New Books in Jewish Studies

Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable.

Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than as a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.

Zainab Saleh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford, 2020).

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 296-298 (on the concept of “the right to have rights”).

Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians. A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012).

Zainab Saleh, Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (OneWorld, 2024).

Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017), 4 (on “emotional belonging”).

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With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mocked immigrants and minorities. Essentially a variant of blackface minstrelsy, the music that accompanied these “Jewface” performances was not only performed on stage, but also published as colorfully illustrated sheet music so fans could play them at home. Outrageous and offensive by today’s standards, these “Yiddish” dialect songs exploited a variety of unpleasant stereotypes about Jews.

Based in part on the sheet music collection of The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine Critic-at-large Jody Rosen, YIVO presents its latest exhibition, Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley. Join Eddy Portnoy (Senior Researcher & Exhibition Curator, YIVO), the curator of Jewface, and Jody Rosen for a discussion with Tablet Magazine editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse about this form of early 20th-century entertainment, how it mocked Jews, engaged Jews, and developed Yiddish-accented English for comic effect. Allen Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner will be performing selections from the exhibit, as well as a number of classic Yiddish/English comedy routines.

This exhibition opening took place on November 24, 2015.
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The untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who literally manufactured “the century of the child.”

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear―bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression―in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfeld brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains.

From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026) reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely Jewish―the company founders, executives, and designers, as well as the factory workers, wholesale distributors, retail outlets, and armies of salesmen. A descendant of the founders of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel shows how these poor, often Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling children of immigrants invented a world they never experienced for themselves. Along with the toys and Jewish toymakers that climbed the ladder of success, Kimmel also portrays the rise of an entire culture focused on children, led by Jewish comic book creators, children’s authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists.

The first full-scale toy history of the United States, Kimmel’s story conjures the colorful, imaginative, restless spirits who followed the promise of the American Dream―and describes the ways in which the

world they came from molded their beloved creations. Playmakers shows that the overlapping experiences of being a Jew, an immigrant, and a child in twentieth-century America―an outsider looking in, a person desperate to be accepted―created childhood as we know it today.
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The YIVO Institute was pleased to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth. Roth read excerpts from his new novel, Nemesis (2010), which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children. Through this story, Roth addresses profound questions of human existence: What types of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand circumstance?

Preceding the reading was a panel discussion with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University), Igor Webb (Adelphi University) and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University).

This reading and discussion originally took place on May 18, 2011.
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“In every generation a person must see himself as if he himself came out of Egypt.” Mishna Pesachim 10:5

Now, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman’s new work, The Echoes of Egypt Haggada (Koren, 2026), does just that. By incorporating the latest discoveries from archaeology, Near Eastern studies, Egyptology and more to connect the ancient world with modern scholarship, Berman’s Haggada helps this generation re-experience the exodus out of Egypt more deeply. Echoes of Egypt is a visually sumptuous journey that helps us grasp what our ancestors saw, felt, and resisted – and invites us to see ourselves in their story anew.

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman is a professor of Tanakh at Bar-Ilan University. A graduate of Princeton University and of Yeshivat Har Etzion, Rabbi Berman is the author of several books including Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Maggid 202), Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford, 2008), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Scholarship, and The Temple: Its Symbolism and Meaning Then and Now(Jason Aronson, 1995).

Joshua Berman's podcast Bible Bar can be found here.
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