New Books in Jewish Studies

Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2024) confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.

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What happens when you read the weekly Torah portion alongside the strange, fascinating, and sometimes uncomfortable story of modern Jewish history? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Rabbi David Bashevkin to discuss I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha (Maggid, 2026), a book that turns Shabbat reading into an intellectual journey through the Jewish past.
Bashevkin takes familiar Torah stories and places them in surprising conversation with the events and ideas that have shaped modern Jewish life. Noah’s ark leads to the Industrial Revolution. The biblical census opens a window onto the modern haredi draft debate. Korah’s rebellion becomes a lens for understanding the rise of Marxism. Along the way, Bashevkin explores questions that remain deeply relevant: Is the founding of Israel a messianic moment? How should we understand rabbinic authority centuries after its emergence? Can political disagreements justify divisions among Jews? And how did the revival of Hebrew transform Jewish identity?
The essays move freely between Jewish history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and traditional sources. They aren't conventional Torah sermons or academic lectures; instead, they are invitations to make unexpected connections and to see both the Torah and Jewish history with fresh eyes. Each essay also ends with suggested books, turning Bashevkin's own reading into an invitation for listeners to keep exploring.
Together, Bashevkin and Katz explore what happens when the weekly parasha becomes a doorway into the Jewish historical imagination—and why Shabbat might be the perfect time to slow down, pick up a book, and reconnect with the story of our people.
About the Guest:
David Bashevkin is founder of 18Forty, a media and educational platform leading conversations on Jewish faith, identity, and community, and host of its flagship podcast. He serves as Assistant Clinical Professor of Jewish Values at Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business and is a rebbe at Isaac Breuer College. David has been rejected from several prestigious fellowships and awards.
About the Host:
Rab­bi Marc Katz is the Rab­bi at Tem­ple Ner Tamid in Bloom­field, NJ. He is author of the books Yochanan’s Gam­ble: Judaism’s Prag­mat­ic Approach to Life (JPS) cho­sen as a final­ist for the PROSE award and The Heart of Lone­li­ness: How Jew­ish Wis­dom Can Help You Cope and Find Com­fort (Turn­er Pub­lish­ing) which was cho­sen as a final­ist for the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award.

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This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center—details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.
Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos—"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"—while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.
Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational poet derives paradoxically from an inward-looking stance that privileges “the trope of the room” and a practice of self-translation that is faithful to his own internal poetics rather than the poetic norms of the target tradition. The resulting bilingual poetics is one that, though not universally accepted by English readers, ultimately had a profound effect on the Anglo-American literary tradition and anticipated certain foreignizing tendencies that have become central to translation studies and theories of transnationalism. No less powerful than the book’s thesis is the elegant analyses, which encompass Brodsky’s Russian poetry, his translations from Russian to English, and his English-language essays.
Daria Smirnova holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and a degree in Linguistics from Russia. Inspired by years of traveling between languages and cultures, her research explores literary translation, bilingualism, and transmediation. Daria's current archival research examines the role of translation in shaping literary canons.
Amber Nickell is Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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This vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power.

The Jew Who Would Be King: A True Story of Shipwreck, Survival, and Scandal in Victorian Africa (U California Press, 2025) tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power.

Adam Rovner’s meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. Through Isaacs’ story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and “savagery,” and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.
Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He is the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York University Press, 2014).
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.

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