New Books In Jewish Studies

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026). Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies. Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily

The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Following the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture, author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Join us for a discussion of this book with Rachel Rojanski in conversation with Rachel Brenner, Shachar Pinsker, and Sunny Yudkoff. This book talk originally took place on May 27, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch join

For centuries, Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world. Until World War II, this area was home to over forty percent of world Jewry: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland, and nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of American and European Jews originate from Eastern Europe, the history of this life and civilization is not well known, or has been reduced to a story of persecution and martyrdom. In his masterful three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia: 1350 to the Present Day, Polonsky avoids sentimentalism and mythologizing, and provides a comprehensive and detailed account of this great civilization. From the towns and shtetls where Jews lived, to the emergence of Hasidism and the Haskalah movement, to the rise of Jewish urbanization, and Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, Polonsky’s book dispels myths about this culture, while demonstrating the importance of Poland and Russia as a great center of Jewish life. Winner

The beginnings of contemporary Jewry are often associated with Jewish figures in Western Europe such as Moses Mendelssohn. But in his book, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern offers a new and provocative narrative for understanding contemporary Jewish life, which begins in the East, with the leading East European mystic and rabbinic scholar of the 18th century, Elijah ben Solomon, or the “Vilna Gaon.” Eliyahu Stern joined in conversation with Jeremy Dauber for a discussion about the Vilna Gaon, his influence on modern Judaism, and why his legacy has been claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists and the Orthodox. Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication Finalist for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature Eliyahu Stern was the Tell fellow at the YIVO Institute in 2004. This book talk originally took place on November 7, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show

What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton UP, 2026). Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see sla

Marc Chagall is widely recognized as the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century, but little is known of his work to preserve Jewish culture. In this program, his granddaughter Bella Meyer interweaves images of Chagall’s artwork and personal letters to reflect on his life, passion for Yiddish and dedication to perpetuating Jewish heritage and culture. This program originally took place on February 17, 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable. Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values and eliminate dissenting citizens throug

With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mocked immigrants and minorities. Essentially a variant of blackface minstrelsy, the music that accompanied these “Jewface” performances was not only performed on stage, but also published as colorfully illustrated sheet music so fans could play them at home. Outrageous and offensive by today’s standards, these “Yiddish” dialect songs exploited a variety of unpleasant stereotypes about Jews. Based in part on the sheet music collection of The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine Critic-at-large Jody Rosen, YIVO presents its latest exhibition, Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley. Join Eddy Portnoy (Senior Researcher & Exhibition Curator, YIVO), the curator of Jewface, and Jody Rosen for a discussion with Tablet Magazine editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse about this form of early 20th-century entertainment, how it mocked Jews, engaged Jews, and developed Yiddish-accent

The untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who literally manufactured “the century of the child.” In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear―bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression―in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfeld brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains. From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026) reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely

The YIVO Institute was pleased to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth. Roth read excerpts from his new novel, Nemesis (2010), which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children. Through this story, Roth addresses profound questions of human existence: What types of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand circumstance? Preceding the reading was a panel discussion with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University), Igor Webb (Adelphi University) and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University). This reading and discussion originally took place on May 18, 2011. 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 every generation a person must see himself as if he himself came out of Egypt.” Mishna Pesachim 10:5 Now, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman’s new work, The Echoes of Egypt Haggada (Koren, 2026), does just that. By incorporating the latest discoveries from archaeology, Near Eastern studies, Egyptology and more to connect the ancient world with modern scholarship, Berman’s Haggada helps this generation re-experience the exodus out of Egypt more deeply. Echoes of Egypt is a visually sumptuous journey that helps us grasp what our ancestors saw, felt, and resisted – and invites us to see ourselves in their story anew. Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman is a professor of Tanakh at Bar-Ilan University. A graduate of Princeton University and of Yeshivat Har Etzion, Rabbi Berman is the author of several books including Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Maggid 202), Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford, 2008), which was a National Jewish Book

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy. This discussion originally took place on October 23, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942. With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and with the partisans in the forest. In this newly revised translation of the original Yiddish memoir, which was published in 1948, Vladka’s son, Steven D. Meed, preserves the testimony and memory of his mother for a new generation of readers. Join YIVO for a discussi

