New Books In Jewish Studies

Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in a lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, features mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford UP, 2004-2017) volumes present the first translation ever made from a critical Aramaic text of the Zohar, which has been established by Professor Daniel C. Matt (along with Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker) based on a wide range of original manuscripts. Every one of the twelve volumes provides extensive commentary, appearing at the bottom of each page, clarifying the kabbalistic symbolism and terminology, and citing sources and parallels from biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic texts. 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 Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture? In On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2024) addresses these questions and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwor

Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick, taught children, and hid families. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, and Band of Brothers, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos (William Morrow, 2021) at

In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, and against the backdrop of the Bernie Sander's campaigns in the United States, Mahalel revisits the radical period of the 1890s and recasts Peretz as an "organic intellectual" (Antonio Gramsci) of the Eastern European Jewish working class complementing the political work of the incipient socialist, diaspora nationalist movement of the Jewish Labor Bund. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz in Yiddish and Hebrew and following a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, this study traces Peretz's radicalism from its inception through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history. It shows how this writ

During the Second World War, Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, occupied Poland, and Ukraine lived in communities with Jews and close to various Nazi camps and killing sites. As a result of this proximity, Mennonites were neighbours to and witnessed the destruction of European Jews. In some cases they were beneficiaries or even enablers of the Holocaust. Much of this history was forgotten after the war, as Mennonites sought to rebuild or find new homes as refugees. The result was a myth of Mennonite innocence and ignorance that connected their own suffering during the 1930s and 1940s with earlier centuries of persecution and marginalization. European Mennonites and the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2021) identifies a significant number of Mennonite perpetrators, along with a smaller number of Mennonites who helped Jews survive, examining the context in which they acted. In some cases, theology led them to accept or reject Nazi ideals. In others, Mennonites chose a closer embrace of German identity as a str

Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz was one of the greatest rabbis of the eighteenth century. Even as a child, he was renowned as one of the rare geniuses of his time. Among the most revered Torah scholars of the last 300 years, Rabbi Eybeshitz was also a prolific writer, preacher, and Kabbalah master. His innumerable writings cover all areas of Jewish Learning, including the Talmud, Jewish Law, Homiletics, and Kabbalah. Carefully chosen selections of Rabbi Eybeshitz's writings have now been translated into English by the illustrious scholar Rabbi Yacov Barber, making Rabbi Eybeshitz's extraordinary ideas and insight accessible to a wider audience. In Pearls of Wisdom, you will discover Rabbi Yehonatan's thoughts on the weekly Torah portion and the Jewish holidays, as well as his insights into the Messianic Era; in Sparks of Wisdom, Rabbi Yacov Barber provides an alphabetically organized treasury of Rabbi Eybeshitz’s practical guidance on many questions regarding Jewish teachings, laws, and code; and in Gates of Wisdom

Arjen F. Bakker's book The Secret of Time: Reconfiguring Wisdom in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2023) contributes to the rethinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls as an essential and integral part of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. The Qumran manuscripts attest to the reconfiguration of Jewish wisdom concepts in this period. Strikingly, reflection on time as the organizing principle behind all of reality is formative for these emerging concepts, which are expressed by the enigmatic phrase rāz nihyeh. The secret of time invites us to venture beyond existing categorizations and explore a rich conceptual framework that is manifested across a wide range of texts, beyond generic categories, and overcoming the sectarian divide. 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 Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945 (Brill, 2019), Mirjam Rajner traces the lives and creativity of seven artists of Jewish origin. The artists - Mosa Pijade, Daniel Kabiljo, Adolf Weiller, Bora Baruh, Daniel Ozmo, Ivan Rein and Johanna Lutzer - were characterized by multiple and changeable identities: nationalist and universalist, Zionist and Sephardic, communist and cosmopolitan. These fluctuating identities found expression in their art, as did their wartime fate as refugees, camp inmates, partisans and survivors. A wealth of newly-discovered images, diaries and letters highlight this little-known aspect of Jewish life and art in Yugoslavia, illuminating a turbulent era that included integration into a newly-founded country, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and renewal in its aftermath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

