor of multi-ethnic U.S. literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and associate editor of American Quarterly. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

After Jews: Essays on Political Theology, Shoah and the End of Man (Anthem Press, 2025) is an attempt to describe and critically interpret the condition of man living in the shadow of the Shoah, in the world "after Jews". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In this episode Rabbi Marc Katz is in discussion with Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin about his new book Inviting God In: A Guide to Jewish Prayer (Central Conference of American Rabbis Press, 2025), an engaging and insightful commentary on the Shabbat evening and morning services. Designed for students of all ages, from bet mitzvah to adulthood, the book's relatable tone and discussion questions meaningfully engage readers in the worship service they are leading or attending. In the book, Rabbi Salkin breaks down each prayer and ritual, helping learners connect to the service with fresh insight and knowledge. With a blend of humor and depth, Inviting God In shows how the ancient words of prayer still speak to the challenges and joys of contemporary life. Our discussion, not only touches on the main themes and ideas in the book, but about prayer itself and the role that ritual plays in helping Jews connect with God. Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin is the author of numerous books, including Righteous Gentiles in the Hebrew Bible: Ancient Role Models for Sacred Relationships and Putting God on the Guest List, winner of the 1993 Benjamin Franklin Award for the best religion book published in the United States. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025). The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In doing so, he established standards of scientific inquiry into God that were and remain highly influential on Jewish and Christian thought. Averroes, however, does not provide much in the way of demonstrative knowledge of God, and most of his arguments remain dialectical, rhetorical, or political. This volume explores the various pathways towards attaining divine knowledge that we find in Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, and on Plato’s Republic, along with Averroes’ Epistle on Divine Knowledge, Decisive Treatise, and more. Yehuda Halper is Professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University. He is currently a aisiting professor at University of Chicago Divinity School. His first monograph, Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato (Brill, 2021) won the Goldstein-Goren Book Award for the best book in Jewish Thought in 2019-2021. He is currently directing the ISF grant (#622/22) "Samuel Ibn Tibbon's Explanation of Foreign Terms and the Foundations of Philosophy in Hebrew." Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid. His latest book is Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry (Jewish Publication Society, 2025) illluminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss. She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet—Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa—in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too. Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah. Rabbi Dr. Wendy I. Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and the coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation and And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing and coeditor of These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah (de Gruyter, 2025) proposes a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality. It derives from the four-year workings of a group of researchers and artists at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute led by Michal Govrin. The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male participants. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising (Harper, 2025), Holocaust historian Elizabeth Hyman introduces five young, courageous Polish Jewish women—known as “the girls” by the leadership of the resistance and “bandits” by their Nazi oppressors—who were central to the Jewish resistance as fighters, commanders, couriers, and smugglers. They include:Zivia Lubetkin, the most senior female member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command Staff in Warsaw and a reluctant legend in her own time, who was immortalized by her code name, "Celina"Vladka Meed, who smuggled dynamite into and illegal literature out of the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the uprisingDr. Idina “Inka” Blady-Schweiger, a young medical student who became a reluctant angel of mercyTema Schneiderman, a tall, beautiful and fearless young woman who volunteered for smuggling and rescue missions across Nazi-occupied Eastern EuropeTossia Altman, a heroic courier with a poetic soul, who helped bring arms into the Warsaw Ghetto, fought in the Uprising, and ferried communiques to the outside worldInterspersed with the stories of other Jewish women who resisted, The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto rescues these women from the shadows of time, bringing to light their resilience, bravery, and cunning in the face of unspeakable hardship—inspiring stories of courage, daring, and resistance that must never be forgotten. Elizabeth Hyman is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Polish Jews who fled their homeland in 1939 and ultimately made their way, as refugees, to the United States. She earned dual master’s degrees in History and Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland-College Park, and has written the history blog, “HISTORICITY (was already taken),” since 2011. She lives in New Paltz, New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: Amer­i­can Jew­ish Studies Cel­e­brate 350 Award Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush yearsWhat do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2025) delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history.Drawing from a wealth of archival sources including the travelogues of thousands of American tourists who smuggled aid to Russian Jews, Shaul Kelner offers a compelling tale of activism and its profound impact, revealing how a seemingly disparate array of elements could be woven together to forge a movement and achieve the seemingly impossible. It is a testament to the power of unity, creativity, and the unwavering dedication of those who believe in the cause of human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Founded in 1932, the Pērkonkrusts ("Thunder Cross") was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto--"Latvia for Latvians!"--echoed the ultranationalist rhetoric of similar movements throughout Europe at the time. Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, however, the Pērkonkrusts never succeeded in seizing power. Nevertheless, in her book Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia (U Wisconsin Press, 2025) holocaust historian Paula A. Oppermann argues that the movement left an indelible mark on the country . The antisemitism at the core of the Pērkonkrusts' ideology remained a driving force for Latvian fascists throughout the twentieth century, persisting despite shifting historical and political contexts. Thunder Cross is the most comprehensive study of Latvia's fascist movement in English to date, and the only work that investigates the often neglected continuities of fascist antisemitism after World War II. Formulated as an empirical case study, this book draws on international and interdisciplinary secondary literature and sources in seven languages to broaden our understanding of fascism, antisemitism, and mass violence from Germany and Italy to the larger European context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Chronicles the encounter of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with war, revolution, and Soviet power from 1917 through 1930 At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. Yet while a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. This groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s. Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life, 1917–1930, Vol. 1, (NYU Press, 2025) Guest: Elissa Bemporad (she/her) is the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust, and is a Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013), and Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019). Elissa is also the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018); and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: here Linktree: here tells the story of the ways in which Jews endured, adjusted to, and participated in the Soviet system both as individuals and as part of a Jewish collectivity during the first decade of its existence. The volume explores Jewish cultural, political, and social life in the different regions of the Soviet Union, integrating gender and women’s issues, narratives of historical elites and ordinary folk. It focuses on everyday life and discusses the fate of Jews in the Soviet Union both as Soviet citizens and as Jews. Chronicling the ways in which different Jews became Soviet in the 1920s, the volume reveals how the lines of contact between Jews in the Soviet Union and the outside world fluctuated between open antagonism and impassioned support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in On Antisemitism: A Word in History (Penguin Press, 2025). More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn. Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies