New Books in Jewish Studies

In this first episode, author and psychotherapist Modya Silver, and David Gottlieb, Director of Jewish Studies at Spertus Institute, begin a yearlong project of seeking guidance on self improvement in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, with the help of R. Menahem Mendel Lefin's Cheshbon haNefesh: A Guide to Self-Improvement Through Character Refinement. This book, one of the classics of the Jewish practice of Mussar, or ethical self-improvement, provides guidance on how to methodically develop each of 13 personality traits. Modya and David begin at the beginning: with the very first portion of the Torah, Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8). Follow them as they consider the Torah portion of the week through one of Rabbi Lefin's 13 character traits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941.Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men's gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a profound process of marginalization that destabilized accustomed ways of performing masculinity. At the same time, in their attempts to sustain their conceptions of masculinity these men maintained agency and developed coping strategies that prevented their full-scale emasculation. Huebel draws on a rich archive of diaries, letters, and autobiographies to interpret the experiences of these men, focusing on their roles as soldiers and protectors, professionals and breadwinners, and parents and husbands.Fighter, Worker, and Family Man sheds light on how the Nazis sought to emasculate Jewish men through propaganda, the law, and violence, and how in turn German-Jewish men were able to defy emasculation and adapt - at least temporarily - to their marginalized status as men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Excavating and interpreting Paul’s thought, belief, ideas, and mission from his authentic letters and those otherwise attributed to him remains an ongoing effort in scholarship, with several competing perspectives vying for prominence. Matthew Thiessen advances an important reading of Paul within first-century Judaism, which he conceives not as a monolith of theological positions but rather as a spectrum of ideas that comfortably included Paul’s new belief in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and Paul’s own call as appointed envoy to deliver that good news to non-Jewish Gentiles. On this episode, Matthew joined the New Books Network to discuss the recent publication of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Baker Academic, 2023), a concise and accessible introductory study of this Diasporic Jew that yet embraces the “weird” in Paul’s thinking, including his advance of pneumatic “gene therapy” rather than “cosmetic surgery” for non-Jews who wished to partake in God’s promises to Abraham. According to Thiessen, Paul must be understood first in his own historical context, complete with the philosophical and scientific presuppositions common to the first century CE, before being imported into our theological present—a method that has potential to overcome the devastating effects of centuries of Christian supersessionism but also compels us to tackle the uncomfortable apocalyptic origins of the earliest Jesus movement.Matthew Thiessen (Ph.D., Duke University, 2010) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the rise of Christianity, particularly as it relates to early Judaism, and especially on contextualizing Paul’s letters within first-century Judaism. Atop numerous journal articles and chapter-length contributions, he has authored several books to that effect, including Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jesus and the Forces of Death (Baker Academic, 2020), and Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In her book, Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023), Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicates the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora from the vantage point of the putative homeland, engaging both diasporic and Zionist models simultaneously through language, geography, and imagination. These examples contend with the existence of the state of Israel and its complex implications for diaspora Jewish identities and nationalisms, as well as the implications for Zionism of those diasporic conceptions of Jewish national identity. This dynamic understanding of both an Israeli and a Jewish diaspora works to envision a non-hegemonic Jewish nationalism that can negotiate both political imagination and reality.Melissa Weininger is an assistant professor of Jewish studies at California State University, Northridge.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Stefan C. Ionescu examines the process of economic Romanianization of Bucharest during the Antonescu regime that targeted the property, jobs, and businesses of local Jews and Roma/Gypsies and their legal resistance strategies to such an unjust policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021). A visiting professor of modern Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, Magid also is rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Sea View, N.Y. Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s, was assassinated in New York in 1990 yet, as Magid told me, and as his perceptive book demonstrates, his legacy lives on. Kahane was an exponent of a “militant post-Zionist apocalytpticism,” in Magid’s term, and he lived by an ethos of revenge—in Hebrew, Nekama. Nowadays, a kind of neo-Kahanism serves as an agitating ideology for a faction of Israelis who revere Kahane and keep his memory and uncompromising pronouncements alive. And as Magid explains, the neo-Kahane vision presents a stark challenge to a liberal, democratic Zionism that Kahane himself detested.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylonia (Mohr Siebeck, 2017), Seth L. Sanders offers a history of first-millennium scribes through their heavenly journeys and heroes, treating the visions of ancient Mesopotamian and Judean literature as pragmatic things made by people. He presents each scribal culture as an individual institution via detailed evidence for how visionary figures were used over time. The author also provides the first comprehensive survey of direct evidence for contact between Babylonian, Hebrew, and Aramaic scribal cultures, when and how they came to share key features. Rather than irrecoverable religious experience, he shows how ideal scribal selves were made available through rituals documented in texts and institutions that made these roles durable. The result is as much a history of science as a history of mysticism, providing insight into how knowledge of the universe was created in ancient times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In Rewriting Eve: Rescuing Women’s Stories from the Bible and Reclaiming Them as Our Own (She Writes Press, 2023), Ronna Detrick invites us into the presence and power of ten sacred, biblical women, revealing the endlessly relevant ways in which they speak today and showing how they can heal, embolden, and transform our stories.Trapped in patriarchy and theological argument, dismissed as irrelevant, or viewed as unchangeable even as times change, these women’s voices, desires, and hearts have too often been silenced through misunderstanding and neglect. When they are reimagined, deconstructed, disentangled from doctrine and dogma, and heard on their own terms, these stories become a powerful inspiration and a source of discernment that reconnects us to a feminine lineage and a sovereign sense of self we’ve never known to call on or trust.Detrick has combined her love of writing with a diverse and winding career that has included coaching, spiritual direction, professional development training, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship. She shocked and delighted her audience in a provocative TEDx Talk, Redeeming Eve – Reimagining Everything, on an Eve who inspires and empowers women instead of shaming and silencing them.Ronna Detrick holds both a Master of Divinity degree and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Business and Communications from Whitworth University.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Book of Deuteronomy, the Fifth Book of Moses, is foundational for both Judaism and Christianity. What makes Deuteronomy so significant? How does one apply its message today?Tune in as we speak with Adolph Harstad about his recent Concordia Commentary on Deuteronomy.You’re listening to New Books in Biblical Studies, a channel of the New Books Network, and I’m your host, Michael Morales.Rev. Dr. Adolph Harstad served as a pastor for many years and was a professor at Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary. He has participated in archaeological digs and led study tours in Israel.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies