New Books in Jewish Studies

What does it really mean to go "beyond the letter of the law"? In
this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with scholar Deborah Barer to
discuss her book Going Off Script: Improvisational Judgment in the Talmud, which offers a surprising new interpretation of one of the Talmud's most enduring ethical concepts: lifnim mi-shurat ha-din.

For generations, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din has been understood
to mean acting "beyond the letter of the law"—choosing generosity or
compassion over strict legal obligation. Barer challenges that
assumption. Through a close reading of classical rabbinic texts, she
argues that the Talmud originally used the phrase not to describe a
particular kind of moral act, but a particular way of making decisions.
Rather than rigidly following established rules, rabbis sometimes
improvised, departing from expected patterns in pursuit of the right
outcome for a unique case.

By tracing how this idea developed from in the Talmud, Barer uncovers
how one phrase evolved into a cornerstone of Jewish ethical thought.
Her work invites readers to rethink the relationship between law and
morality, showing that creativity and flexibility have always been part
of the rabbinic legal tradition.

Together, Barer and Katz explore why improvisation matters in Jewish
law, how the Talmud balances consistency with compassion, and what this
ancient model of decision-making can teach us about navigating difficult
moral questions today.

Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of
North America. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University
of Virginia, with an emphasis on rabbinic literature and Jewish ethics.
Previously, she was Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Towson
University, and she has also taught at Oberlin College and for the
Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (North America). She served as the
editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior Rabbi at Temple Ner
Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble:
Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS)
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When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction.

In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025.
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In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman about his book Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become? (Jewish Publication Society, 2023), the 2023 National
Jewish Book Award Finalist in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.
Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the
Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. His work has consistently
addressed what constitutes Jewish peoplehood across a landscape of
internal difference.

Hartman's central argument distinguishes
between the Genesis covenant and the Exodus covenant. The Genesis
covenant is a covenant of belonging: membership in the Jewish people
that obtains by birth or by formal entry into the community, independent
of belief or practice. The Exodus covenant, by contrast, is a covenant
of aspiration, calling the people toward holiness, ethical development,
and spiritual growth. Where the first establishes identity, the second
establishes obligation.

In our discussion, Hartman emphasized
that the Genesis covenant requires each community, and each individual,
to relinquish the presumption of controlling a singular, authoritative
account of the Jewish story. Read together, the two covenants do not
divide the Jewish people into separate camps so much as describe the
full shape of Jewish belonging: one covenant that secures the people as a
people, and a second that gives that peoplehood its ongoing direction
and purpose. Jewishness, on this account, transcends denominational
boundaries—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, and otherwise—even
as each tradition supplies its own particular mode of enacting the
Exodus covenant's demand for growth.

Hartman situated this
framework within a longer pattern in Jewish intellectual history: the
recurring effort to locate an essential core beneath the full body of
commandments, exemplified by Hillel's reduction of the Torah to a single
ethical principle. This tendency toward distillation, he argued, helps
explain how communities as historically and culturally distinct as
Yemenite, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and secular Israeli Jews continue to
recognize one another as belonging to a single people, notwithstanding
significant divergence in practice. Shared calendar and shared
collective memory, in his formulation, do more to sustain peoplehood
than uniformity of observance.

The conversation turned to the
relationship between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. Hartman
located Zionism itself within the Genesis covenant: attachment to the
Jewish people's return to and sovereignty in the land of Israel is, on
his account, a constitutive part of Jewish family and belonging, not a
separate or optional commitment layered on top of it.

Hartman
further addressed the changing status of intermarriage, noting a shift
from its historical treatment as a violation of the Genesis covenant
toward broader acceptance, particularly in Diaspora communities. He
observed that a substantial proportion of Jewish spouses in
intermarriages maintain Jewish identity, practice, and communal
affiliation, complicating any straightforward inference from rising
intermarriage rates to communal decline. Jewish continuity, on this
account, is proving more resilient, and more complex, than earlier
demographic anxieties assumed.

The conversation closed on the
question of how Exodus Judaism—a Judaism oriented toward aspiration,
self-criticism, and moral striving—can be sustained in a period marked
by contested facts and by the anti-Zionism as antisemitism seen around
the world. Hartman offered no definitive resolution, but argued for the
continued value of engaging the argument itself: treating the Genesis
covenant as the foundation that preserves collective belonging, and the
Exodus covenant as the ongoing rationale for what that belonging is for.

As
we continue the discussion to find common ground and appreciation of
the greater Jewish story, follow Jewish Tapestry for engaging talks on
Jewish heritage communities.
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Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026) tells
the compelling story of the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group (JBG), a
five-thousand-strong military unit, recruited primarily from the Jewish
population of Palestine, and the only exclusively Jewish military unit
to fight under the British flag during the Second World War. Gianluca
Fantoni reconstructs the military and human experience of the brigade in
Italy and investigates its enduring and controversial place in memory
and public debate.

Formed in 1944, the JBG saw combat in the
final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with
distinction against German forces. After the war, many of its members –
who often had little or no military training, and included artists,
scientists, and farmers – engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle
Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork
for the future Israeli state. Others sought retribution against Nazis
and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and
the desire for justice.

Far more than a conventional military history, Soldiers, Angels, and
Avengers is both a critical study of the political uses of history and a
vivid, passionate narrative that brings to life the men and women of
the brigade. Accessible and engaging, this book offers readers a rare
lens through which to understand the intersections of war, memory, and
politics in twentieth-century Europe.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett
Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host
of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref
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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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