Join Rabbi Marc Katz for a powerful and unexpected conversation with historian Ofer Idels author of Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine (Rutgers UP, 2025). This episode dives into a fascinating paradox at the heart of modern Jewish history:Why did Zionism—especially during the era of “muscular Judaism”—remain deeply ambivalent about sports? Drawing on rich archival research and contemporary theory, Idels reveals a surprising story of Mandate Palestine, where athletes rarely became national heroes and sports never fully transformed into symbols of collective pride. This is more than a history of sports—it’s a conversation about selfhood, revolution, ideology, and the compromises embedded in every national dream. If you care about Zionism, Jewish culture, modern identity, or the meaning of revolution, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Ofer Idels is the Jenny Belzberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary, Canada. He

In this expanded edition to a groundbreaking work, now in paperback, Lincoln and the Jews: A History (NYU Press, 2025), Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell reveal how Abraham Lincoln's unprecedentedly inclusive relationship with American Jews broadened him as president, and, as a result, broadened America. A conversation with Professor Jonathan D. Sarna. Co-authored with collector and scholar Benjamin Shapell, the book began as a lush coffee-table volume built around Shapell’s remarkable Civil War–era collection: letters, photographs, and documents that reveal Lincoln’s Jewish connections in real time. It has since been reissued in paperback by NYU Press, making it far easier to teach, carry, and assign. The shift mirrors the project’s purpose: from a beautiful artifact to a working tool for rethinking Lincoln’s world. Sarna stresses that Lincoln didn’t “know Jews” in the abstract; he knew particular Jews who mattered. Abraham Jonas, an early ally, saw Lincoln as presidential material and encouraged the

Jewish law, known as halakhah, is a unique legal system that has developed over a period of nearly two millennia, across multiple continents, and in innumerable different contexts. Dealing not only with ritual, Jewish law extends to virtually every aspect of life including ethics, business, war, and sex. This Handbook highlights foundational questions about the nature of Jewish law, emphasizing what distinguishes it from other legal systems and illuminating its vitality throughout history. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law (Oxford UP, 2025) navigates core issues such as halakhah's authority, its interpretation, and the meaningfulness of an ancient legal system in a modern period. With contributions from an interdisciplinary cast of authors, the Handbook spans law, history, sociology, and religion. Its chapters draw from a wide range of sources, including traditional texts such as Mishnah and Talmud, rabbinical codes, and legal opinions known as responsa. Moreover, chapters addressing pressing modern issues c

Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word “shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a small town in Eastern Europe with a lot of Jews—and leave it at that? Or was the shtetl that nostalgic world of “tradition” so lovingly celebrated in Fiddler on the Roof? How are we to understand imaginary shtetls like Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, where the “little people” ran around, talked non stop, and tried to make sense of a world they could no longer understand or control? Indeed the “shtetl” meant many things to many people. For many Zionists and Jewish leftists, the shtetl was a pathetic symbol of Jewish backwardness. Others cherished it as a place of real Jewishness, that fixed point that gave Jews in the diaspora the feeling of being home. The destruction of the Holocaust encouraged this nostalgia for the lost shtetl, especially as many Jews in the post-war world, newly comfortable and secure in their new homes, showed a new interest in their ethnic roo

The open access Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury, 2025) offers readers a state-of-the-art guide to the public debates and scholarship on religious heritage in contemporary Europe. It contains articles by scholars, policy makers and heritage practitioners, who explore the key challenges facing the organizations, churches, and government bodies concerned with religion and heritage. Featuring polemics, case studies, and analysis, the volume is united by major themes,including Jewish, Muslim and Christian heritage, the (post)secular, interreligious heritage, sacred texts, museums, tourism, and contemporary art. The book explores the shifting significance of Europe's historic churches, synagogues, and mosques, many of which are caught between declining numbers of worshippers, increasing numbers of tourists, and the pressure to find new uses. It also examines the key role religious heritage plays in political discourse, both in the interest of including and excluding

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth. Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidism (Temple University Press, 2026) is Newfield's poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community. From pivotal moments of devasta