New Books in Jewish Studies

By Marshall Poe

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently publ... more

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The podcast currently has 1,521 episodes available.

New Books in Jewish Studies episodes:

August 08, 2026 Russia’s Jews in World War I
When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction.
In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler.
Buy the book: here
This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025.

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57min
August 08, 2026 Deborah Barer, "Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud" (Oxford UP, 2026)
What does it really mean to go "beyond the letter of the law"? In
this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with scholar Deborah Barer to
discuss her book Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud, which offers a surprising new interpretation of one of the Talmud's most enduring ethical concepts: lifnim mi-shurat ha-din.
For generations, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din has been understood
to mean acting "beyond the letter of the law"—choosing generosity or
compassion over strict legal obligation. Barer challenges that
assumption. Through a close reading of classical rabbinic texts, she
argues that the Talmud originally used the phrase not to describe a
particular kind of moral act, but a particular way of making decisions.
Rather than rigidly following established rules, rabbis sometimes
improvised, departing from expected patterns in pursuit of the right
outcome for a unique case.
By tracing how this idea developed from in the Talmud, Barer uncovers
how one phrase evolved into a cornerstone of Jewish ethical thought.
Her work invites readers to rethink the relationship between law and
morality, showing that creativity and flexibility have always been part
of the rabbinic legal tradition.
Together, Barer and Katz explore why improvisation matters in Jewish
law, how the Talmud balances consistency with compassion, and what this
ancient model of decision-making can teach us about navigating difficult
moral questions today.
Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of
North America. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University
of Virginia, with an emphasis on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics.
Previously, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson
University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the
Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She served as the
editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning.
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 (JPS)

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52min
August 07, 2026 Gianluca Fantoni, "Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026) tells
the compelling story of the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group (JBG), a
five-thousand-strong military unit, recruited primarily from the Jewish
population of Palestine, and the only exclusively Jewish military unit
to fight under the British flag during the Second World War. Gianluca
Fantoni reconstructs the military and human experience of the brigade in
Italy and investigates its enduring and controversial place in memory
and public debate.
Formed in 1944, the JBG saw combat in the
final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with
distinction against German forces. After the war, many of its members –
who often had little or no military training, and included artists,
scientists, and farmers – engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle
Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork
for the future Israeli state. Others sought retribution against Nazis
and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and
the desire for justice.
Far more than a conventional military history, Soldiers, Angels, and
Avengers is both a critical study of the political uses of history and a
vivid, passionate narrative that brings to life the men and women of
the brigade. Accessible and engaging, this book offers readers a rare
lens through which to understand the intersections of war, memory, and
politics in twentieth-century Europe.
Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett
Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host
of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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1h 6min
August 07, 2026 Donniel Hartman, "Who Are the Jews—And Who Can We Become?" (Jewish Publication Society, 2023)
In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman about his book Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become? (Jewish Publication Society, 2023), the 2023 National
Jewish Book Award Finalist in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.
Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the
Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. His work has consistently
addressed what constitutes Jewish peoplehood across a landscape of
internal difference.
Hartman's central argument distinguishes
between the Genesis covenant and the Exodus covenant. The Genesis
covenant is a covenant of belonging: membership in the Jewish people
that obtains by birth or by formal entry into the community, independent
of belief or practice. The Exodus covenant, by contrast, is a covenant
of aspiration, calling the people toward holiness, ethical development,
and spiritual growth. Where the first establishes identity, the second
establishes obligation.
In our discussion, Hartman emphasized
that the Genesis covenant requires each community, and each individual,
to relinquish the presumption of controlling a singular, authoritative
account of the Jewish story. Read together, the two covenants do not
divide the Jewish people into separate camps so much as describe the
full shape of Jewish belonging: one covenant that secures the people as a
people, and a second that gives that peoplehood its ongoing direction
and purpose. Jewishness, on this account, transcends denominational
boundaries—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, and otherwise—even
as each tradition supplies its own particular mode of enacting the
Exodus covenant's demand for growth.
Hartman situated this
framework within a longer pattern in Jewish intellectual history: the
recurring effort to locate an essential core beneath the full body of
commandments, exemplified by Hillel's reduction of the Torah to a single
ethical principle. This tendency toward distillation, he argued, helps
explain how communities as historically and culturally distinct as
Yemenite, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and secular Israeli Jews continue to
recognize one another as belonging to a single people, notwithstanding
significant divergence in practice. Shared calendar and shared
collective memory, in his formulation, do more to sustain peoplehood
than uniformity of observance.
The conversation turned to the
relationship between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. Hartman
located Zionism itself within the Genesis covenant: attachment to the
Jewish people's return to and sovereignty in the land of Israel is, on
his account, a constitutive part of Jewish family and belonging, not a
separate or optional commitment layered on top of it.
Hartman
further addressed the changing status of intermarriage, noting a shift
from its historical treatment as a violation of the Genesis covenant
toward broader acceptance, particularly in Diaspora communities. He
observed that a substantial proportion of Jewish spouses in
intermarriages maintain Jewish identity, practice, and communal
affiliation, complicating any straightforward inference from rising
intermarriage rates to communal decline. Jewish continuity, on this
account, is proving more resilient, and more complex, than earlier
demographic anxieties assumed.
The conversation closed on the
question of how Exodus Judaism—a Judaism oriented toward aspiration,
self-criticism, and moral striving—can be sustained in a period marked
by contested facts and by the anti-Zionism as antisemitism seen around
the world. Hartman offered no definitive resolution, but argued for the
continued value of engaging the argument itself: treating the Genesis
covenant as the foundation that preserves collective belonging, and the
Exodus covenant as the ongoing rationale for what that belonging is for.
As
we continue the discussion to find common ground and appreciation of
the greater Jewish story, follow Jewish Tapestry for engaging talks on
Jewish heritage communities.

