A DISCUSSION WITH AUTHOR DR. LAURA ARNOLD LEIBMAN In "The Art of the Jewish Family" Dr. Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who lived in New York between the years 1750 and 1850. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish...

A discussion with JTS's Dr. David G. Roskies about his powerful new collection of writings from the Warsaw Ghetto, recording the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the...

In his magisterial new biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dr. Edward K. Kaplan tells the engrossing, behind-the-scenes story of the life, philosophy, struggles, yearnings, writings, and activism of one of the 20th century’s most outstanding Jewish thinkers. Following this extraordinary figure through his Hasidic childhood in Warsaw to his pursuit of a doctorate in Berlin to his escape from the Nazis to the United States, and into his courageous activism as a voice for nonviolent social...

Episode 1: Who Were the Rabbis? What led to the emergence of the group of scholars and teachers we call the Rabbis? What motivated them and what did they value? The Rabbis looked to their forebear, Hillel, as an exemplar of religious leadership, and in this episode, we’ll look at three stories they told about Hillel to see what we can learn about the Rabbis’ self-conception. Subscribe now: Apple podcasts:...

A Discussion with Translator Edward L. Greenstein The Book of Job has often been called the greatest poem ever written. The book, in Edward Greenstein’s characterization, is “a Wunderkind, a genius emerging out of the confluence of two literary streams,” which “dazzles like Shakespeare with unrivaled vocabulary and a penchant for linguistic innovation.” Despite the text’s literary prestige and cultural prominence, no English translation has come close to conveying the proper sense of the...

As hate crimes and domestic terrorism dominate the headlines, the legacy of the late Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum as a leader in interfaith and race relations in the United States and around the world becomes more and more relevant with each atrocity that is perpetrated in the name of racial purity, religion and rectitude. His widow, humanitarian and philanthropist Dr. Georgette Bennett, discusses the first-ever biography of Rabbi Tanenbaum, Confronting Hate: The Untold Story of the Rabbi Who Stood...

In this opening episode of JTS’s new podcast, What Now?, host Sara Beth Berman tells her story and speaks with Professor Alan Mittleman. Dr. Mittleman shares his own experiences with loss, framing tragedies as taking place in a world that is nevertheless good and that gives us reason for hope. We also learn why giving Professor Mittleman advice is never a good idea. Subscribe now: RSS: https://www.spreaker.com/show/3550593/episodes/feed Apple Podcasts:...

Four rabbis from a local community—one Orthodox, two Conservative, and one Reform—meet each week at a local kosher deli to discuss Jewish law, theology, and synagogue business. This new work of fiction from Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins is an opportunity to be the proverbial fly on the wall and find out what rabbis talk about when no one else is listening. Dov Peretz Elkins is a nationally known lecturer, educator, author, and book critic. He is a popular speaker on the Jewish circuit. Ordained...

Dr. Jane S. Gabin's historical novel looks at the complicated life and aftermath of the occupation of Paris during WWII and spotlights Jewish experiences during the Nazi occupation of the city. Her debut novel intertwines the two timelines of postwar Paris and the current day as a young woman seeks answers when she finds an old picture of her father, a U.S. Army private, with two women and a small boy in Paris after the war. Wishing to learn more about her father, she travels to Paris to try...

Dr. Wendy Zierler's Movies and Midrash pioneers the use of cinema as a springboard to discuss central Jewish texts and matters of belief. Exploring what Jewish tradition, text, and theology have to say about the lessons and themes arising from influential and compelling films, Zierler uses the method of “inverted midrash”: while classical rabbinical midrash begins with exegesis of a verse and then introduces a mashal (parable) as a means of further explication, Zierler turns that process...

In The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dr. Eitan Fishbane reveals the Zohar as an extraordinary narrative—the tale of a wandering kabbalist sage seeking wisdom in ancient Galilee—a fiction invented by 13th-century Jewish mystics in Spain. Calling it “one of the greatest works of world religious literature,” Dr. Fishbane explores the Zohar’s storytelling through the various lenses of literary criticism, clarifying its deep integration with...

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living...

Important next-generation Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s gripping novel narrates the aftermath of an Israeli neurosurgeon’s accidental killing of an Eritrean migrant. Newly translated from Hebrew, this tightly crafted story is as timely as it is riveting.

At the age of 27, alone in Jerusalem in the wake of a painful divorce, Ilana Kurshan decided to begin learning daf yomi, the “daily page” of the Talmud. By the time she completed the Talmud after seven and a half years, Kurshan was remarried with three young children. If All the Seas Were Ink is her moving and remarkable memoir of this journey through heartache and humor, love and loss, marriage and motherhood—all guided by the pages of the Talmud, which become for Kurshan a conversation...

Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House received the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. Now newly translated into English, Namdar’s tale of a man whose comfortable secular life begins to unravel in the face of haunting religious visions cuts to the core of contemporary Jewish-American identity.

The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The Talmud, written in and for an agrarian society, was in many ways ill-equipped for the new economy. In the early Islamic period, the Babylonian Geonim made accommodations through their responsa, through occasional taqqanot, and especially by applying the concept that custom can be a source of law. Not previously noticed, in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides made his own...

Francine Klagsbrun's definitive new biography of Golda Meir brings to life a world figure unlike any other. An iron-willed leader, chain-smoking political operative, and tea-and-cake-serving grandmother who became the fourth prime minister of Israel, Meir was one of the most notable women of our time. Born in czarist Russia in 1898, Meir immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills...

A discussion with Rabbi Ron Kronish on his new book, The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, A View from Jerusalem. Drawing on personal experiences from his 25-year career as founding director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, Rabbi Ron Kronish describes the theory and practice of interreligious dialogue, education, and action in Israel and Palestine in the context of the political peace process. The Rev. Chloe Breyer and Iman Boukadoum of the Interfaith Center...

Ilana Sasson, instructor at Sacred Heart University and JTS alumna, discusses her new critical edition of a key Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Proverbs. Working in the 10th century, Yefet ben Ò…li ha-LeviÓ³ commentary attests to his rationalistic and revisionist ideology and egalitarian approach.

Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a new political thriller from Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author Nathan Englander, unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And the General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a...

Aly Gerber’s young adult novel, Braced, is the story of a 12-year-old soccer player who learns she needs to wear a back brace 23 hours a day for her worsening scoliosis. As she adjusts to life with the brace, her confidence and self-image are shaken. Ultimately she discovers her own voice and learns how to face this challenge—plus all the others associated with being a preteen.Gerber will share the personal experience that inspired Braced. She and Dr. Epstein will discuss how educators,...

In his new book, the winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship, JTS's Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History Dr. Benjamin R. Gampel uses rich new archival data to illuminate one of the major disasters that struck medieval Jewry: the anti-Jewish riots of 1391-92 in the lands of Castile and Aragon. Offering the most exhaustive and profound record to date of the ten fateful months between June 1391 and March 1392, during which hundreds if not thousands of Jews...

In his book Kohelet’s Pursuit of Truth, Rabbi Benjamin J. Segal, former president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, presents an arresting new translation and commentary on Ecclesiastes that unlocks the ancient wisdom of one of the deepest and most controversial books of the Tanakh. Segal's most striking innovations include the tracing of change within the book, an exploration of the charatcer of the main speaker, an appreciation of the literary structure, and a...

Kaplan was a compulsive diarist. His journal of twenty seven volumes is one of the longest on record. Communings of the Spirit, volume 2, edited by Dr. Mel Scult, contains in vivid detail the edited selections from 1934-1941. He reacts passionately to the momentous events of the thirties paying particular attention to the rise of Fascism. We meet a host of Jewish notables including Judah Magnes and Martin Buber. In addition the diary allows us to enter the  inner processes of his very...