While many have noted the general Jewishness of the Gospel of John, few have given it a seat at the ideologically crowded table of ancient Jewish practice and belief—until now. Join us as we speak with Wally Cirafesi, whose book, John Within Judaism: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Shaping of Jesus-Oriented Jewishness in the Fourth Gospel (Brill, 2021), offers a reading of the Gospel of John as an expression of the fluid and flexible nature of Jewish identity in Greco-Roman antiquity. Wally V. Cirafesi obtained his PhD from the University of Oslo, where he is Visiting Researcher in the Faculty of Theology. He has published on a range of topics related to the New Testament, ancient Judaism, and early Christianity, including Verbal Aspect in Synoptic Parallels (Brill, 2013). Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of th

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French.  Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to dis

In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought.  God as Patient: The Medical Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah (Magnes Press, 2023) presents medical discourse – the knowledge, language, and practice of medicine – as a significant key to our understanding of the Lurianic search for a way to mend reality, and first and foremost the Godhead. The book reads together the Lurianic texts alongside the medical writings of R. Hayyim Vital, R. Isaac Luria's chief disciple, and a medical practitioner. Consequently, the book analyzes how medicine becomes the model for the Lurianic language of action. In its final part, the book shows how God becomes

Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich: Seven Studies (de Gruyter, 2024) apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman(n), and Abraham Schalit. In each case, it is argued that some seemingly trivial anomaly or infelicity, in a publication about such ancient characters as Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod, and Josephus, points to the way in which the historian constructed, and revised, his understanding of the Jews’ situation under Greeks or Romans in light of his perception of the Jews’ situation under the Second or Third Reich. The collection also includes a study that focuses on a Jewish medievalist, Philipp Jaffé, and unravels the indirect but inexorable process that led from a scholarly feud about the editing of medieval Latin texts, in the 1860s, to the “Berlin Antisemitism Dispute”

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the Lubavitcher Rebbe, took an insular Chasidic group that was almost decimated by the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry.  Join us as we speak with Rabbi Chaim Miller about his biography of the Rebbe, Turning Judaism Outward (Kol Menachem, 2014), a superbly crafted biography that draws on recently uncovered documents and archives of personal correspondence, painting an exceptionally human and charming portrait of a man who was well known but little understood.  Rabbi Chaim Miller was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in London, England and studied Medical Science at Leeds University. He published the best-selling Kol Menachem Chumash—Gutnick Edition, which made over a thousand complex discourses of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe easily accessible to the layman. His Lifestyle Books Torah, Five Books of Moses—Slager Edition was distributed to thousands of servicemen and women in the U.S. Army.

In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies.  Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust (de Gruyter, 2023) provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historic

All can agree that the achievement of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) set the standard for subsequent works of "Jewish philosophy". But just what were the contours of philosophical-scientific inquiry that Maimonides replaced? A fairly large array of diverse texts have been studied, but no comprehensive picture has yet emerged. The newly discovered Hebrew dialogue published here, Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2023), has points of contact of various depth with most of the major works of pre-Maimonidean thought. It shares as well influences from without, especially from the Islamic kalam. The dialogue thus presents, in an engaging literary form, a clear and detailed snapshot of pre-Maimonidean philosophy and science. Y. Tzvi Langermann teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephe

The book of Acts is often misunderstood as reflecting anti-Judaism or promoting supersessionism. Jason Moraff, however, argues that Acts binds the Way, Paul, and the Jewish people together in a shared identity. Taking a historically situated approach, Moraff frames Acts' portrayal of the early church and Paul in relation to the Jewish people as participating in internecine conflict regarding the Jewish-tradition-in-crisis after the destruction of the temple. Join us as we speak with Jason Moraff about his recent book, Reading the Way, Paul, and 'the Jews' in Acts Within Judaism (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jason F. Moraff is assistant professor of biblical studies at The King’s University in Southlake, USA. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodu

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work camps for Tunisian Jews, brothels in which women were forced to have sex with soldiers, and prisons and penal camps for Wehrmacht personnel. Most of these sites have not been described in detail in the existing historical literature, and a substantial number of them have never been documented at all. The volume also includes an introduction to the German prisoner of war camp system and its evolution, introductions to each of the various types of camps operated by the Wehrmacht, and entries devoted to each individual camp, r

Prit Buttar's book Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom. Unlike the figures at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, the men who were responsible for these killings have been largely forgotten. Karl Jäger was a senior SS figure who was in charge of the units that carried out most of them. He complained that his experiences caused him to suffer nightmares but continued to order his units to carry on and refused offers of sick leave on the grounds that he regarded it as his duty to remain in his post. He took refuge in compiling painstakingly detailed reports of the killings, listing the numbers executed at every location and breaking them down into men, women and children. T he roles played by other

In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s bo