Episodes
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On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost once again.
Drawing on archival sources from government documentation to diaries and newspaper reports, Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950 (Cambridge UP, 2024) explores both the early success and later reversal of restitution policies. In doing so, it sheds light on the postwar treatment of Romanian Jewish survivors, and the reasons so many survivors emigrated from Romania.
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Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes.
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Episodes manquant?
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The main objective of Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus (de Gruyter, 2020) is to locate the grass roots initiatives of remembering the Holocaust victims in a particular region of Russia which has a very diverse ethnic structure and little presence of Jews at the same time. It aims to find out how such individual initiatives correspond to the official Russian hero-orientated concept of remembering the Second World war with almost no attention to the memory of war victims, including Holocaust victims. North Caucasus became the last address of thousands of Soviet Jews, both evacuees and locals. While there was almost no attention paid to the Holocaust victims in the official Soviet propaganda in the postwar period, local activists and historians together with the members of Jewish communities preserved Holocaust memory by installing small obelisks at the killing sites, writing novels and making documentaries, teaching about the Holocaust at schools and making small thematic exhibitions in the local and school museums. Individual types of grass roots activities in the region on remembering Holocaust victims are analyzed in each chapter of the book.
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Mysticism is not just a phenomenon of the past, but has been alive and flourishing in Chistianity, Judaism, and Islam over the past century, as well as in many of the other religious traditions. Best understood as a search for the transforming presence of God, the mystical tradition has necessarily undergone changes and developments as it has confronted modernity and its frequently anti-religious stance. Making use of ten exemplary mystics of the 20th century, including Catholic, Protestants, and Jews, Modern Mystics: An Introduction (Herder & Herder, 2023) argues for the continued importance of mysticism in the modern world and studies its ongoing transformations.
Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor emeritus at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-four years before retiring in 2003. McGinn has written extensively on the history of apocalyptic traditions, and especially on spirituality and mysticism. His major project is the multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism under the general title of The Presence of God. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy. McGinn has also\ served as President of a number of learned societies, such as the Medieval Academy and the American Society of Church History.
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Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love. Bendahan’s nuanced and moving novel is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and quotidian customs constraining North African Jewish women on the cusp of emancipation and decolonization.
Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre—that of the feminist Sephardi novel. A historical introduction, a literary analysis, and annotations elucidate historical and cultural terms for readers, supplementing the author’s original notes.
Blanche Bendahan was born in Oran, Algeria on November 26, 1893, to a Jewish family of Moroccan-Spanish origin. Bendahan published her first collection of poetry, La voile sur l’eau, in 1926 and then her first novel, Mazaltob, in 1930.
Yaëlle Azagury is a writer, literary scholar, and critic. She was Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Barnard College, and Lecturer in Discipline in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. She is a native of Tangier, Morocco.
Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. Her current project is titled Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters in Muslim Lands. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education.
Azagury and Malino were finalists of the 74th National Jewish Book Awards in the category of Sephardic Culture.
Mentioned in the podcast:
• Blanche Bendahan,“Visages de Tétouan,” Les Cahiers de L’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paix et Droit), no. 093 (November 1955): 5.
• Susan Gilson Miller, “Gender and the Poetics and Emancipation: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Northern Morocco (1890-1912).” In Franco-Arab Encounters, edited by L. Carl Brown and Matthew Gordon (1996)
• Susan Gilson Miller, “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghribi Jew.” In
French Mediterraneans, edited by P. Lorcin and T. Shepard (2016)
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927)
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (1994)
• Female teachers of the Alliance israélite universelle
• Jewish figures in the literature of The Tharaud Brothers
• Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU)
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Dr. Simkovich taught in a Catholic University and now is at JPS and YU. She continues her interfaith dialogue throughout. But here we spoke, among other things, about the concept of diaspora and exile - what is a Judean, a Judahite, and an Israelite. These are terms that are often thrown around interchangeably, but understanding the meaning and etymology of each helps us understand the spatial and temporal elements of being Jewish, of Judean roots, and in the context of today.
Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity (Eisenbrauns, 2024) is an analysis of letters from Jewish Antiquity and spans the Persian and Babylonian Empires in space and time and touches upon the Greek and Roman Empires. Is diaspora curse? If a main prohibition was for Israelites to return to Egypt, how is one of the most ancient Jewish communities found in Egypt? How and why did they get there? Was it a negative or positive evolution of the exile?
As the conversation evolved Dr. Simkovich let out a call for suggested readings on the term and concept of "golah" as opposed to "galut", diaspora and exile. Please reach out if you want to share your thoughts on this and the significance of the diaspora as a phenomenon.
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The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is more than a physical space where untold horrors took place. Symbolically, it is the ultimate meeting point of so many disparate threads of Soviet culture: the state and the artist, the Jew and the non-Jew, and the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War. Ultimately, it is a place that reveals the frailty and courage of those who bear witness to atrocity.
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In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally "chained women," who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the danger of a woman's becoming an agunah? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves agunot, and what could they do to extricate themselves from their plight? How did rabbinic decisors discharge their task during this period, and what were the outcomes given the fact that the agunot were dependent on the male rabbinic establishment? This study describes the lives of agunot, and by reexamining the halakhic activity concerning agunot in this period, proposes a new assessment of the attitude that decisors displayed toward the freeing of agunot.
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A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on rich archival documentation in German, Arabic, English, and Hebrew, it traces the migration of Orientalist knowledge from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. The book examines how research – and researchers – were transformed as their encounter with the Orient shifted from a textual-philological exercise to a direct, physical engagement, marked by contradictions and tensions against the backdrop of the intensifying Jewish-Arab conflict.
Among its key themes, the book reveals how prominent Orientalist scholars extended their work beyond study rooms and libraries, engaging in efforts to foster Jewish-Arab understanding or collaborating with diplomatic and security institutions.
By shedding new light on the development of academic research in Mandatory Palestine and the early years of Israel, the book offers a compelling case study of the intricate relationship between "pure" scholarship and the political, social, and cultural challenges of the time. It also provides a fresh perspective on the roots of the Jewish-Arab conflict and the influential role of knowledge in shaping it.
Amit Levy is a Spinoza postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Israel Studies, School of Regional and Historical Studies, University of Haifa. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and migration and their impact on cross-cultural encounters. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Open University of Israel. His book A New Orient received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.
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In Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas (U Toronto Press, 2025), Stephanie M. Pridgeon explores cultural depictions of Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity within a comparative, inter-American framework. The dynamics of Jewishness interacting with other racial categories differ significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with those in the United States and Canada, largely due to long-standing and often disputed concepts of mestizaje, broadly defined as racial mixture. As a result, a comprehensive understanding of Jewishness and the construction of racial identities requires an exploration of how Jewishness intersects with both Blackness and Indigeneity in the Americas.
Absorption Narratives charts the ways in which literary works capture differences and similarities among Black, Jewish, and Indigenous experiences. Through an extensive and diverse examination of fiction, Pridgeon navigates the complex connections of these identity categories, offering a comparative perspective on race and ethnicity across the Americas that destabilizes US-centric critical practices. Revealing the limitations of US-focused models in understanding racial alterity in relation to Jewishness, Absorption Narratives emphasizes the importance of viewing the narrative of race relations in the Americas from a hemispheric standpoint.
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A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities. Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.
Mentioned in the podcast:
• Diana Saltoon, My Sister Meda: A Memoir of Old Singapore (2023)
• The Jews of Singapore Museum
Recent literature on the Sassoon family includes:
• Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai (2021)
• Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire (2022)
• Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons (2023)
Jay Prosser is a reader in humanities at the University of Leeds in England, where he has taught since 1999.
Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.
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Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania's national communities before World War II and the international and domestic crises which led to the destruction of the Lithuanian state in 1940. The author describes in detail the process of the mass persecution and murder of the country's Jews during the Holocaust, the role of Nazi and collaborationist forces, acts of resistance, as well as the society's responses. The book concludes with an examination of the postwar struggle within Lithuania to confront this legacy of unprecedented violence.
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There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest, Professor Joseph Stern, will discuss Maimonides’ unique understanding of the afterlife, per his recent article, "A Guide to the AfterDeath: Maimonides on olam ha-ba’", Religious Studies (2024), 60, S74–S90
Professor Josef Stern is a renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy and thought, specializing in the works of Moses Maimonides. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he has contributed significantly to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly the intersection of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history.
