Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchRoy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)
Episode 246
Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the sons of immigrants from Eastern Europe.…
4 years, 7 months ago
Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Episode 245
In this episode, I interview Ethan Kleinberg, professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University, about his new book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudi…
4 years, 7 months ago
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, "A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg" (Yale UP, 2021)
Episode 242
The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy grou…
4 years, 7 months ago
Dov Zakheim, "The Prince and the Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Prince" (Maggid, 2021)
Episode 241
Rabbi Judah the Prince transformed the Mishnah into a text, and now Dov Zakheim, culling from a fascinating array of sources, has brought to life the…
4 years, 7 months ago
Eliyana R. Adler, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2020)
Episode 244
Between 1940 and 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, …
4 years, 7 months ago
Mikhael Manekin, "The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power" (Evrit, 2021)
Episode 127
In The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power (Evrit, 2021), Mikhael Manekin argues that modern Jewish nationalism--widespread t…
4 years, 7 months ago
Jeffrey Veidlinger, "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
Episode 127
Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil …
4 years, 7 months ago
John-Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944" (Ibidem Press, 2021)
Episode 129
One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. John-Paul…
4 years, 7 months ago
Yakov Nagen, "The Soul of the Mishna" (Maggid, 2021)
Episode 243
As the foundational text of the Oral Torah in Judaism, the Mishnah is generally analyzed to understand Jewish law and the workings of the halakhic sy…
4 years, 7 months ago
Shay Hazkani, "Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War" (Stanford UP, 2021)
Episode 32
In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs…
4 years, 8 months ago