Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas

Laughter and Leadership: A Conversation with Tikva Blaukopf Schein, Ph.D.

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

We laugh without thinking — but what if laughter is one of the most revealing human acts?

In this episode of The Van Leer Institute Series On Ideas, Dr. Tikva Blaukopf Schein explores laughter not as humor, but as power. Across ancient Roman and rabbinic texts, laughter could strengthen leadership, threaten institutions, or expose hidden fear. The same laugh that comforts one audience can unsettle another.

Our conversation moves from classical literature to contemporary academic life, touching on scholarship, family, identity, and the challenges facing Jewish and Israeli scholars today. Along the way emerges a surprising idea: societies become nervous about laughter precisely when they feel most fragile.

Thoughtful, personal, and deeply relevant, this episode asks why humans so often laugh in moments of crisis — and what that laughter reveals about hope, survival, and meaning.

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Elias V. Messinas, "Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace" (Bloch Publishing, 2011)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Across Greece, once-thriving Jewish communities stood for more than two thousand years. From the Romaniote Jews of Ioannina to the great Sephardic center of Salonika, Jewish life shaped the cultural and urban fabric of the eastern Mediterranean.

During the Holocaust, approximately 87 percent of Greek Jewry was murdered — one of the highest destruction rates in Europe. Entire communities disappeared almost overnight.

What remained were buildings — sometimes abandoned, sometimes altered, sometimes barely recognizable — silent witnesses to lives erased.

For more than three decades, architect, researcher, and author Elias V. Messinas has devoted his life to documenting, restoring, and re-interpreting these synagogues and Jewish spaces.

His major works include:

The Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace, a foundational architectural and historical survey,
The Synagogue of Verona, a landmark study in restoration practice,
Kahal Shalom: The Synagogue of Kos — A Chronicle of Research, Restoration, Sanctity and Ecology, and
his recent reflective work, The Synagogue, which explores memory, encounter, and meaning through these spaces.

Messinas is both architect and historian — but perhaps most importantly, a custodian of memory, working to preserve places whose congregations no longer exist.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator, and host of the New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here and also contributes here.

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Steven Pinker, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" (Scribner, 2025)

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room. In When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life (Scribner, 2026) Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:

-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?

-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?

-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?

-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign? -Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?

-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator, and host of the New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here and also contributes here.

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Robert J. Coplan, "The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Solitude is part of the human experience. But just like other relationships, your relationship with solitude can be satisfying, intimate, and enhance your well-being, or it can leave you wanting, stuck in a cycle of sadness, anxiety, or anger. Regardless of whether you're starved for “me time” or struggling with loneliness, most of us have never thought carefully about how to get the most out of the time we spend by ourselves. As a result, we’re missing out on what could be a deeply enriching aspect of our lives. But how can we unlock the positive power of solitude?

In The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World (Simon and Schuster, 2025) Robert Coplan draws from diverse fields including psychology, neuroscience, literature, and sociology to guide readers through solitude’s many dimensions and its profound effects on mental health and well-being. In this enlightening book, you will discover:

The many different types of solitude, ranging from enjoyable to challenging, each influencing personal experiences in unique ways.
Why choosing to spend even fifteen minutes alone each day can help stabilize your mood, recharge your battery, and spark creativity.
A deeper understanding of extraverts and introverts and their (often misunderstood) relationship to solitude. -What alone time looks like in a world where social connection is always a click away.
Groundbreaking scientific insights into the effects of both loneliness and “aloneliness.”
The surprising ways that time alone can enhance relationships with others.
Practical strategies for harmonizing moments of social engagement and solitude, crucial for achieving optimal life satisfaction.

The Joy of Solitude is a vital resource for those who wish to understand the complexities of solitude and its potential to enhance mental health, creativity, and self-discovery. Whether you seek affirmation for your love of solitude or strive to find balance within it, Coplan’s insights are indispensable tools for enriching your relationship with yourself and others.

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Michael Kimmel, "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

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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Oren Harman, "Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History" (Basic Books, 2025)

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A search for the meaning of one of nature's greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform?

“How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorphosis.
But why do tadpoles transform into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies, elvers into eels, immortal jellyfish from sea sprigs to medusae and back again, growing younger and younger in frigid ocean depths? Why must creatures go through massive destruction and remodeling to become who they are? Tracing a path from Aristotle to Darwin to cutting-edge science today, Harman explores that central mystery in Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History (Basic Books, 2025).
Metamorphosis, however, isn’t just a biological puzzle: it takes us to the very heart of questions of being and identity, whatever kind of change we humans may undergo. Metamorphosis is a new classic of natural history: a book that, by unveiling a mystery of nature, causes us to relearn ourselves.

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Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals how central attention is to all of these functions, and how interactions with nature can restore it. Nature and the Mind is both an introduction to a revolutionary new scientific field and a helpful guide to better living.

In these pages, he draws on his original research and research from others and shares life-altering findings such as:
-Just eleven more trees on your street can decrease cardio-metabolic disorders like stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.
-A short walk in nature can improve attention by almost twenty percent, decrease depression symptoms, and make people feel more spiritual and self-reflective.
-More greenspace around schools and homes is related to better school performance, reduced crime, and improved working memory.
-Many of these effects can be achieved even if you don’t like nature.
With an engaging and approachable style, Dr. Berman offers the nature prescription for physical health, mental health, and social health. Importantly, you don’t have to pack up your house and move to the country to participate. The nature prescription includes practical ways to bring the outside indoors and to “naturize” our spaces, no matter where you live. The positive effects of nature don’t just end at the individual; contact with nature can make people more caring towards one another, encourage people to care more for the environment, and more.
This groundbreaking guide explains why and how nature is good for our brains and bodies and gives us a window into fundamental aspects of our psychology and physiology that can be improved through interactions with nature.

