In Hanukkah in America: A History (New York University Press, 2013), Dianne Ashton, professor of Religion Studies at Rowan University, delves into the history of Hanukkah in the United States to illuminate how successive generations of American Jews used the holiday to project their hopes and fears about Judaism’s survival in America. Through analyzing an impressive range of source materials including rabbinic sermons, etchings of 19th century communal pageants, and contemporary flyers advertising latke flavor varieties, Ashton demonstrates Hanukkah’s malleability in the observances of American Judaism’s leaders and laity, which enabled the holiday – historically considered a minor festival – to become an integral part of the Jewish calendar year.

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Daniel E. Dawes has written 150 Years of ObamaCare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Dawes is the executive director of health policy and external affairs at Morehouse School of Medicine and a lecturer within Morehouse’s Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine. In 150 Years of ObamaCare, Dawes tells the long and often forgotten history of the nearly two century fight for health care equity that culminated in the passage of the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. He draws on his role as a leader in a large coalition of organizations that helped shape ObamaCare, revealing what went on behind the scenes. He illustrates this with copies of letters and e-mails written by those who worked to craft and pass the law. Ultimately, Dawes argues that ObamaCare is much more comprehensive in the historical context of previous reform efforts that go back to the Civil War.

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Cass Sunstein‘s son, Declan, got dad hooked on Star Wars. And dad, a Harvard Law professor, ended up writing a book about it. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d write a book about Star Wars,” Sunstein recently told the Boston Globe,“I’d say it’s more likely that I’d become an astronaut or a poet.” In The World According to Star Wars (Harper Collins, 2016) Sunstein explores its lessons as they relate to childhood, fathers, the Dark Side and redemption. Calling it our Modern Myth, Sunstein says Star Wars also has a lot to teach us about constitutional law, economics, and political uprisings. From those topics, it answers questions like these. No one predicted the film’s massive success so how did it happen? When Star Wars heroes are told they are free to choose, what does that mean in their epic story world? What does it say about our never-ending ability to make the right decision when the chips are down in our real one? How are constitutional law opinions similar to serialized blockbusters? An intelligent book for a general audience, Sunstein doesn’t shy away from putting on his subjective movie critic’s hat and declaring which Star Wars is the best. Spoiler: He puts Empire Strikes Back at No. 1. Why? Listen to the podcast to find out.

John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected].

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In Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Adam Ferziger, S.R. Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement at Bar-Ilan University, traces the evolution of Orthodox Judaism in the U.S. Ferziger explains the important realignments that have taken place in recent decades within Orthodoxy, especially among its Modern Orthodox and Haredi, or Ultra Orthodox segments.

The book won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish Studies category.

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Jonathon S. Kahn is an associate professor of religion at Vassar College. He is co-editor with Vincent W. Lloyd of a collection of essays entitled Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016). Eleven scholars forward the argument that secularism in America has been a project that manages, or excludes, difference by control over both religion and race. The introduction demonstrates how Martin Luther King Jr., both a religious and black leader, was stripped of both his race and his religion to represent a homogenous white secularism. Secularism is dependent on managing not just the intertwined racial and religious discourse but the practices and bodies of ordinary people. Secularism thus becomes white and springs from a managed Protestantism. The abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth are historical examples of resistance to a secularist white consensus. The volume explores the many ways religion and race are circumscribed, how they are entwined, and the ways their management has been refused. In the process, the authors recover the transformative potential of racial and religious discourse in imagining worlds of possibilities and justice.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure?

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One hundred and forty-five years ago this week, the French state massacred thousands of its own people during the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross’ Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso Books, 2015) pushes readers to consider Communard thought and actions in a frame that moves beyond the 72 days that traditionally define (and confine) the Commune as an event. This is a Commune that begins with the meetings and reunions of the 1860s rather than the states attempted seizure of the cannons protecting the capital in March 1871. Extending the spatial and temporal bounds of the Commune to include the lifetime of its participants and supporters within and beyond Paris, Communal Luxury opens up new possibilities for our historical understanding of 1871. It also renders visible and analyzes a neglected archive of Communard thought as a resource for contemporary political struggles and activisms in the 21st century. Liberating the Commune from both the French national republican histories that have attempted to incorporate it, and histories of state communism that have cast the Commune as the failed precursor to 1917, Ross pursues the lived and conceived history of a set of events that have gained mythological status in the century and a half since their unfolding. The book directs our attention to the ideas and perspectives of a range of actors and thinkers: Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Eugene Poittier, Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Karl Marx. From the Communard call for a Universal Republic, to new programs for education and the arts (including an aspiration to the public beauty of communal luxury), to shifting visions of the possibilities of revolution and solidarity into the future, the book explores what Marx referred to as the working existence of the Commune. More a study of the theory and political praxis of the movement than a history of the Paris Commune in a traditional sense, the book illuminates the past while speaking to the present in profound ways.

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Betina Cutaia Wilkinson is the author of Partners or Rivals? Power and Latino, Black, and White Relations in the Twenty-First Century (University of Virginia Press 2015). Wilkinson is assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University. In Partners or Rivals, Wilkinson relies on national survey and focus group data to examine how social interaction; feelings of identification with members of their own group and others; and individuals sense of power as established by their racial, economic, and political surroundings impact interracial attitudes. She finds that the complex racial dynamics are not easily reducible to simple formulae, yet they have strong implications for the formation of interracial coalitions.

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Jennifer Beineke and Jason Rosenhouse‘s new book The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math (Princeton University Press, 2015) covers a multitude of topics and is in many ways as entertaining as the various subjects it describes. Even though the book can be skimmed simply to expose one to various aspects of recreational mathematics, I think it’s fair to say that some mathematical background is needed to fully appreciate it. But even if you’re only willing to skim the book, you’re going to find sections which will make you want to dive in more deeply.

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I don’t often have a chance to read books that focus solely on Belarus, which is exactly why I was intrigued by The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Per Anders Rudling‘s study seeks to answer a basic question Why is there today an independent Belarus and how did this state appear? He begins by noting that Belarusian statehood was declared and re-declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920, despite the fact that Belarusian territory was occupied by Germany during World War I and then divided between the Soviet Union and Poland in 1920. Rudling traces the activities of few hundred intellectuals as they attempted to shape a Belarusian national identity and political state. At the same time, he demonstrates the extent to which the these nationalists cultural and political achievements were dependent on the support of external powers Germany, the Soviet Union and Poland all of whom who saw Belarusian nationalism as a tool for undermining an opposing state.

Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe.

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