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Jewish Studies
Jewish Studies October 3, 2022

The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust

Ion Popa

Hosted by Ari Barbalat
In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of …

Jewish Studies

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Interviews with scholars of Judaism about their new books.

Jewish Studies September 30, 2022

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society

Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825

Aviva Ben-Ur

Hosted by Drora Arussy
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony …
Jewish Studies September 28, 2022

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa

The Impact of World War II

Reeva Spector Simon

Hosted by Drora Arussy
Incorporating published and archival material, Reeva Spector Simon's book The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II (Routledge, 2019) fills an important gap in …
Israel Studies September 27, 2022

The Invisible Palestinians

The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv

Andreas Hackl

Hosted by Akin Ajayi
The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this …
Middle Eastern Studies September 22, 2022

A Sephardi Sea

Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean

Dario Miccoli

Hosted by Roberto Mazza
A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and …
Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel September 19, 2022

Queering Anti-Zionism

Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism

Corinne E. Blackmer

Hosted by Renee Garfinkel
Why do some scholars sacrifice truth and logic to political ideology and peer acceptance? With courage and intellectual integrity, queer scholar-activist Corinne Blackmer stages a pointed critique of scholars whose …
Jewish Studies September 19, 2022

Demons in the Details

Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia

Sara Ronis

Hosted by Zalman Newfield
The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and …
Jewish Studies September 19, 2022

Sin•a•gogue

Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought

David Bashevkin

Hosted by Matthew Miller
By its very nature, the ideals of religion entail sin and failure. Judaism has its own language and framework for sin that expresses themselves both legally and philosophically. Both legal …
Jewish Studies September 14, 2022

How the Soviet Jew Was Made

Sasha Senderovich

Hosted by Miriam Schulz
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live …
Jewish Studies September 13, 2022

Dirshuni

Contemporary Women's Midrash

Tamar Biala

Hosted by Matthew Miller
Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences …
Think About It September 12, 2022

Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"

Book Talk 55

Courtney Blair Hodrick and Amir Eshel

Hosted by Uli Baer
Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt …
Jewish Studies September 12, 2022

Herod in History

Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context

Kimberley Czajkowski

Hosted by Ari Barbalat
Most of our information about Herod the Great derives from the accounts found in Josephus' Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Together they constitute a unique resource on one of the …
Biblical Studies September 9, 2022

Exodus in the New Testament

Seth M. Ehorn

Hosted by Michael Morales
The book of Exodus played a significant role in forming the identity of the Jewish people, with exodus traditions appearing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. As the paradigmatic act of redemption …
Middle Eastern Studies September 7, 2022

The Islamic Movement in Israel

Tilde Rosmer

Hosted by Roberto Mazza
Since its establishment in the late 1970s, Israel’s Islamic Movement has grown from a small religious revivalist organization focused on strengthening the faith of Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel to …
Intellectual History September 5, 2022

Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism

Investigating the Human Intellect

Michael Engel

Hosted by Ari Barbalat
Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature …
Jewish Studies September 2, 2022

Humanity Divided

Martin Buber and the Challenges of Being Chosen

Manuel Duarte de Oliveira

Hosted by David Gottlieb
Throughout a hugely productive intellectual career spanning more than half a century, the Austrian-born philosopher Martin Buber returned repeatedly to the question of Israel’s divine election. Buber, who left Nazi …
Asian Review of Books September 1, 2022

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem

A New Biography of the Old City

Matthew Teller

Hosted by Nicholas Gordon
Jerusalem’s Old City is normally understood to be split into four quarters: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter. Those designations can be found …
Music August 30, 2022

Who by Fire

Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

Matti Friedman

Hosted by Bradley Morgan
In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos …
Literature August 30, 2022

Open When You Are

A Mystical Novel

Ben Ackerman

Hosted by Michael Morales
Gabel's eatery is always open, feeding hungry hearts, bodies, and souls. When Strad, a young man at odds with life, wanders in, an uncanny encounter propels him on a journey …
Italian Studies August 29, 2022

Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews

Early Modern Conversion and Resistance

Emily Michelson

Hosted by Miranda Melcher
Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse …