New Books in Jewish Studies

What if the book of Genesis is not only the story of humanity’s first
family, but also the story of God learning how to parent? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Stephen Spector to discuss his
book God and the First Families: Parenting, Trauma, and Healing in the Book of Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 2026), a provocative reexamination of the Bible’s foundational stories through the lens of parenting.

Drawing on both biblical interpretation and contemporary psychology,
Spector explores how God’s relationship with the patriarchs and
matriarchs evolves throughout Genesis. God begins as a demanding
authority figure, shifts toward a more nurturing presence, returns
briefly to authoritarianism in the binding of Isaac, and ultimately
develops a style focused on fostering moral and emotional growth.
Remarkably, Spector argues, Genesis anticipates parenting insights that
psychologists would not articulate for thousands of years.

Along the way, familiar stories take on new meaning. Cain and Abel,
Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers—each
narrative becomes a window into questions of favoritism, resilience,
forgiveness, family conflict, and healing after trauma. By reading
Genesis as a story about parenting and human development, Spector
uncovers enduring wisdom about how families flourish, fracture, and find
their way back to one another.

Together, Spector and Katz explore what the Bible can teach about
raising children, repairing relationships, and understanding the complex
bond between love, authority, and growth.

Stephen Spector is a professor of English emeritus at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews and Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism,
among other volumes. Spector has taught the Bible to undergraduate and
graduate students for fifty years. He has been a visiting scholar at
Hebrew University and a senior research fellow at the National
Humanities Center and the Wesleyan Center for Humanities. 

Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He is the author of The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort, a National Jewish Book Award finalist and Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.
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Was it one of the war’s most memorable feats of valor or an act of desperation, even madness?

In Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe (Spiegel & Grau, 2026), Matti Friedman unravels one of the strangest episodes of World War II: In 1944, a team of young women and men who had escaped the Holocaust made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe under the cover of a British military operation. Yet by the end of the mission, not a single Nazi was harmed and not a single Jew was saved, and many of the parachutists died in the process. Even so, some of their names would become legendary, especially that of twenty-three-year-old Hannah Senesh, the author of the beloved Hebrew song “Eli, Eli.” Their story would become one of the young state of Israel’s founding myths—but what exactly was the mission, and what had the parachutists actually accomplished? What made them heroes?

Using thousands of original documents from once-secret files, manuscripts, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Matti Friedman follows four of the parachutists from the spring of 1944 to the operation’s dramatic end that winter. In Out of the Sky, he tells the gripping and surprising tale of a forgotten moment, demonstrating how storytelling itself can have a power even greater than warfare. And in exploring the line between myth and reality, heroism and futility, he creates an argument that has resonance in our own time.
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What would you do if you were pressured to support a rebellion that
you believed was misguided and doomed to failure? What if the safety of
your family and business depended on your answer? In A Ram for Mars (NFB Publishing, 2026), Marcus
and Miriam, recently freed slaves from Asia Minor, arrive in Israel
buoyed by hopes of finding Marcus's long-lost mother and starting a new
life together. They discover that the land is seething with social and
political unrest, with anti-Roman parties in the ascendancy. ​Marcus,
who grew up in a Roman colony and owes his present prosperity to a Roman
master, finds these anti-Roman sentiments perplexing. His uncertainty
increases when war breaks out and he's asked to ship supplies to the
rebel army, including a newfound cousin who protects the northern
front. As his entanglement with the rebellion deepens, Marcus is torn
between loyalty to the world in which he was nurtured and the need to
secure his family's safety. Then his adopted son runs off to join the
rebels. What is he to do? Fans of Conn Iggulden, Ken Follett, and Robert
Graves will be captivated by this richly detailed and compelling
exploration of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 AD/CE) through the
lens of a pro-Roman Jew in the rural district of Galilee.

More about A Ram for Mars, as well as the trilogy, “A Slave’s Story,” can be found here.

Christopher D. Stanley is a social and religious historian who writes
about early Christianity and Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. He
served for over twenty years as a professor at St. Bonaventure
University in western New York, where he holds the title of Professor
Emeritus.

Dr. Stanley has written or edited ten books and dozens of
professional articles on early Christian texts and history and presents
papers at academic conferences around the world. The “A Slave’s Story”
trilogy, which grew out of his historical research on first-century Asia
Minor, is his first foray into fiction. He continues to write for the
academic world as well, including a recently finished book on sickness
and healing in the Greco-Roman world that explores some of the history
behind this trilogy, Paul and Asklepios: The Greco-Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission (T&T Clark, 2023).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian
University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his
interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the
author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the
Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).
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The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Routledge, 2026) examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and representation, illustrating their mutual influence.

The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.
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Beyond Brutality: Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah (Brandeis University Press, 2025) draws
on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of
the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and
where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Jane Kanarek brings to
light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text. Despite the
brutality of the sotah ritual—in which the woman accused of adultery is
put through a divine ordeal intended to reveal her innocence or her
guilt—this book demonstrates that Bavli Sotah is not primarily concerned
with describing the sotah ritual or establishing male control over
women. Instead, Bavli Sotah becomes a pedagogical text in which the
sotah is secondary to moral and sinning men. As the sotah herself fades
into the background, the sotah ritual nevertheless overflows its
boundaries and weaves its way through a range of other topics within the
tractate. In the process, Bavli Sotah teaches its audience who
transmits and how one transmits rabbinic culture.

Dr. Rabbi Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, Newton, MA.

Dr. Rabbi Rachel Adelman, Professor of Bible at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, Newton, MA.
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