New Books in Jewish Studies

Since 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been a pioneer in the field of Jewish studies. At the core of YIVO since its founding was its commitment to scholarship which supported the Jewish “folk.” This manifested in a variety of initiatives, including youth autobiography contests and a youth research division (yugfor), an Economic-Statistical section (ekstat), and the establishment of various YIVO branches. These YIVO's activities continue to pique the interests of scholars, who have recently produced new scholarship analyzing these initiatives through the lens of new pioneering research methods.

Join YIVO for a panel discussion sharing new research on these historic YIVO initiatives featuring presentations by William Pimlott, Kamil Kijek, and Nicolas Vallois, followed by a conversation led by Jessica Kirzane.

This panel discussion originally took place on June 11, 2025.
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Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of Eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and peddlers, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them, many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts.

In A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (Liverpool UP, 2024), Marek Tuszewicki studies manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs to tease out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. His research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in Eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbors together.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Tuszewicki about this book, led by cultural critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen.

Buy the book here

This book talk originally took place on November 11, 2024.
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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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