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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Best of New Books in Jewish Studies

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Number 1: Denialism: Polish Style
Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’s Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context. Elżbieta Janicka focuses on the case of the former German Nazi death camp Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries, the majority from Poland. While keeping in mind that “Treblinka” is as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station at Treblinka the village, Janicka examines symbolic topography, such as the symbols and narratives that are imprinted into these sites under the auspices of the Treblinka Museum. Regarding the unrestricted Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable for Poland, Janicka raises the question: Why doesn’t the present Polish strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation? Janicka argues that while Polish cultural institutions do not deny the Holocaust itself, they practice a form of denialism by obscuring the reality of Polish involvement in the Holocaust. This lecture fits into a broader debate about Polish public institutions that promote a counter-history of the Holocaust and have at their disposal extraordinary means of propaganda both within Poland and abroad. This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2026. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
August 22, 20261h 10min
Number 2: Jacqueline Vayntrub, "Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible" (Yale UP, 2026)
Tune in to this interview about Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale UP, 2026). Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School. She holds a Ph.D. with honors in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago. Her research operates at the intersection of biblical philology, poetics, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its own Terms (Routledge 2019), Body Language: Voice, Embodiment, and Textuality in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2026), as well as the co-author of Hebrew Funerary Inscriptions from Iron Age Judah (Society of Biblical Literature Press, forthcoming). Her current major projects include a commentary on Ecclesiastes for the Old Testament Library series (Westminster John Knox Press), and serving as Project Director for an NEH-funded international collaboration investigating the institutional history and anti-Jewish scaffolding of modern biblical criticism. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
August 23, 202650min
Number 3: "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in Court: The Bern Trial (1933-1935) and the "Antisemitic International"
Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements. During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of material assistance and propaganda. The defendants and their supporters in Nazi Germany were able to rely on an extensive network that had been established in the early 1920s to combat “Judaeo-Bolshevism.” This conspiratorial “Antisemitic International” united German völkisch circles, Italian fascists, Russian monarchists, and French conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the plaintiffs actively sought to expose the “Protocols” as a forgery in the hope that this would counteract their impact. In this lecture, Michael Hagemeister will use the Bern trial as a case study of Jewish legal self-defense in order to shed light on both the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the concerted efforts against the “Antisemitic International” in the 1930s, which have received little attention from historians. Read more about Michael Hagemeister's research on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This lecture originally took place on April 10, 2024. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
September 02, 20261h 8min
Number 4: Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende. In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
August 21, 20261h 31min
Number 5: Laura 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
August 06, 202650min