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47min
August 06, 2026 Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust
The Light of Learning (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War I, as secularism spread, Hasidic leaders rapidly reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of world-renowned yeshivas, Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and eventually underground yeshiva bunkers during the Holocaust. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour.
Join YIVO for a presentation on this book with author Glenn Dynner along with performances of Hasidic nigunim by Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics.
Buy the book: here
This lecture and performance originally took place on March 13, 2024.

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1h 10min
August 06, 2026Laura Jockusch on Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust (JP)
After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system?
To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon.
Mentioned in the episode
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal

The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass)

Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...)

Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

Tony Judt Postwar (2005)

Recallable Books:

Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished

Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers

Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810)
Read a transcript here.

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51min
August 05, 2026 Yiddish Language During the Holocaust
The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Hannah Pollin-Galay uses cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation to explore Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Pollin-Galay about this new book, led by historian Samuel Kassow.
Buy the book: here
This book talk originally took place on December 2, 2024.

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1h 3min
August 01, 2026Posen Library: Jewish Studies Teaching Modules
Bring the breadth of Jewish history and civilization into your classroom with ready-to-use teaching modules curated by experts.
The Posen Library is an educational resource grounded in primary sources and made broadly accessible through the creation and curation of engaging contextual material. Its goal is to highlight the varieties of Jewish culture and civilization across time and space for English-speaking audiences and to be the first stop for those, in university settings and beyond, who are interested in teaching about the significant breadth of Jewish experiences.
Originally conceived as a 10-volume print anthology, the Posen Library’s free digital platform makes the published content globally accessible. Content from print volumes is added to the site as the volumes are published by Yale University Press. Nine out of the ten volumes have been published to date.
The Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative comprises teaching modules centered around core teaching topics. Each module consists of an overview and curricular material that can be used in four class meetings, focusing on 20–25 primary sources (texts, images, and other media) with interpretive content and supplementary resources for both students and instructors. Posen Library curricula offer flexibility and are designed to be easily integrated into coursework in a variety of ways—perfect for launching a new class or refreshing a syllabus to include new perspectives and voices.
Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.
Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the Senior Scholar for Pedagogy at the Posen Library.
Geraldine Gudefin is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Mentioned in this episode:
Posen Library Teaching modules: here

Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative Fellowship: here

Sarah Bunin Benor’s “Jewish Culture around the world” Module: here

Lila Corwin Berman’s “Who Is American? Citizenship, Law, and Jewish History in the United States” Module: here

Geraldine Gudefin’s “Jewish Emancipation, Citizenship, and Belonging” Module: here

Geoffrey Levin’s “Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: Empire, Colonialism, and Identity” Module: here

Karen E. H. Skinazi’s “Sephardic Journeys: Literature, Memory, and Jewish Culture” Module: here

Jewish Language Project: here

Jewish Cultures on the Map: here

Jewish English Lexicon: here

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57min
July 31, 2026 The YIVO Library in New York: Personal Reflections on Its History and Collections
In the mid-1930s a group of New York Yiddishist intellectuals established the Central Jewish Library and Press Archive, whose collections became the nucleus of the YIVO Library when the Institute relocated from Vilna to New York in 1940. Over the succeeding decades, the Library grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to the dedication of its librarians and supporters. It emerged as a “collection of collections,” absorbing the extensive personal libraries of prominent Yiddish writers, scholars, and book collectors. Crucially, after 1945 the Library also recovered large portions of the Vilna YIVO’s prewar holdings along with thousands of rabbinic works from Vilna’s Strashun Library. Throughout its history, the YIVO Library has been a beehive of scholarship and bibliography, which has been fostered by such outstanding figures as Mendl Elkin and Dina Abramowicz.
In this presentation, Zachary M. Baker will offer some personal reflections on the legacy that the YIVO Library’s founders and builders have left behind.
View the bibliography for this talk: here
This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2025.

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1h 1min
July 31, 2026Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce eds., "The Ancient Israelite World" (Routledge, 2024)
The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of the archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, the 47 chapters in The Ancient Israelite World provide foundational, accessible, and detailed studies in their respective topics. The volume considers the history of interpretation of ancient Israel, studies on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society and history, and avenues for present and future approaches to the ancient Israelite world. Accompanied by over 150 maps and figures, it allows the reader to gain an understanding of key issues that archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars have faced and are currently facing as they attempt to better understand ancient Israelite society. The Ancient Israelite World is an essential reference work for students and scholars of ancient Israel and its history, culture, and society, whether they are historians, archaeologists or biblical scholars. Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene is a distinguished international scholar closely associated with the European Hebrew Journal (EHJ), an international double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal.
Dr. Greene serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the European Hebrew Journal. In addition to contributing to the supervision of the scholarly quality of submitted articles, the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature in Belgrade, the journal’s publisher, has released an official academic interview with him as part of its series of scholarly conversations.
His publication and interview, entitled “Scribes, Scripts, and State Formation in Ancient Israel,” were produced in collaboration with Željko Stanojević, the journal’s Managing Editor.
About Dr. Nathaniel E. Greene
Dr. Greene is a lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Old Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He received his PhD from the prestigious University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States.
His principal areas of scholarly expertise and the fields he represents within the journal include:
Biblical Hebrew and Philology: The study of the historical development and linguistic structure of ancient Hebrew.

Northwest Semitic Languages and Epigraphy: The analysis of ancient inscriptions on stone, clay, and other materials from the Levant.

Palaeography: The historical development of ancient scripts and manuscript traditions.

The Formation of the Ancient Israelite State: Anthropological and sociological approaches to the emergence of institutions during the Iron Age, with particular attention to the role of scribes in the formation of biblical texts, including the Deuteronomistic History.

In his research, Dr. Greene also employs modern digital technologies, including advanced Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to analyse damaged ancient inscriptions and reconstruct patterns of literacy in the Iron Age Near East.

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28min

FAQs about New Books in Jewish Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in Jewish Studies have?

The podcast currently has 1,521 episodes available.

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