New Books in Jewish Studies

When a contemporary reader opens up their Bible they may be unaware of the long historical process that created the pages within. One of the key components in this history is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Timothy Michael Law, Lecturer in Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, offers a thorough chronicle of the creation and afterlife of the Septuagint in When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford University Press, 2013). Through this narrative Law also interrogates broader concerns, such as the ways we examine canons and scriptures during this period, translation in the ancient world, authorial intentions, and audience receptions. The book covers the role the Septuagint in the Bible’s lengthy history up until the present and demonstrates how our contemporary engagement with it can illuminate numerous shadowy paths in Religious Studies. In our conversation we discussed Hellenistic Judaism, apocrypha, Jerome, the Hebrew Bible, Origen’s Hexapla, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical citation, Augustine, the Protestant reformation, Eusebius, and academic writing for public audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

“In no other instance,” notes Yaacov Ariel, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “have members of one community of faith considered another group to hold a special role in the divine course of human redemption and to be their God’s first nation.” This theological concept underpins An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (NYU Press, 2013), Ariel’s most recent monograph, published in 2013 with New York University Press. It weaves together various strands of evangelical-Jewish relations from the US, England, and Israel. Ariel also takes his study beyond most others on the topic by bringing together chapters on politics, the state of Israel, and Christian Zionism with those on less studied aspects, including evangelical responses to the Holocaust, missionary work, and Messianic Judaism. An Unusual Relationship synthesizes more than a hundred years of history in lucid and readable prose and will appeal to general audiences, as well as specialists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of cooperation and accommodation between French Jewish young people and organizations and the state, the author shows the ways in which Vichy was uneven in its policies and practices, particularly in the two years immediately following the defeat of 1940. Drawing on a wealth of local and national archival sources, Petain’s Jewish Children examines Vichy’s inclusion of Jewish youth in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, as well as responses of a range of Jewish youth organizations (including the Jewish Scouts) to Vichy’s ideals and plans. As the book shows, these groups saw in certain Vichy policies and programs for French regeneration (especially the notions of a national cultural revolution and a return to the land) opportunities for the improvement of self, community, and nation. The author also draws on a series of fascinating interviews he conducted with a number of French Jews who lived through this difficult period. Complicating our understanding of years that have been understood predominantly in terms of persecution, resistance, and rescue, Petain’s Jewish Children will be of great interest to scholars of both French and Jewish studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