With a deep focus on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and religious thought, Professor Stern has published extensively on themes such as skepticism, intellectual perfection, and the nature of religious language. His work often bridges Jewish thought with broader philosophical traditions, including Aristotelian and Islamic philosophies.
Known for his clear, incisive analysis and ability to connect historical ideas to contemporary debates, Professor Stern remains a leading voice in Maimonidean scholarship. His recent studies on concepts like Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come) provide fresh insights into Maimonides' revolutionary vision of the afterlife and human perfection.
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Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.
Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all.
Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life.
Mentioned in the Episode:
119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori
Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents.
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.
The Beinart Notebook podcast
Listen and Read Here.
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What is the function of the wilderness narratives for understanding the Pentateuch and Israel and Judah’s historical experience? Drawing from literary and historical criticism, Angela Erisman creates a synthesis to offer a novel journey through the narratives of Exodus and Numbers.
Join us as we speak with Angela Erisman about her recent book, The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge UP, 2024).
Angela Roskop Erisman earned her MA in Hebrew and Northwest Semitics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her PhD in Bible and Ancient Near East from Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion.
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Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today.
Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser; the 1956 Suez war that marked the end of the British empire; and in its wake the destruction of the Jewish community that had lived in Egypt since Biblical times.
Though set in times of revolution and war, Goodbye, Tahrir Square is not a political book. It is the story of a boy whose close-knit extended Sephardic family, full of rich traditions and colorful characters, is suddenly torn asunder by the forces of revolution and war. A man-child coming of age like a wild cactus in the rubble of the past, overcoming a hostile environment, forging friendships that transcend ethnic and religious animus, and finding his own identity as he awakens to literature, history, art, archaeology, and the magic of love and sex.
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Who wrote the Haggada? Is there a thematic roadmap to the structure of the Seder? Why is the meal eaten in the middle of Hallel? These and many more questions could be asked in one's struggle to discern what the Seder is really about. All the more reason to join us as we speak with Rabbi Shmuel Goldin about his book, Unlocking the Haggada: The Complete Haggada With In-Depth Commentary (OU Press, 2018).
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin received his BS in psychology and his MA in Jewish education from Yeshiva University, and his rabbinic ordination from the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. He was included in Newsweek’s list of “America’s Top 50 Rabbis for 2012” and in Forward magazine’s list of Jewish communal leaders who have made a difference in the community at large.
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We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk Ghetto. Between 1941 and 1943 approximately 80,000 Jews lived in or pass through that place of terror; as a result of starvation and repeated brutal pogroms most did not survive. A few were helped by brave Byelorussian locals who risked their own lives to save them. Others, many of them mere children like the narrators of these stories, managed to escape to the partisans living in the nearby forests. Having reached the relative safety of partisan camps, some even returned to Minsk to rescue their families and neighbours. Several of their dangerous missions are described within the pages of this powerful book. These stories which recount the memories of the Minsk Ghetto survivors are a testimony to the extraordinary power and resilience of the human spirit.
This book was published by I.P. Logvinov Publishers in Russian in 2012. This translation from the original Russian to English is a project that was initiated, facilitated and managed by the UK Charity The Together Plan.
This is an interview with Debra Brunner and Artur Livshyts.
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Antisemitic caricatures had existed in Polish society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But never had the devastating impacts of this imagery been fully realized or so blatantly apparent than on the eve of the Second World War.
In Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland (U Press of Mississippi, 2024), scholar Ewa Stańczyk explores how illustrators conceived of Jewish people in satirical drawing and reflected on the burning political questions of the day. Incorporating hundreds of cartoons, satirical texts, and newspaper articles from the 1930s, Stańczyk investigates how a visual culture that was essentially hostile to Jews penetrated deep and wide into Polish print media. In her sensitive analysis of these sources, the first of this kind in English, the author examines how major satirical magazines intervened in the ongoing events and contributed to the racialized political climate of the time.
Paying close attention to the antisemitic tropes that were both local and global, Stańczyk reflects on the role of pictorial humor in the transmission of visual antisemitism across historical and geographical borders. As she discusses the communities of artists, publishers, and political commentators who made up the visual culture of the day, Stańczyk tells a captivating story of people who served the antisemitic cause, and those who chose to oppose it.
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Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?
In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century.
The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Elizabeth Campbell deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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