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Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?" (Taylor & Francis, 2025

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds? (Taylor & Francis, 2025) is the first in-depth study of food in talmudic literature in its geographical and cultural contexts. It demonstrates the sharing of foods and foodways between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the Near East in Late Antiquity.

Using both ancient written sources and archaeological evidence, this book sets the foods of the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud in their Graeco-Roman context, and the foods of the Babylonian Talmud and the ge’onim in their Persian and Arab contexts. It explores practices of food preparation and their contribution to the ancient diet, as well as analysing the relationships between food, status and culture. The rabbinical authors of talmudic literature were more concerned with everyday food than were aristocratic Classical authors; by examining both talmudic sources and archaeological finds, this book paints a new picture of the diet, lifestyle and culture of ordinary people.

Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts will interest Food Historians as well as students and scholars of Jewish Studies, particularly the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as those dealing with the wider social and cultural history of the Ancient Near East.

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William Ury, "Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict" (Harper Business, 2024)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The author of the world’s best-selling book on negotiation draws on his nearly fifty years of experience and knowledge grappling with the world’s toughest conflicts to offer a way out of the seemingly impossible problems of our time.

Conflict is increasing everywhere, threatening everything we hold dear—from our families to our democracy, from our workplaces to our world. In nearly every area of society, we are fighting more and collaborating less, especially over crucial problems that demand solutions.

With this groundbreaking book, bestselling author and international negotiator William Ury shares a new “path to possible”—time-tested practices that will help listeners unlock their power to constructively engage and transform conflict. Part memoir, part manual, part manifesto, Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict (Harper Business, 2024) offers stories and sage advice from Ury’s nearly 50 years of experience on the front lines of some of the world’s toughest conflicts.

One of the world’s top experts in the field, Ury has worked on conflicts ranging from boardroom battles to labor strikes, from the US partisan divide to family feuds, from wars in the Middle East, Colombia and Ukraine to helping the US and USSR avoid nuclear disaster. Now, in Possible, he helps us tackle the seemingly intransigent problems facing us.

In Possible, Ury argues conflict is natural. In fact, we need more conflict, not less—if we are to grow, change, evolve and solve our problems creatively. While we may not be able to end conflict, we can transform it—unleashing new, unexpected possibilities.

Successfully tested at Harvard University with almost a thousand participants from business, government, academia, and the nonprofit sector, Ury’s “Path to Possible” proved so valuable that Harvard’s Program on Negotiation selected it as its inaugural online daylong in April 2022.

Possible introduces Ury’s methods and makes them available for everyone. Combining accessible frameworks and powerful storytelling and offering dozens of examples, it is an essential guide for anyone looking to break through the toughest conflicts—in their workplace, family, community or the world.

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Michal Govrin et. al, "But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah" (de Gruyter, 2025)

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah (de Gruyter, 2025) proposes a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality. It derives from the four-year workings of a group of researchers and artists at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute led by Michal Govrin.

The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.

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Maya Arad, "The Hebrew Teacher" (New Vessel Press, 2024)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:45:00 -0000

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises.

Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade.

Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

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Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Winner of The 74th National Jewish Book Award: American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award

Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the Reagan–Bush years
What do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic®, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.
The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.
A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2025) delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization tactics during a three-decade-long campaign to liberate Soviet Jews—an endeavor that would ultimately lead to one of the most significant mass emigrations in Jewish history.
Drawing from a wealth of archival sources including the travelogues of thousands of American tourists who smuggled aid to Russian Jews, Shaul Kelner offers a compelling tale of activism and its profound impact, revealing how a seemingly disparate array of elements could be woven together to forge a movement and achieve the seemingly impossible. It is a testament to the power of unity, creativity, and the unwavering dedication of those who believe in the cause of human rights.

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Danya Ruttenberg, "On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World" (Beacon Press, 2022)

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice and Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award
On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022) is a crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues.
American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides.
For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are.
Maimonides laid out five steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward.
Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.

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Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Body: How the stress of Loss Can be an Opportunity for Healing (Harper One, 2025)

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Grieving Body: How the stress of Loss Can be an Opportunity for Healing (Harper One, 2025)by Mary-Frances O’Connor, Ph.D.

The follow-up to celebrated grief expert, neuroscientist, and psychologist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s The Grieving Brain focuses on the impact of grief—and life’s other major stressors—on the human body.

Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experiences. While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor specializes in the study of grief, and in The Grieving Body she shares vital scientific research, revealing imperative new insights on its profound physiological impact. As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being.

The Grieving Body addresses questions about how bereavement affects us, such as:

Can we die of a broken heart?
What happens in our bodies when we’re grieving?
How do our coping behaviors affect our physical health?
What is the cognitive impact of grief?
Why are we more prone to illness during times of enormous stress?
and more

Research-backed, warm, and empathetic, The Grieving Body is an essential, hopeful read for those experiencing loss as well as their supportive friends and family.

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Nicole Nehrig, "With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this first of a series of episodes on healing, we speak with Nicole Nehrig, whose book With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a rich and intimate exploration of how women have used textile work to create meaningful lives, from ancient mythology to our current moment.

Knitting, sewing, embroidery, quilting―throughout history, these and other forms of textile work have often been dismissed as merely “women’s work” and attached to ideas of domesticity and obedience. Yet, as psychologist and avid knitter Nicole Nehrig wonderfully explores in this captivating book, textile work has often been a way for women to exercise power. When their voices were silenced and other avenues were closed off to them, women used the tools they had―often a needle and thread―to seek freedom within the restrictive societies they lived in.

