New Books in Jewish Studies

What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform
American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with
acclaimed cultural critic David Denby to discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt, 2025), a vibrant portrait of four extraordinary Americans whose Jewish identities helped shape the modern United States.

Though
they worked in vastly different fields, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks,
Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer shared a remarkable historical moment.
Coming of age after World War II, they entered an America where Jewish
opportunity was expanding and antisemitism was beginning to recede.
Their Jewish heritage, energized by the freedoms of American life,
fueled bold, unconventional careers that reshaped music, comedy,
literature, feminism, and public debate.

Denby paints these figures in all their complexity: ambitious,
difficult, generous, provocative, and endlessly creative. Rather than
offering simple hero worship, he explores how their outsized
personalities and relentless drive allowed them to challenge old
assumptions about art, politics, gender, humor, and what it meant to be
both fully Jewish and fully American.

Together, Denby and Katz
explore why this particular generation produced so many cultural
revolutionaries, how Jewish identity informed their work without
defining it, and what their legacies reveal about the changing place of
Jews in postwar America.
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Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel’sPhänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).
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It's a shadowy, ornate world of cover-ups and hidden motives. In Flirting with Evil: The Catholic Church in the Age of Total War and Globalisation (Apollo, 2026), Ambrogio Caiani lifts back the heavy velvet curtains of thechancel and peers behind the locked mahogany doors of the Vatican to reveal the shocking truths that make up a century of Catholic corruption.

For
many, Catholicism's flirtation with evil has become impossible to
ignore: a pope courting Nazi officials and, horribly, turning a blind
eye to the Holocaust; the Vatican becoming embroiled in a series of
dodgy financial dealings; the child abuse continuously perpetrated by
members of the clergy. Time and time again, Catholic figures have made
terrible choices in private and preached in public about goodness and
morality.

This is the first history that focuses exclusively on
Catholicism throughout the twentieth century, sketching not only
scandalous stories of corruption but also lively portrayals of
Catholicism's key characters—from a beret-clad communist revolutionary
priest to the bizarre morning routine of the pope who followed a daily
cold bath with dry unbuttered toast. Caiani, a critical Catholic
himself, takes a frank and sceptical look at the trajectory of global
Catholicism and wrestles with vital questions about the future of the
church. Taking in the wider socio-political contexts of a world at war
and the accumulating momentum of social progress, this brilliant
history traces the evolution of the Catholic church alongside the
development of our modern society right up to the election of Pope Leo
XIV in 2025.
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On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt.

Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance in Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance (U Wisconsin Press, 2026). Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time.

Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940. plerner@usc.edu @plerner.bsky.social
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In
1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes
she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a
group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook
simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we
prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining
a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it
became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of
Jewish American culture.

Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book,
demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn
shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook’s
evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of
immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization,
and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates
pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a
repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation.
Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book
is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food
they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic
cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of
American cuisine.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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