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About Renee Garfinkel
Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.
NBN Episodes hosted by Renee:
November 12, 2024
What Are Children For?
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grou…
November 5, 2024
The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7
The essay "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7" (Mosaic Magazine) by Shany Mor, dated October 7, 2024, examines the intellectual and …
October 11, 2024
Judaism is About Love
A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religio…
September 18, 2024
The October 7 War
A harrowing account on the frontlines of the war between Israel and Hamas, The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza (Wicked Son, 2024) …
September 12, 2024
Reading Genesis
For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional intere…
September 8, 2024
Dissident Rabbi
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the…
September 4, 2024
Hate Speech and Academic Freedom
Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre, Cary Nelson's Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on B…
August 27, 2024
Kohelet's Cocktail
Dive into the timeless wisdom of Ecclesiastes in Jay Garfinkel's groundbreaking work, Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness (Illuminated…
August 9, 2024
Following Similar Paths
Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a…
August 7, 2024
The Temple in Early Christianity
Eyal Regev's The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale UP, 2019) is he first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the e…
June 7, 2024
Truth and Repair
Judith Herman is renowned for her groundbreaking work with survivors of trauma, including sexual trauma. Her earlier books include Trauma and Recover…
June 4, 2024
German Jerusalem
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…
May 10, 2024
Life's Edge
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the appl…
May 8, 2024
The Making of an Alliance
Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and de…
April 14, 2024
Fragile Neighborhoods
The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the qua…
April 10, 2024
Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophi…
April 1, 2024
Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek”)
How does an organization change in an instant, shift its focus and mission in response to a new reality? One volunteer organization did just that. I…
March 8, 2024
Mapping the Darkness
Why do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep? A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn …
February 24, 2024
Four Battlegrounds
An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence. A new industrial re…
February 10, 2024
Verified
An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds. The internet brings information to our fingertips…
February 8, 2024
Terrorist Minds
What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism chang…
January 17, 2024
What Can We Learn From A Pottery Shard?
Some people are good at what they do, some are enthusiastic about their work. This guest brings both to bear in his exploration of the ancient past.…
January 14, 2024
Hamas
The world is reeling from the savage terror attack that brutalized, raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis and civilians from at least 25 other countr…
January 12, 2024
Assad
In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, e…