New Books in Jewish Studies

01:00:51

The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck,...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/10/03

This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa(U California Press, 2025)tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West

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00:37:40

Who Gets to Write History? Wikibiases.org by Shlomit...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/10/02

Most of us use Wikipedia without thinking very much about it. A name comes up in conversation, an argument breaks out, or we suddenly need to know what happened in, for example, 1948—and within seconds, Wikipedia offers us a clean, confident answer.But who decided what that answer would be?Who chose which facts belonged in the opening paragraph and which could wait until paragraph fifteen? Who determined which sources were authoritative?My guest on this podcast is Dr. Shlomit Lir, a researcher at

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00:59:46

Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/10/02

From a leading historian, the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the

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00:39:14

The Last of the Ellis Island Jews: A Brooklyn Memoir...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/29

Joel Dinerstein's The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (SUNY Press, 2026) is a tragicomic memoir of a dysfunctional, working-class Brooklyn Jewish family that illuminates both the vitality of urban life in the twentieth century and the social turmoil of white flight. As a child of immigrants born to older parents, Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations--from his grandparents escaping Russia's pogroms to his parents' embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between

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00:51:59

Antisemitism, an American Tradition with Pamela S....

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/25

Pamela S. Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and is Director of the Jewish Studies Program. A specialist in American Jewish history and women’s history, she teaches a variety of courses in Jewish civilization. Pamela Nadell’s books include America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton, 2019), named Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Reviewed in the New York Times, America’s Jewish Women was praised as “a welcome

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00:36:43

Matthew Montgomery, "An Intercessor Like Moses: A Key...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/22

In this episode of the New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with Matthew Montgomery about his article “An Intercessor Like Moses: A Key Component of the Psalter’s Message”, published in the European Hebrew Journal.Montgomery’s study asks how the final form of the Masoretic Psalter communicates hope after the collapse of Judah and the Babylonian exile. Building on the widely recognized observation that Book III of the Psalter engages the downfall of the Southern Kingdom while Book IV places

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00:32:26

Giuseppe Motta, "Jewish Refugees and the...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/16

In this episode of New Books Network, Željko Stanojević speaks with historian Giuseppe Motta about Jewish Refugees and the International Community Between the Two World Wars: Beyond the State (Routledge, 2026), a study of Jewish displacement, statelessness, humanitarian action, international law, and international institutions between the First and Second World Wars.Drawing on extensive archival research in the records of the League of Nations and the Joint Distribution Committee, Motta reconstructs

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00:28:42

Anthony Julius, "Abraham: The First Jew" (Yale UP, 2025)

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/15

Abraham: The First Jew (Yale UP, 2025) is the story of Abraham, the first Jew, portrayed as two lives lived by one person, paralleling the contradictions in Judaism throughout its historyIn this new biography of Abraham, Judaism’s foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham’s life as two

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51:51

Joseph G. Rosenstein, "Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/12

What if Pirkei Avot has a bigger story to tell? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Joseph G. Rosenstein to discuss Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): The Big Picture(Academic Studies Press, 2026), a fresh approach to one of Judaism’s most beloved collections of rabbinic wisdom.The 123 teachings of Pirkei Avot often seem to jump from one subject to another: Torah study, ethics, the afterlife, relationships, leadership, and the responsibilities of living a meaningful Jewish life

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00:48:06

Joseph G. Rosenstein, "Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/12

What if Pirkei Avot has a bigger story to tell? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Joseph G. Rosenstein to discuss Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): The Big Picture(Academic Studies Press, 2026), a fresh approach to one of Judaism’s most beloved collections of rabbinic wisdom.The 123 teachings of Pirkei Avot often seem to jump from one subject to another: Torah study, ethics, the afterlife, relationships, leadership, and the responsibilities of living a meaningful Jewish life

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66:07

Daniela Gerson, "The Wanderers: A Story of Exile,...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/08

InThe Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II(Grand Central Publishing, 2026), an immigration journalist and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin—a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love.Daniela Gerson and her wife, Talia Inlender, met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier,

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60:05

An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/06

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book,An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching

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53:56

Agnes Mueller, "Holocaust Migration in German Jewish...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/05

InHolocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures(Cambridge UP, 2026),analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G.Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and

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67:35

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in Court: The...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/09/02

Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements.During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of

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56:27

Educating for an Uncertain Future in Interwar Poland

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/29

In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish schools with strong ties to Jewish socialism and the labor movement, Hebraist schools promoting

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54:17

Encore - Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/28

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met.Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors. Nothing is value-free. InBioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical

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58:47

Musical Pripetshik: Lyrics and Melodies of...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/25

Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire

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89:41

Sabrina Inowlocki, "Ancient Apologetics and the...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/24

Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archives, and regulating interpretation. Tracing a trajectory from the Letter of Aristeas to Jerome's De viris

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53:17

Jacqueline Vayntrub, "Body Language: Voice,...

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/23

Tune in to this interviewaboutBody Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible(Yale UP, 2026).Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. with honors in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago. Her research operates at the intersection of biblical philology, poetics, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its own Terms

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68:43

Denialism: Polish Style

New Books in Jewish Studies ·

2026/08/22

Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’sPoland vs. Holocaust Historyseries examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context.Elżbieta Janicka focuses on the case of the former German

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