Spanning continents and centuries, With Her Own Hands brings together remarkable stories of women who have used textiles as a means of liberation, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography to the Quechua weavers working to preserve and revive Incan traditions today, and from the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate “story cloths” to a midcentury British women’s postal art exchange. Textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas, and convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest.

Heartfelt and deeply moving, With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories―and a testament to their resilience.

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Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, "The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism" (Jewish Publication Society. 2024)

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Triumph of Life is Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s magnum opus—a narrative of the relationship between God and humanity as expressed in the Jewish journey through modernity, the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, and the birth of Judaism’s next era.
Greenberg describes Judaism’s utopian vision of a world created by a God who loves life, who invites humans to live on the side of life, and who enables the forces of life to triumph over death. The Bible proclaims our mission of tikkun olam, repairing the world, such that every human image of God is sustained in the fullness of our dignity. To achieve this ideal, Judaism offers the method of covenant—a realistic, personal, incremental partnership between God and humanity across generations in which human beings grow ever more responsible for world repair.
Greenberg calls on us to redirect humanity’s unprecedented power in modernity to overcome poverty, oppression, inequality, sickness, and war. The work of covenant requires an ethic of power—one that advances life collaboratively and at a human pace—so that the Jewish people and all humanity can bring the world toward the triumph of life.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award's Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner of the Natan Fund’s 2024 Natan Prize.

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David S. Wall, "Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age" (Polity, 2024)

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How has the digital revolution transformed criminal opportunities and behaviour? What is different about cybercrime compared with traditional criminal activity? What impact might cybercrime have on public security?

In this updated edition of his authoritative and field-defining text, cybercrime expert David Wall carefully examines these and other important issues. Incorporating analysis of the latest technological advances and their criminological implications, he disentangles what is really known about cybercrime today.

An ecosystem of specialists has emerged to facilitate cybercrime, reducing individual offenders’ level of risk and increasing the scale of crimes involved. This is a world where digital and networked technologies have effectively democratized crime by enabling almost anybody to carry out crimes that were previously the preserve of either traditional organized crime groups or a privileged coterie of powerful people. Against this background, the author scrutinizes the regulatory challenges that cybercrime poses for the criminal (and civil) justice processes, at both the national and the international levels.

This book offers the most intellectually robust account of cybercrime currently available. It is suitable for use on courses across the social sciences, and in computer science, and will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

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Rebecca Lemov, "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" (Norton, 2025)

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone.

The Instability of Truth exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, from the brainwashing techniques used against American POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. In our increasingly data-driven world, anyone can fall victim to mind control. Lemov identifies invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction to coerce and persuade in everyday life. Tracing the word “brainwashing” from deep in the files of an operative of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the 1950s to the pioneering research of Robert Jay Lifton, to the public trials of cult leaders and the case of Patty Hearst, Lemov also studies how the idea of mind control has spread across the globe and penetrated courtrooms, secret labs, military schools, and today’s digital sites.

The Instability of Truth offers lessons from mind-control episodes past and present. Truth is always subject to question in more mundane walks of life than most people believe, and Lemov equips us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism. The Instability of Truth develops a rigorous new understanding of both brainwashing’s paradoxes and its emotional roots, by giving voice to brainwashers, the brainwashed, and third-party observers alike.

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Cary Nelson, "Mindless: What Happened to Universities?" (Jewish Quarterly 259, 2025)

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Mindless: What Happened to Universities?, renowned scholar and former president of the American Association of University Professors Cary Nelson delivers a searing indictment of modern higher education. Once bastions of open debate and critical thinking, universities have become ideological battlegrounds where dissent is silenced, academic freedom is under siege, and antisemitism is repackaged as social justice.

Against the backdrop of Hamas’ brutal invasion of Israel and massacre of civilians on October 7, 2023, and the war that followed, Nelson examines how anti-Zionist activism has overtaken campuses, transforming student protests into rigid political movements that brook no opposition. With chilling examples—from faculty members who celebrated Hamas attacks to university administrators who failed to protect Jewish students—Mindless exposes how radical ideology has reshaped the very nature of learning.

In this urgent and provocative work, Nelson explores the emotional and social toll of this shift, the complicity of university leadership, and the role of social media in fueling division. He challenges readers to ask: Can the university still be saved? And if not, what does that mean for the future of education—and for society itself?

A must-read for educators, students, and anyone concerned about the fate of intellectual freedom, Mindless is both a wake-up call and a call to action.

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Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.
What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.
Flanagan has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience, along with his wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction, informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system. Some addictions are fun and experimentation gone awry. Flanagan reveals addiction to be a heterogeneous set of disorders, which are picked out by multifarious cultural, social, psychological, and neural features.
Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.

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Elaine Pagels, "Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus" (Doubleday, 2025)

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Doubleday, 2025) she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.
The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus's followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?
The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus's life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn't illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus's body wasn't humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn't a failed messiah, his kingdom is a metaphor: he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers' numbers grow.
In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract.

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Sandra Matz, "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior" (HBRP, 2025)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A fascinating exploration of how algorithms penetrate the most intimate aspects of our psychology—from the pioneering expert on psychological targeting.

There are more pieces of digital data than there are stars in the universe. This data helps us monitor our planet, decipher our genetic code, and take a deep dive into our psychology.

As algorithms become increasingly adept at accessing the human mind, they also become more and more powerful at controlling it, enticing us to buy a certain product or vote for a certain political candidate. Some of us say this technological trend is no big deal. Others consider it one of the greatest threats to humanity. But what if the truth is more nuanced and mind-bending than that?

In Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior (Harvard Business Press, 2025), Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives—for example, by improving our mental health, encouraging better financial decisions, or enabling us to break out of our echo chambers.

With passion and clear-eyed precision, Matz shows us how to manage psychological targeting and redesign the data game.

Mindmasters is a riveting look at what our digital footprints reveal about us, how they're being used—for good and for ill—and how we can gain power over the data that defines us.

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David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)

Sat, 03 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What to do when a victorious soldier lusts for the beautiful woman he’s just taken captive in an overseas war. In fact, her body already belongs to him as war booty. If they’re alone in an alley, no one will find out what he does to her.

That’s the incendiary situation to which the Bible responds with the Beautiful Captive Law. The Bible’s first step was to stop battlefield rape and protect the vulnerable woman from the powerful soldier. More than that, the Bible has strategies to get the soldier to control himself, even when no one is looking. Then the Bible brings the soldier to care for her, as the person she is. The Jewish tradition’s next major step was in the 12th century when it empowered the captive to decide for herself what direction she wants her life to take, including going free without marrying him. Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse (BfoT, 2025) shows how these strategies can work in our communities today, to reduce all kinds of sexual abuse.

Tales of passion, martyrdom and a rare man who can “Just say no” to a rape he could have gotten away with -- can help us educate our youth toward a more respectful future for all gender relations, not just war-time rape. Surprises await both Bible-believers and Bible-skeptics.

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Jerome Gellman, "The Problem of God in Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Hebrew Bible contains two quite different divine personae. One is quick to anger and to exact punishment while the other is a compassionate God slow to anger and quick to forgive. One God distant, the other close by.

This severe contrast posed a theological challenge for Jewish thought for the ages. The Problem of God in Jewish Thought (Cambridge UP, 2025)follows selected views in rabbinic literature, medieval Jewish philosophy, Jewish mystical thought, the Hasidic movement, modern Jewish theology, response to the Holocaust, and Jewish feminist theology. In the history of Jewish thought there was often a tendency to identify closely with the God of compassion.

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Keith J. Hayward, "Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood" (Constable & Robinson, 2025)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you're increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection?

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

But importantly Infantilised is no one-dimensional, unsympathetic critique. Brimming with anecdotes and examples that span everything from the normalisation of infantilism on reality TV to the rise of a new class of political 'infantocrat', Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Constable & Robinson, 2025) also offers an insightful and at times humorous account of infantilism's seductive appeal, and details some suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with our increasingly infantilised world.

Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at Copenhagen University

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James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”

James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis (Yale UP, 2024) that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.

Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?

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On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate change.

Ubiquitous air conditioning, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility have served as temporary remedies for escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all of these measures have ultimately fueled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. I

Identifying the scientific, economic, and cultural forces that have numbed our responses, this book charts a way out of short-term thinking and towards meaningful action.

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Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.

In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus―a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.

Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired―often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.

Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.

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Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest, Professor Joseph Stern, will discuss Maimonides’ unique understanding of the afterlife, per his recent article, "A Guide to the AfterDeath: Maimonides on olam ha-ba’", Religious Studies (2024), 60, S74–S90

Professor Josef Stern is a renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy and thought, specializing in the works of Moses Maimonides. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he has contributed significantly to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly the intersection of philosophy, theology, and intellectual history.

With a deep focus on Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and religious thought, Professor Stern has published extensively on themes such as skepticism, intellectual perfection, and the nature of religious language. His work often bridges Jewish thought with broader philosophical traditions, including Aristotelian and Islamic philosophies.

Known for his clear, incisive analysis and ability to connect historical ideas to contemporary debates, Professor Stern remains a leading voice in Maimonidean scholarship. His recent studies on concepts like Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come) provide fresh insights into Maimonides' revolutionary vision of the afterlife and human perfection.

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Eric Cline, "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

At the end of Eric Cline's bestselling history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton UP, 2025), Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration.

After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos.

Filled with lessons for today about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities.

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On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel by Nachum Sarna

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode we delve into one of the most profound and enduring works of sacred poetry: the Book of Psalms. Emotional and spiritual, joyful and despairing, triumphant and trembling with terror, the psalms have given voice to humanity's deepest yearnings for millennia. These timeless prayers and hymns have offered solace, inspiration, and a path to connection with the Divine, both individually and collectively.

Traditionally attributed to King David, the psalms were sung by the Jewish priests in the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. But what is it about these ancient verses that still resonate with readers and worshippers today—Jews, Christians, and people of many faiths or none at all? How do these sacred words help the human heart and mind reach toward the Transcendent? And what explains their unparalleled staying power over thousands of years?

To guide us through this journey, we are honored to welcome Dr. Shlomo Dov Rosen, a truly remarkable and multifaceted scholar. Dr. Rosen is a philosopher, poet, and congregational rabbi whose expertise bridges disciplines and traditions. With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he brings a unique perspective to the psalms, informed by his deep engagement with Jewish law, theology, and even the literary world of Milton. As someone who has dedicated his life to both the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of faith, Dr. Rosen is uniquely equipped to help us explore the profound meanings of these ancient prayers.

In today’s conversation, we touch on the historical origins of the psalms, their universal and interfaith appeal, and how they speak to the human experience of war, illness, gratitude, jay and awe in the face of nature—and beyond nature. We’ll also discuss why certain psalms, like the beloved 23rd Psalm, hold such enduring power, even for those who might not consider themselves religious.

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Matthew Levitt, "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" (Yale UP, 2008)

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The world is reeling from the savage terror attack that brutalized, raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis and civilians from at least 25 other countries, continuing to hold many of them hostage – and from the ongoing war that followed.

After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, some thought it would become more moderate. That was wishful thinking. The barbaric massacre of October 7, 2023 made it clear that Hamas is a terrorist group intent on destroying Israel and hoping to spark a regional – and even wider-war.

We talk with Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert with extensive field experience in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and author of Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale UP, 2008). This important book provides the most fully researched assessment of Hamas ever written. It draws aside the veil of legitimacy behind which Hamas hid, by presenting concrete, detailed evidence from an extensive array of international intelligence materials, including recently declassified CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security reports.

Levitt demolishes the notion that Hamas’ military, political, and social wings are distinct from one another. Levitt exposes Hamas as a unitary organization committed to a militant Islamist ideology.and expands the book’s insights and their implication for the future in “The War Hamas Always Wanted.” Foreign Affairs, 16 Oct. 2023, and "The Road to Oct 7: Hamas’ Long Game, Clarified" in CTC Sentinel (Combating Terrorism Center at West Point), Vol. 16, issue 10, Oct.-Nov. 2023.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Anthony Bale, "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes" (Norton, 2024)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A captivating journey of the expansive world of medieval travel, from London to Constantinople to the court of China and beyond.

Europeans of the Middle Ages were the first to use travel guides to orient their wanderings, as they moved through a world punctuated with miraculous wonders and beguiling encounters. In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites readers on an odyssey across the medieval world, recounting the advice that circulated among those venturing to the road for pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and war.

Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensable information on the exchange rate between Bohemian ducats and Venetian groats, medieval cures for seasickness, and how to avoid extortionist tour guides and singing sirens. He takes us from the streets of Rome, more ruin than tourist spot, and tours of the Khan’s court in Beijing to Mamluk-controlled Jerusalem, where we ride asses across the holy terrain, and bustling bazaars of Tabriz.

We also learn of rumored fantastical places, like ones where lambs grow on trees and giant canes grow fruit made of gems. And we are offered a glimpse of what non-European travelers thought of the West on their own travels.

Using previously untranslated contemporaneous documents from a colorful range of travelers, and from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, North Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes (Norton, 2024) is a witty and unforgettable exploration of how Europeans understood—and often misunderstood—the larger world.

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Writing on the Wall: A Conversation with William Kolbrener

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

"Writing on the Wall" is a global platform founded by Professor William Kolbrener and novelist Ronit Eitan in response to the traumatic events of October 7th and the alarming rise in global antisemitism.

The co-founders, despite their differing perspectives on many issues, share a steadfast belief: the fight against antisemitism can begin by uniting diverse voices through poetry and art.

In a world where some wield literature, art, and scholarship as tools of intimidation and exclusion, efforts to silence Israelis and their supporters grow—alongside the grim reality of Hamas holding Israelis and Americans hostage.

Yet, there are those who embrace the transformative power of writing to challenge antisemitism and foster collective healing.

As Executive Director of Writing on the Wall, a nonprofit initiative based at Bar-Ilan University, Professor Kolbrener spearheads creative and community-driven responses to combat hate and division.

How should we confront the intellectual boycotts and the subtler but equally harmful efforts to marginalize Israeli academics? In today’s episode, William Kolbrener shares his approach, offering a powerful example of resistance through creativity and inclusion.

William Kolbrener is a Full Professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research explores the intersections of literature, theology, and politics, focusing on figures such as John Milton, Mary Astell, and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.

He is the author of several influential books that integrate literary studies, Jewish thought, and philosophy:

Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge University Press, 1996): A key contribution to Renaissance studies, focusing on critical interpretations of John Milton.
Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism, and Love (Continuum, 2011): A collection of essays blending Jewish tradition with contemporary thought.
The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016): An exploration of Soloveitchik’s philosophical legacy in the modern age.

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Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.

With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.

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The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The essay "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7" (Mosaic Magazine) by Shany Mor, dated October 7, 2024, examines the intellectual and policy failures leading up to the October 7 attack on Israel. Mor critiques several conceptual frameworks that have guided Israeli and international policy, particularly in dealing with Gaza and Hamas. These failed ideas include:

1. Netanyahu’s Leadership - Mor argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-standing skepticism, indecision, and focus on messaging over strategic action contributed to the failure. His belief that Israel could contain Hamas while ignoring broader strategic decisions proved disastrous.

2. Religious Settler Ideology -The right-wing settler movement has, according to Mor, distorted Israeli policy for years. This ideological shift, prioritizing the West Bank settlement agenda over national security interests, has resulted in misguided policies that left Gaza's threat underestimated and unaddressed.

3. Peace Processors’ Delusion -The international peace processors, particularly in Western liberal circles, have perpetuated unrealistic frameworks for Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution. Mor critiques their belief that diplomacy and incremental concessions could resolve deep-seated ideological conflicts with groups like Hamas, which remain fundamentally opposed to Israel’s existence.

4. The Role of the International Community - Global organizations, including the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs, have indirectly supported the hostile status quo by empowering non-state actors like Hamas. Mor criticizes these bodies for exacerbating rather than mitigating conflict, enabling militias to exercise power without responsibility.

The essay argues that these failed concepts need to be dismantled for Israel and the international community to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the tragic events of October 7 and to establish a more secure and realistic policy moving forward.

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Judaism is About Love: A Discussion with Shai Held

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law.

In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held―one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today―recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity. Blending intellectual rigor, a respect for tradition and the practices of a living Judaism, and a commitment to the full equality of all people, Held seeks to reclaim Judaism as it authentically is.

In Judaism Is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (FSG, 2024), he shows that love is foundational and constitutive of true Jewish faith, animating the singular Jewish perspective on injustice and protest, grace, family life, responsibilities to our neighbors and even our enemies, and chosenness.

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Seth J. Frantzman, "The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza" (Wicked Son, 2024)

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A harrowing account on the frontlines of the war between Israel and Hamas, The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza (Wicked Son, 2024) War tells the story of how Hamas surprised Israel with its deadly attack, killing more than 1,000 people and kidnapping more than 250. With unparalleled access to the Israeli soldiers and units that faced the Hamas onslaught and their epic battle to defeat the terror group in Gaza, this is the story of the men and women who faced one of the world’s worst terror attacks and brought justice to its victims. It is also the story of how Hamas—backed by anti-Western and anti-Semitic forces around the globe—masterminded its attack and aspired to fire the first shot in a war to upset the US-led world order. The war against the terrorist group will determine the future of the Middle East.

From the battlegrounds in Gaza and the IDF strike cells using the latest in artificial intelligence, to the Israeli communities devastated by the fighting and trips to Israel’s frontlines against Hezbollah, this is the gripping story of how Israel suffered a surprise attack and recovered. The October 7 War is based on the author’s fifteen years of experience covering wars in Gaza, defense technology, and the rise of Iranian-backed terror in the Middle East.

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Marilynne Robinson, "Reading Genesis" (FSG, 2024)

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture.

Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis (FSG, 2024), which includes the full text of the King James Version of the book, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.

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Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers.

The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.

Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre, Cary Nelson's Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Academic Studies Press, 2024) takes up issues that have consequently gained new urgency in the academy worldwide.

It is the first book to ask what impact antisemitism has had on the fundamental principles the academy relies on for its identity—academic freedom, free speech rights, standards for hiring or firing faculty members and administrators, and the ethics of academic conduct and debate.

Antisemitic hatred is spreading at a fever pitch. What steps can counter it? What damage to students is done when departments embrace anti-Zionism? Should faculty members face consequences for promoting antisemitism on social media? Should universities make a new push to adopt the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism?

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Jay Garfinkel, "Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness" (Illuminated Press, 2024)

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dive into the timeless wisdom of Ecclesiastes in Jay Garfinkel's groundbreaking work, Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness (Illuminated Press, 2024) This exquisite "illuminated" digital masterpiece marries the ancient with the avant-garde, offering a fresh, poetic voice to the biblical text that has resonated with humanity for millennia. The book contains:

• 83 Stunning Illustrations: Each piece is a visual symphony that invites you on a visual journey through Kohelet's philosophical and existential musings.

• A Modern Poetic Voice: Garfinkel reimagines the ancient text with a contemporary poetic flair, making the profound teachings of Ecclesiastes accessible and relatable to a 21st-century audience.

• A Fusion of Art and Wisdom: "Kohelet's Cocktail" is not just a book but a multimedia experience that blends vivid imagery with evocative poetry. It illuminates the timeless questions of life, purpose, and human existence.

The title, Kohelet's Cocktail, is a metaphor, a blended mixture of life's contradictions, that echoes throughout the book. The author acknowledges life's seeming meaninglessness yet finds value in relationships and work; he places a premium on wisdom, yet it is harshly critical of its limits; he accepts the idea of the Divine but questions whether divine justice even exists.

Aimed at a diverse audience of readers – from spiritual wanderers to religious leaders, from mindfulness mavens to those on a personal growth path – this book speaks a universal language. It guides anyone seeking clarity, purpose, and peace in an age of relentless change.

An audiobook of Kohelet’s Cocktail can be found on youtube here.

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Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici, "Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another" (U California Press, 2024)

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America.

This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici reveal, they follow similar paths in their American experience.

Heilman and Bilici immerse readers in three layers of discussion for each religious group: historical evolution, sociological transformation, and a comparative understanding of certain parallel beliefs and practices, each of which is used as a window onto the lived reality of these communities.

Written by two sociologists, one a religiously observant American Jew and the other an American Muslim, Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another (U California Press, 2024) offers lively insider and outsider perspectives that deepen our understanding of American diversity and what it means to be religious in a modern society.

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Eyal Regev, "The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Eyal Regev's The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale UP, 2019) is he first scholarly work to trace the Temple throughout the entire New Testament, this study examines Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the Temple in the first century and provides both Jews and Christians with a better understanding of their respective faiths and how they grow out of this ancient institution. The centrality of the Temple in New Testament writing reveals the authors’ negotiations with the institutional and symbolic center of Judaism as they worked to form their own religion.

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Judith Lewis Herman, "Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice" (Basic Books, 2023)

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Judith Herman is renowned for her groundbreaking work with survivors of trauma, including sexual trauma. Her earlier books include Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 2022) and Father-Daughter Incest (Harvard UP, 2000)

The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, in both domestic and work settings. However, the movement did not address the crime of sexual violence in war, and the use of rape as a weapon of war. In fact, when these historical horrors were brutally used once again in October 2023, the #MeToo movement, and other feminist and anti-rape organizations responded - not with outrage- but with silence.

In contrast, high profile, celebrity cases of sexual abuse and harasment in the U.S. and U.K. gained media coverage, with attention focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial. We heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse.

Professor Herman maintains that conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. She argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them.

In Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books, 2023) she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.

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Thomas Sparr, "German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City" (Haus Publishers, 2021)

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the 1920s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber.

It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City (Haus Publishers, 2021), Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home.

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Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive (Dutton, 2022) is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?

Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

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David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States.

Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties.

Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.

The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies.

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Seth D. Kaplan, "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live.

Yet too many of us live in neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. Even the wealthiest neighborhoods are not immune; while poverty exacerbates these challenges, they exist in zip codes rich and poor, rural and urban, and everything in between.

In Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (Little, Brown Spark, 2023), fragile states expert Seth D. Kaplan offers a bold new vision for addressing social decline in America, one zip code at a time. By revitalizing our local institutions—and the social ties that knit them together—we can all turn our neighborhoods into places where people and families can thrive.

Readers will meet the innovative individuals and organizations pioneering new approaches to everything from youth mentoring to affordable housing: people like Dreama, a former lawyer whose organization works with local leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to equip young people with the social support they need to succeed in school; and Chris, whose Detroit-based non-profit turns vacant school buildings into community resource hubs.

Along the way, Kaplan offers a set of practical lessons to inspire similar work, reminding us that when change is hyperlocal, everyone has the opportunity to contribute.

Seth D. Kaplan, Ph.D. is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs.

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Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

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Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek”): A Conversation with Ronen Koehler

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How does an organization change in an instant, shift its focus and mission in response to a new reality? One volunteer organization did just that. In this podcast, Ronen Koehler shares the ideas, skills and commitments that enabled his organization’s dramatic, consequential change.

The nonprofit, Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek” in Hebrew) was started by active and former IDF reservists and high-tech leaders who opposed their government’s plan for judicial reform, which would have altered the balance of power among the branches of government. They were joined by many thousands of Israelis who came out every week throughout most of 2023 to demonstrate peacefully against the reform.

Then October 7 happened. Hamas’ unprovoked, barbaric attack on peaceful Israeli villages and a music festival – when they raped, burned beheaded, murdered – and kidnapped people, more than 130 of whom are still in captivity today. October 7 changed everything.

Instantly, the organization shifted its focus and its mission from protest to rescue and assistance. Today Brothers and Sisters for Israel is the country’s largest civil aid organization.

Who are these remarkable volunteers? How did the organization change direction so quickly? And how does it see its future?

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Kenneth Miller, "Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep" (Hachette Books, 2023)

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Why do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep?

A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness.

In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of sleep. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM sleep revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of sleep medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who uncovered an epidemic of sleep deprivation among teenagers, and launched a global movement to fight it.

In Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep (Hachette Books, 2023), award-winning Kenneth Miller weaves together science and history to tell the story of four outsider scientists who took sleep science from fringe discipline to mainstream obsession through spectacular experiments, technological innovation, and single-minded commitment.

Mapping the Darkness was named the Best Book of the Year 2023 by the New Yorker.

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Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023)

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Norton, 2023) argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.

Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.

Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

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Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet.

In Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (U Chicago Press, 2023), you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.

This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to

• Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)

• Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack

• Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible

• Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking

• Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised

• Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government

• Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps.

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John Horgan, "Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right" ( Columbia UP, 2023)

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism change someone? And how can people become deradicalized?

John Horgan―one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of terrorism―takes readers on a globe-spanning journey into the terrorist mindset. Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, he traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens. Horgan provides an up-to-date, evidence-based understanding of the patterns, motives, and mentalities of violent extremists from the Islamic State and al-Shabaab to white supremacists and incels. He argues that there is not a straightforward psychological profile of a terrorist, in part because of the great variety of today’s extremists, who are able to attract a more diverse pool of recruits than ever before. But even though there is no one-size-fits-all profile, psychological study can provide crucial insight into why and how people become terrorists.

Accessible and nuanced, Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right (Columbia UP, 2023) is an essential book for readers interested in what psychology can explain about extremist behavior.

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What Can We Learn From A Pottery Shard? Uncovering the Ancient Past Through Biblical Archeology with Professor Aren Maeir

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Some people are good at what they do, some are enthusiastic about their work. This guest brings both to bear in his exploration of the ancient past.

Today we are privileged to talk with a distinguished figure in the world of archeology whose enthusiasm doesn’t quit. Professor. Aren Maeir is not only an accomplished archaeologist, but he is also a captivating storyteller who brings the past to life through his discoveries.

Professor Aren M. Maeir is Director of the Tel es Safi/Gath Archeological Project in Israel. He is an expert in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, with a particular focus on the Bronze and iron Ages of the Ancient Near East.

Professor Maeir is based at (and formerly served as the chairmen of) the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, and serves as the head of the Institute of Archaeology.

Maeir is also the co-director of the “Minerva Center for the Relations between Israel and Aram in Biblical Times” (RIAB), and the director of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. He is also the co-editor of the Israel Exploration Journal.

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Con Coughlin, "Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny" (Picador, 2023)

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country.

Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world’s view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert’. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later.

In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times.

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John Perlin, "The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization" (Patagonia, 2023)

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A Foundational Conservation Story Revived.

Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.”

This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.

Without vast supplies of wood from forests, the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome, the Islamic World, Western Europe, and North America would have never emerged. Wood, in fact, is the unsung hero of the technological revolution that has brought us from a stone and bone culture to our present age.

Until the ascendancy of fossil fuels, wood was the principal fuel and building material from the dawn of civilization. Its abundance or scarcity greatly shaped, as A Forest Journey ably relates, the culture, demographics, economy, internal and external politics and technology of successive societies over the millennia.

The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization (Patagonia, 2023) was originally published in 1989 and updated in 2005. The book's comprehensive coverage of the major role forests have played in human life -- told with grace, fluency, imagination, and humor -- gained it recognition as a Harvard Classic in Science and World History and as one of Harvard's "One Hundred Great Books." Others receiving the honor include such luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson. This is a foundational conservation story that should not be lost in the archives. This new, updated and revised edition emphasizes the importance of forests in the fight against global warming and the urgency to protect what remains of the great trees and forests of the world.

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Dan Senor and Saul Singer, "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How has a small nation of 9 million people, forced to fight for its existence and security since its founding and riven by ethnic, religious, and economic divides, proven resistant to so many of the societal ills plaguing other wealthy democracies?

