Rachel Harris joins us to talk about her recent volume Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which brings together almost forty scholars who are teaching about Israeli and about the Arab-Israeli conflict in a range of institutions and settings to talk about how we teach about this conflict and why it matters.
Continue readingJessica Kirzane and Saul Zaritt join the podcast to talk about their work on In Geveb, an online journal of Yiddish studies.
Continue readingSusannah Heschel joins us to talk about the work and legacy of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel: What we take away from Heschel’s writings as well as his moral and political example, and what we still have to learn from him today. We also talk about Susannah’s efforts to publish her father’s writings as well as her own research in modern Jewish history and Jewish thought. Indeed, she’s a towering scholar in her own right and we’re delighted to have her on the podcast for a wide ranging discussion about the meaning and context of one her father’s work, and also how it relates to her own research and thinking about Jewish thought and why it matters.
Continue readingWhat is censorship? How can we identify it, and understand how it functions and what are its effects? Hannah Marcus joins us for a fascinating discussion about her research on the history of the censorship of scientific and medical texts in early modern Italy which opens up a wide-ranging set of issues about the nature of censorship in historical context and the control of knowledge in more recent times, too.
Continue readingWhat happens to our stuff when we’re gone? Hillel Smith and Alanna Cooper join the podcast to talk about their projects that consider what happens to Jewish communities and their stuff, both buildings and objects, especially when we look at communities and synagogues that shrink, disappear, merge together, or move from one place to another.
Continue readingJonathan Sarna discusses American Judaism: A History, which recently was published in a second, revised edition. Listen in for a wide ranging conversation about American Jewish history in big terms, about Jonathan’s work at large and the book American Judaism in particular. As we discuss in the episode, American Judaism is one of a series of books which have been published in recent years that has tried to synthesize American Jewish history, so we will look closely at how the landscape of American Jewish historical studies has developed, how we tell the history of America’s Jews, and why it matters.
Continue readingIn this episode, we’re joined by Sandra Fox to talk about contemporary Yiddish culture and her Yiddish-language feminist podcast, Vaybertaytsh. The podcast recently came back for a new season, and so we’re going to be talking about the origin of the podcast as part of the development of contemporary Yiddish culture and its history.
Continue readingIn this episode we’re excited to share a presentation by Shayna Weiss about Israeli TV titled “Black is the New Black: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Israel, and the Globalization of Television,” and a conversation with her about Israeli television, the representation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in this medium, and why this matters as we put Israel in a global context.
Continue readingMarc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine join us to discuss the Jewish Annotated New Testament: what it means to have a “Jewish” version of the NT, how we can effectively understand the NT within its historical and social context, and why all this matters in terms of scholarly developments as well as the relationship between Judaism and Christianity today.
Continue readingFor this episode, we are joined by Robert Alter to discuss his monumental translation of the Bible. Robert Alter has been translating the Bible for more than twenty years, beginning with his translation of Genesis published in 1996. It’s really a tremendous achievement, as he brings his own particular sensibilities to the project as a literary scholar. We’re excited to share our fascinating conversation about the meaning of translation, the significance of Bible translations in particular, and what we get from a translation of the Bible that emphasizes its literary character and sensibilities.
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