Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchYair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial…
8 years, 1 month ago
Daniel B. Schwartz, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image” (Princeton UP, 2012)
Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish communit…
8 years, 2 months ago
Rachel Sherman, “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence” (Princeton UP, 2017)
For her new book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017), Rachel Sherman conducted in-depth interviews with fift…
8 years, 2 months ago
David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether…
8 years, 2 months ago
Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler, “Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power” (Princeton UP, 2016)
Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressi…
8 years, 2 months ago
Stephen Sheehi, “The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910” (Princeton UP, 2016)
In the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a…
8 years, 2 months ago
Michael Ruse, “On Purpose” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natura…
8 years, 2 months ago
Alexander Thurston, “Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Boko Haram is one of the most well known global terrorist organizations. They have killed thousands of people and displaced millions of West Africans…
8 years, 3 months ago
Alexander Knysh, “Sufism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New Hi…
8 years, 3 months ago
Emily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain” (Princeton UP, 2016)
Emily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking…
8 years, 3 months ago