In the wake of the devastating WWI, three Jews headed the most valuable territory in the British Empire in addition to a strategically important new addition. Edwin Montagu held the position of Secretary of State for India, Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading) was the newly appointed Viceroy of India, and Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem as the first High Commissioner of Palestine. Their appointments came at a time of great upheaval as Indian nationalists clamoured for independence, pan-Islamists...

In Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes, and Otherness in the Book of Judges (Brill, 2016), Robin Baker provides a masterly reappraisal of Israel's experience during its Settlement of Canaan as narrated in the Book of Judges, which, he argues, subtly encrypts a grim forewarning of Judah's future. In its extensive treatment of otherness, the Book of Judges also explores the meaning of God’s covenant with Israel.  Join us as we speak with Robin Baker about his monograph on the Book of...

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and...

In Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana UP, 2023), Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish and non-Jewish decision makers exiled from wartime east central Europe and the powerbrokers...

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race. They discuss the...

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include...

First published in 2011, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford UP, 2017) was a groundbreaking work, bringing the New Testament's Jewish background to the attention of students, clergy, and general readers. In this new edition, eighty Jewish scholars bring together unparalleled scholarship to shed new light on the text. This thoroughly revised and greatly expanded second edition brings even more helpful information and new insights to the study of the New Testament. For Christian...

The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2024) discusses the life and work of Leo Baeck (1873–1956) the rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust. The Jewish Imperial Imagination shows the myriad ways in which the German imperial enterprise left its imprint on his religious and political thought, and on modern Judaism more generally. This book is the first to explore Baeck's religious thought as...

In World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination. Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic...

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that...

The Holocaust in Croatia (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity...

In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class...

The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe.  Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experience of the Jews after 1933, Bojan Aleksov's book Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933-1945 (Brill,...

Since the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the promise of universal equality be combined with the claim to diversity? In Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus (Hamburger Editionen, 2022), Till van Rahden takes up this central theme of European modernity through the example of Jewish history. The more the ideal of equality gained in importance, the fiercer the...

Juan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century.  Recovering the silenced voices of...

Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated.  As Marzouk explains in Egypt as a...

Today I talked to Mara Josi about her new book Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature (Legenda, 2023). Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from a local railway station, Stazione Tiburtina. From December 1944, literary texts of this...

Daphna Sharfman's book Jerusalem in the Second World War (Routledge, 2024) is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem,...

How should we think about violent accounts in the Bible? Why did Gandhi urge the Jews to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism during World War II? What is the reality behind buzz-words like asymmetric warfare and collective punishment that come up so often when discussing events in Gaza? What role should global opinion and the hostage crisis play in Israeli strategy? Is there a moral imperative to win? Jewish ethicist Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody discusses these questions and more in this discussion...

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of...

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty...

On this week's episode, Modya and David discuss the Torah portion of Mishpatim (Ex. 21:1-24:18) through the lens of the character trait of nekiyut, or cleanliness. In this Torah portion, the divine articulation of detailed laws helps to establish a culture in which physical, spiritual, and moral cleanliness are upheld on an individual and collective basis. What does this mean for how we, today, confront temptation, cultivate care for our physical selves, and support collective efforts toward...

Between Romania's entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the...

When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today.  Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between...

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.  Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother...