New Books in Jewish Studies

The Light of Learning (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War I, as secularism spread, Hasidic leaders rapidly reinvented themselves as educators devoted to rescuing the youth by means of world-renowned yeshivas, Bais Yaakov schools for girls and women, and eventually underground yeshiva bunkers during the Holocaust. The Light of Learning belies notions of late Hasidic decadence and decline and transforms our understanding of Polish Jewry during its final hour.

Join YIVO for a presentation on this book with author Glenn Dynner along with performances of Hasidic nigunim by Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics.

Buy the book: here

This lecture and performance originally took place on March 13, 2024.
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After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system?

To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon.

Mentioned in the episode

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal

The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass)

Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...)

Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

Tony Judt Postwar (2005)

Recallable Books:

Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished

Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers

Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810)

Read a transcript here.
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The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Hannah Pollin-Galay uses cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation to explore Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Pollin-Galay about this new book, led by historian Samuel Kassow.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on December 2, 2024.
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Bring the breadth of Jewish history and civilization into your classroom with ready-to-use teaching modules curated by experts.

The Posen Library is an educational resource grounded in primary sources and made broadly accessible through the creation and curation of engaging contextual material. Its goal is to highlight the varieties of Jewish culture and civilization across time and space for English-speaking audiences and to be the first stop for those, in university settings and beyond, who are interested in teaching about the significant breadth of Jewish experiences.

Originally conceived as a 10-volume print anthology, the Posen Library’s free digital platform makes the published content globally accessible. Content from print volumes is added to the site as the volumes are published by Yale University Press. Nine out of the ten volumes have been published to date.

The Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative comprises teaching modules centered around core teaching topics. Each module consists of an overview and curricular material that can be used in four class meetings, focusing on 20–25 primary sources (texts, images, and other media) with interpretive content and supplementary resources for both students and instructors. Posen Library curricula offer flexibility and are designed to be easily integrated into coursework in a variety of ways—perfect for launching a new class or refreshing a syllabus to include new perspectives and voices.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.

Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the Senior Scholar for Pedagogy at the Posen Library.

Geraldine Gudefin is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Mentioned in this episode:

Posen Library Teaching modules: here

Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative Fellowship: here

Sarah Bunin Benor’s “Jewish Culture around the world” Module: here

Lila Corwin Berman’s “Who Is American? Citizenship, Law, and Jewish History in the United States” Module: here

Geraldine Gudefin’s “Jewish Emancipation, Citizenship, and Belonging” Module: here

Geoffrey Levin’s “Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: Empire, Colonialism, and Identity” Module: here

Karen E. H. Skinazi’s “Sephardic Journeys: Literature, Memory, and Jewish Culture” Module: here

Jewish Language Project: here

Jewish Cultures on the Map: here

Jewish English Lexicon: here

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In the mid-1930s a group of New York Yiddishist intellectuals established the Central Jewish Library and Press Archive, whose collections became the nucleus of the YIVO Library when the Institute relocated from Vilna to New York in 1940. Over the succeeding decades, the Library grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to the dedication of its librarians and supporters. It emerged as a “collection of collections,” absorbing the extensive personal libraries of prominent Yiddish writers, scholars, and book collectors. Crucially, after 1945 the Library also recovered large portions of the Vilna YIVO’s prewar holdings along with thousands of rabbinic works from Vilna’s Strashun Library. Throughout its history, the YIVO Library has been a beehive of scholarship and bibliography, which has been fostered by such outstanding figures as Mendl Elkin and Dina Abramowicz.

In this presentation, Zachary M. Baker will offer some personal reflections on the legacy that the YIVO Library’s founders and builders have left behind.

View the bibliography for this talk: here

This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2025.
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