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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How many episodes does New Books in Jewish Studies have?

The podcast currently has 1,503 episodes available.

New Books in Jewish Studies episodes:

July 18, 2026 Ambrogio Caiani, "Flirting with Evil: The Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation" (Apollo, 2026)
It's a shadowy, ornate world of cover-ups and hidden motives. In Flirting with Evil: The Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation (Apollo, 2026), Ambrogio Caiani lifts back the heavy velvet curtains of thechancel and peers behind the locked mahogany doors of the Vatican to reveal the shocking truths that make up a century of Catholic corruption.
For
many, Catholicism's flirtation with evil has become impossible to
ignore: a pope courting Nazi officials and, horribly, turning a blind
eye to the Holocaust; the Vatican becoming embroiled in a series of
dodgy financial dealings; the child abuse continuously perpetrated by
members of the clergy. Time and time again, Catholic figures have made
terrible choices in private and preached in public about goodness and
morality.
This is the first history that focuses exclusively on
Catholicism throughout the twentieth century, sketching not only
scandalous stories of corruption but also lively portrayals of
Catholicism's key characters—from a beret-clad communist revolutionary
priest to the bizarre morning routine of the pope who followed a daily
cold bath with dry unbuttered toast. Caiani, a critical Catholic
himself, takes a frank and sceptical look at the trajectory of global
Catholicism and wrestles with vital questions about the future of the
church. Taking in the wider socio-political contexts of a world at war
and the accumulating momentum of social progress, this brilliant
history traces the evolution of the Catholic church alongside the
development of our modern society right up to the election of Pope Leo
XIV in 2025.

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1h 5min
July 16, 2026 Chad S. A. Gibbs "Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance" (U Wisconsin Press, 2026)
On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt.
Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance in Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance (U Wisconsin Press, 2026). Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time.
Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940. [email protected] @plerner.bsky.social

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1h 11min
July 15, 2026 Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In
1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes
she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a
group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook
simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we
prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining
a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it
became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of
Jewish American culture.
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book,
demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn
shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook’s
evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of
immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization,
and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates
pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a
repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation.
Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book
is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food
they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic
cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of
American cuisine.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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45min
July 15, 2026 Sarah Kaminsky, "The Forger of Paris" (Doppelhouse Press, 2025)
The Forger of Paris (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) presents
Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography in its only authorized edition, expanded
with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish
Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director
Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore.
"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden
worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has
a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." — Jewish Book Council
At
seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to
Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his
expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce
official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the
Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000
Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation
and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional
photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with
the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he
continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human
rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.
"At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean
the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains
painfully relevant, but inspiring." — Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times
"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." — Foreword Review

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56min
July 13, 2026 Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)
Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to
discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism.
In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance
companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers,
claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly
spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers,
cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement
the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination.
Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial
transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the
complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why
some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how
insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial
interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened
with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that
reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it
does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths.
Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they
persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten
episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of
antisemitism in the United States.

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39min
July 13, 2026 Heidegger in Ruins
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.
In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.

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0min
July 10, 2026 Yiddish Tangos and Klezmer Mambos
This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.
This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros sonidos festival.
This panel discussion originally took place on March 10, 2025.

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1h 6min
July 08, 2026 Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages
There is an academic interest in the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous professor from Vienna.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Seidman about this newly published book, led by scholar Ken Frieden.
Buy the book: here
This book talk originally took place on June 6, 2024.

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59min
July 06, 2026Lila Corwin Berman, "Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they
immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full
legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights
worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila
Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that
both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed
repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the
public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were
Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The
answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine
Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could
exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law
changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political
ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.
Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with
today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman
concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions
about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution.
The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law
and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and,
often, unsettling debates about who is American.
Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.
Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish
migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a
Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National
University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.
Mentioned in this episode:
Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

William E.
Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish
American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140.

Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum

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1h 4min
July 05, 2026Molly Crabapple, "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund" (Random House, 2026)
Molly
Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish
Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern
Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly
anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an
imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” In the first
popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary
world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious
rebels, clandestine revolutionaries
and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this
violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories
interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s
rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a
movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity,
was largely destroyed?
Highlights include:
Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort;

How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe;

The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it
distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization
of Palestine;

A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and
journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner
life of the Bund;

The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun
(with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award.
She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the
Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R.
Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art.
Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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1h

FAQs about New Books in Jewish Studies:

How many episodes does New Books in Jewish Studies have?

The podcast currently has 1,503 episodes available.

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