How does an author craft a work that speaks across the boundaries of dance studies, Jewish studies and gender studies? What does it mean for dance to function as a site for probing complex questions of racial, ethnic and cultural identity? How do choreographers respond to the prompt, “make a Jewish dance?” What does all of this have to tell us about the ways in which Jewish identities show up onstage both historically and contemporarily? I was grateful to engage these questions with dancer, choreographer and historian, Rebecca Rossen (pronounced “Ross – in”,) author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014). Rebecca’s groundbreaking work probes the ways in which American Jewish choreographers use dance as a site to interrogate personal and collective identities while articulating social and political agendas and challenging stereotypes. Rossen critically engages with the work of Anna Sokolow, Pauline Koner, David Dorfman, Liz Lerman and others in examining how they use dance as a space for the creative construction, imagining and re-imagining of Jewish identities. Including over 50 photographs and a companion website with video clips, Dancing Jewish is a resource for dance educators and historians as well. Rebecca Rossen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. A dance historian, performance scholar, and choreographer , her research interests include modern and postmodern dance, stagings of identity in physical performance, and the relationship between research and practice. Her own choreography has been presented in venues throughout her hometown of Chicago, as well as in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Israel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Expressions of religious belief through popular media are a regular occurrence in our contemporary age. But the circulation and negotiation of religious identities in public contexts has a fairly long history in American culture. Matthew Hedstrom, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, looks beyond the church to determine how religious liberalism was popularized through mainstream book culture. In The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012) he examines mid-century middlebrow society at the intersection of protestant liberalism, therapeutic culture, and American consumerism. Through an examination of resources such as book clubs, reading programs, key authors, bestsellers, and new publishing initiatives in religion, he argues that American spiritual life during the mid-twentieth century happens through religious commodities. In our conversation we discussed social practices of reading, William James, publishing companies, effects of the World Wars, mysticism, psychology, consumerism, Jewish and Catholic voices, a turn to the East, and the intersecting religious trajectories of the early twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift. It is safe to say that his voice is singular in its mellifluousness and its range. I first encountered his writing at one of my dearest friend’s, and any second now new NBiP host and psychoanalyst Anne Wennerstrand’s wedding. Her husband, (doyen of the world of choreography), Doug Elkins, insisted I read a snippet from Phillip’s book, On Monogamy, before they slipped on their rings. This request placed the thinking of Phillips squarely into my casually bridesmaided lap. That Elkins, a dancer with what we then called “downtown” street credibility knew from Adam Phillips perhaps 15 years ago says something; and it says something about Phillips and his reach. In Phillips’ most recent book, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale UP, 2014), we encounter the biography of a man who thought the entire genre of biography was nothing but bunk. And yet, in this biography of Freud we also encounter a writer who seeks to show respect for Freud’s dis-ease if not utter disrespect for the attempt to write the story of his life. As such, the book illustrates Phillips’ clinical acumen as much as his mind, his writing mien, and the life of his subject. Demonstrating great caution, going up to the lip of certain facts without speculating unduly, like a savvy but sensitive psychoanalyst, Phillips offers the world a book that, like a true tree of life, grows in many directions at once. As no doubt it will be read by people unfamiliar with “the talking cure” it carries a heavy burden in a day and age that prefers writing/texting/emailing to talking a deux, forget entering into an analysis! Embedded within the text we find a vast exploration of the difference between “telling one’s story” (on Oprah or in a blog as is de rigeur in the culture of confession du moment) and speaking in the analytic dyad. Ultimately, as compared with what real truths might be uttered in a psychoanalysis, indeed the facts of biography look paltry. And furthermore, as this is a book that plays hardball with commonplace conceptions of knowledge, data, and truth, as compared with the exploration of unruly desire and its vicissitudes, we find ourselves returned to Freud who told us that the truths we create for the public work well to hide the real thing, the kinds of archaic truths spoken solely within the confines of a psychoanalytic setting. Phillips brings back the primacy of the sexual to Freud, and hence to psychoanalysis. Bring on the alleluia chorus and enjoy the interview!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Ronen Shamir‘s new book is a timely and thoughtful study of the electrification of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2013) makes use of Actor-Network Theory as a methodology to trace the processes involved in constructing a powerhouse and assembling an electric grid in 1920s Palestine. The book brilliantly shows how electrification “makes politics” rather than just transmitting it: under the auspices of British colonial government, the material processes of electrification produced and affirmed ethno-national distinctions like “Jews” and “Arabs” and the spaces they came to produce and inhabit in Palestine. The electric grid, here, “performs and enables (or disables) social formations through the physical connections it establishes and its attachments to other entities.” The episteme of separatism and the roots of what would become a partition plan were born in this context, as Shamir shows. The first part of the book (chapters 1 & 2) explores these phenomena by looking at flows of electric current to streetlights and private consumers who were lighting their homes and businesses. The second part of the book (chapters 4 & 5) looks at the attachment (or not) of the electric grid to railways, industry, and agriculture. The third chapter acts as a pivot between them, examining the processes by which the measurement and standardization of current became a potent social force, creating new divisions between areas of the city of Tel Aviv, public and private spheres, and kinds of consumers. Whether you’re interested the history of Palestine or the historical sociology of science, this is a fascinating, inspiring study well worth reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindrance to progress and modernity. Over the past two decades, historians have appropriated the term “culture war,” liberated it from its German origin and applied it as a generic expression for secular-catholic conflicts across nineteenth-century Europe. Intellectual and cultural historians have discovered in anti-catholicism a discourse and practice through which liberal ideas of subjectivity, sociability, and nation were constructed. Catholicism was, in short, the Other of a modernity understood to be rational, scientific and possibly Protestant. But what of those other religious Others of European modernity — the Jews? How did Jews relate to, contribute to, or perhaps oppose liberal anti-catholicism? What light do the polemics of Jewish anticlericals throw on one of the key topics of contemporary political philosophy, namely the theory of secularism? These are the questions explored in The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press 2014), an ambitious work that takes the reader from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century and across many disciplinary boundaries. Join us in this interview with the author, Ari Joskowicz, assistant professor of Jewish Studies and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Christian children, draining them of blood, and mixing said blood into Passover matzo. We know when and where the notion of “Blood Libel,” as this myth is conventionally called, appeared (12th-century England), but we don’t know why. Indeed, given the utter absurdity of the charge (Jews, of course, are forbidden to eat, drink, or consume blood in any way, shape, or form), it may be impossible for a rational mind to grasp. Even the Christian Church was vexed and, therefore, repeatedly condemned Blood Libels over the centuries that followed its appearance. Official religious disapproval–together with what might generically called “Enlightenment”–had some effect. By the late nineteenth century at the latest, clerical and civil authorities–not to mention “right-thinking people” everywhere–understood Blood Libel to be nothing but a sick fantasy. For reasons that are not entirely clear, however, Blood Libel enjoyed a kind of renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in the Russian Empire. And it was here that the most infamous and egregious Blood Libel of modern times occurred, the “Beilis case.” In his fascinating (and terrifying) book A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (Schocken, 2014), Edmund Levin takes us into the complicated, contradictory world of late imperial Russia. He introduces us to radical anti-semites, Russian nationalists, inveterate criminals, well-meaning investigators, corrupt police officers, unscrupulous reporters, sycophantic courtiers, underhanded politicians, drunk ‘witnesses,’ pseudo-scientists, delusional quacks, and, of course, poor Mendel Beilis and his family. As Levin shows, the Beilis case was a farce from the beginning and everyone involved knew it. But it went on nonetheless. How, one wonders, could this have happened in a putatively “modern” state? Listen in to our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught. I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation:  The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014).  These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the changing expectations and culture of the international system interacted with local events and personalities to drive mass violence.  The work is more analytical than narrative.  It is complex and requires careful attention to argument and evidence.  But it amply repays this effort with a reading of modern European history that made me rethink how I understood the period.  I learned much from the book about the details of violence in Anatolia and the Balkans.  But it was his broader treatment of the changing norms  of international relations that really made me think hard. Levene’s earlier volume established his work as a must-read for historians of genocide and mass violence.  His new volumes deserve equal praise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies