Dialogues in Judaic Studies
This podcast features educational, informative and intellectually compelling conversations with authors of newly-published books and recently-released monographs on Jewish history, Jewish religion, Jewish philosophy and Jewish literature. The podcast intends to reach academic specialists, members of the reading public and beginners with entry-level curiosity.
Episodes
18 episodes
David Graizbord, ed., *Early Modern Jewish Civilization Unity and Diversity in a Diasporic Society: An Introduction*. New York: Routledge, 2024.
This compilation serves as a foundational historical overview and a selective cultural examination of the evolution, unification, and eventual decline of a diasporic civilization—the Jewish community during the early modern era (approximately 1...
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Season 1
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Episode 18
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1:09:09
Laura Lieber, *Staging the Sacred: Theatricality and Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023
This book investigates the liturgical poetry of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan traditions from late antiquity, approximately during the third to fourth century CE. It examines this poetry in the context of biblical interpretation and prayer c...
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Season 1
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Episode 17
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1:36:27
Matthew Goff, Greg Schmidt Goering and Samuel Adams, *Sirach and Its Contexts: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Human Flourishing*. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
In *Sirach and Its Contexts*, a varied group of scholars who focus on the book of Sirach place this second-century BCE Jewish wisdom text within its numerous contexts: literary, historical, philosophical, textual, cultural, and political. Compi...
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Season 1
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Episode 16
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1:12:47
Gustavo Guzman, *Allende, Pinochet, and the Jews*. New York: Routledge, 2026.
This book investigates the perspectives of Chilean President Salvador Allende and General Augusto Pinochet regarding Jews and the State of Israel.Throughout his political journey, Allende demonstrated solidarity with European Jews durin...
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Season 1
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Episode 15
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1:38:44
Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow, *The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible: An Analysis of Josephus and 4 Ezra*. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
In this monograph, Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow explores the challenging question of when, how, and why the set of twenty-four books known today as the Hebrew Bible was compiled. He thoroughly investigates the two earliest sources on this topic—J...
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Season 1
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Episode 14
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1:09:06
Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, *Cultic Spiritualization: Religious Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls*. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022.
Since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, their material evidence and compelling content have fascinated both scholars and the general public. Regarded as one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century, the unear...
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Episode 13
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1:20:00
Joseph Scales, *Galilean Spaces of Identity: Judaism and Spatiality in Hasmonean and Herodian Galilee*. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
We interpret the world surrounding us through the constructed spaces we inhabit. These spaces are formed by human activities and, in turn, shape the way people live. This book delves into an analysis of archaeological and textual evidence from ...
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Episode 13
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1:21:05
Kristine Henriksen Garroway, *The Dying Child: The Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
The loss of a child is one of the most painful, sorrowful, and seemingly unnatural experiences that anyone can endure. Nevertheless, it is still unclear if this sentiment was also felt by the people of ancient Israel.Many studies have e...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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1:23:19
Rebecca Harris, *Religious Experience and Divinization in the Sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls: Living in the Liminal*. Leiden: Brill, 2026.
For those engaged in the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls movement, membership in the group would have granted them exceptional privileges, including direct and unmediated access to otherworldly realities. This understanding of the present as a type ...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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57:07
Rina Lapidus, *Russian Ideational Roots of Jewish Thought and Hebrew Literature*. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024.
This book explores how the intellectual and literary movements of Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries affected Jewish thought and Hebrew literature.By engaging in a comparative analysis of a diverse range of writings from ...
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1:33:52
Ursula Westwood, *Moses Among the Greek Lawgivers: Reading Josephus’ Antiquities through Plutarch’s Lives*. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
Josephus' Antiquities depicts Moses as the Jewish lawgiver, altering the biblical story for a distinct audience. Nevertheless, who made up that audience, and how did they interpret the term lawgiver? This work utilizes Plutarch's Lives as a pro...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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1:14:43
Jordan Henderson, *Defeat and Deliverance: Prefigurements of the Jewish Revolt against Rome in Josephus' Depictions of Past Invasions of Jerusalem*. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2026.
This monograph investigates Josephus’ representations of foreign invasions of Jerusalem as detailed in his Jewish Antiquities. The invasions covered include those by Shishak, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, Antiochus IV Epipha...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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1:43:16
Roni Weinstein, *Joseph Karo and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Law: The Early Modern Ottoman and Global Settings*. London: Anthem Press, 2022.
The dual legal codes established by R. Joseph Karo during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries mark a crucial milestone in the development of Jewish Halakhah. No further legal advancements were introduced in the following generati...
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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1:29:37
Golan Moskowitz, *Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context*. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021.
*Wild Visionary* reexamines the life and work of Maurice Sendak through the lens of his identity as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) was a passionate, romantic, and surprisingly humorous seeker of truth who made sig...
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1:30:01
Mark L. Smith, *Building and Consoling a Nation: The Yiddish Historians in their Own Words*. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2026.
In the early 1900s, as the aspiration for Jewish cultural nationalism in the Diaspora was gaining momentum among advocates for Yiddish, the prominent intellectuals of the time included the "Yiddish historians" who played a crucial role in uncov...
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Episode 2
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50:43
Debby Koren, *Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities through Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Responsa*. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024.
This book features a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, along with the original Hebrew texts, concentrating on the Spanish-Portuguese communities that arose after the expulsion during the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries....
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Episode 1
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1:11:40
Josef Mendelevitch, *The Cantonists: Jewish Boys in the Russian Military, 1827-1856*. Rachelle Emanuel, trans. Boston: Academic Studies Press (in Partnership with Touro University Press in New York), 2025.
Before 1917, the Russian Tsar wielded total power over a sprawling empire, where more than 5 million Jews lived in seclusion and segregation. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), the treatment of Jews became especially brutal. Nicho...
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1:25:58
David Edwards, *In the Court of the Gentiles: Narrative, Exemplarity, and Scriptural Adaptation in the Court-Tales of Flavius Josephus*. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2023.
In this monograph, David Edwards explores how Josephus, in his work *Jewish Antiquities*, reinterprets the biblical stories of Joseph and Esther in unexpected ways, employing them as frameworks for narratives concerning more modern Jewish figur...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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1:38:14