Why do Israelis have among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest rates of “deaths of despair” from suicide and substance abuse? Why is Israel’s population young and growing while all other wealthy democracies are aging and shrinking? How can it be that Israel, according to a United Nations ranking, is the fourth happiest nation in the world? Why do Israelis tend to look to the future with hope, optimism, and purpose while the rest of the West struggles with an epidemic of loneliness, teen depression, and social decline?

The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World (Simon and Schuster, 2023), already on the New York Times’ bestseller list, was written by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the writers behind the international bestseller Start-Up Nation. They have long been students of the global innovation race. But as they spent time with Israel’s entrepreneurs and political leaders, soldiers and students, scientists and activists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Tel Aviv techies, and Israeli Arabs, they realized that they had missed what really sets Israel apart.

Moving from military commanders integrating at-risk youth and people who are neurodiverse into national service, to high performing companies making space for working parents, from dreamers and innovators launching a duct-taped spacecraft to the moon, to bringing better health solutions to people around the world, The Genius of Israel tells the story of a diverse people and society built around the values of service, solidarity, and belonging.

Widely admired for having the world’s highest density of high-tech start-ups, Israel’s greatest innovation may not be a technology at all, but Israeli society itself. Understanding how a country facing so many challenges can be among the happiest provides surprising insights into how we can confront the crisis of community, human connectedness, and purpose in modern life.

Bold, timely, and insightful, Senor and Singer’s latest work shines an important light on the impressive innovative distinctions of Israeli society—and what other communities and countries can learn.

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The Enlightened Donor: How to Give Charity Wisely

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Motivated by compassion and hope, and the shared desire to make the world a better place, the immense amount of charitable giving stands as a testament to the humanity's collective generosity. From aiding those in need to supporting noble causes in art and science, culture and religion, the act of giving has the power to transform lives and shape a brighter future.

But amidst the goodwill, there lies a shadowy underbelly that seeks to exploit our altruistic impulses. The landscape of charitable giving is not without its challenges, as scams and deceit work to dilute the noble intentions of well-meaning donors.

We sit down with philanthropy consultant and advocate for responsible giving, Arnie Draiman, to learn how to be better and more effective givers. With his keen eye honed through years of experience, Draiman unveils the intricacies of donating wisely while illuminating the potential pitfalls that challenge even the most benevolent intentions.

Arnie Draiman heads The Draiman Consulting Group, which serves individual donors and philanthropists, family foundations, charity funds – anyone interested in giving his or her money away wisely. The Group takes personal responsibility for doing the necessary due diligence and for maintaining constant contact with recipients.

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Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research?

Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized.

In The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes.

In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.

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Itamar Rabinovich, "Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs and the Region" (Brookings Institution Press, 2023)

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Navigating through the intricate web of Middle Eastern geopolitics, few are better equipped to provide insights than Itamar Rabinovich in his compelling book, Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, The Arabs, and the Region 1948-2022 (Brookings Institution Press, 2023). In this update to his earlier work, The Lingering Conflict published by Brookings in 2012, Rabinovich delves deeper, and informs readers on the recent twists and turns of the Middle East conflict.

With a storied career as both an academic historian and a diplomat — notably, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S and a peace negotiator with Syria — Rabinovich brings a unique blend of scholarly rigor and real-world experience. This allows him to place Arab-Israeli dynamics not just as a standalone issue but within the broader canvas of Middle Eastern regional and international politics.

A significant highlight of the book is Rabinovich's attention to the evolving roles of regional powerhouses Iran and Turkey. However, his analysis doesn't stop there. The United States, being a global superpower with intricate ties to the Middle East, gets its due attention, especially its special relationship with Israel and the transitions in its Middle Eastern policy from the Trump era to the Biden administration.

The book is timely and relevant, covering pivotal moments and shifts, such as:

The groundbreaking Abraham Accords signified a fresh direction in Arab-Israeli relations.
Russia’s decisive military intervention exacerbated the tumultuous Syrian civil war and its far-reaching implications.
The rise and subsequent decline of the formidable Islamic State.
The mounting tensions surrounding the Iranian nuclear ambitions.
And lastly, Israel's own internal challenges marked by prolonged political instability.

For those seeking a nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern geopolitics and the ever-evolving Arab-Israeli relationship, Middle Eastern Maze promises to be an instructive read, enriched by the author's unique vantage point at the intersection of history, diplomacy, and contemporary politics.

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Andrew J. Hoffman, "The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay" and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy.

But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis—a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is certainly not accessing the primarily civic spaces it needs to reach in order to mitigate truth corruption. In this brief but compelling book, Hoffman draws upon existing literature and personal experience to bring attention to the problem of academic insularity—where it comes from and where, if left to grow unchecked, it will go—and argues for the emergence of a more publicly and politically engaged scholar.

The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World (Stanford UP, 2021) is a call to make that path toward public engagement more acceptable and legitimate for those who do it; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today's world.

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Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.

Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.

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Gadi Sagiv, "Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Gadi Sagiv's book Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves.

In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. In addition, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel.

Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.

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Tara Isabella Burton, "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen.

As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (PublicAffairs, 2023), Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding.

As attitudes towards religion, politics and society evolved, our sense of self did as well, moving from a collective to individual mindset.

Through a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) "self-creators" in the modern Western world, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to modern capitalism and finally to our present moment of mass media, Burton examines the theories and forces behind our never-ending need to curate ourselves. Through a vivid cast of characters and an engaging mix of cultural and historical commentary, we learn how the personal brand has come to be.

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The Art of Translation: A Discussion with Anne Birkenhauer Molad

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Translation is a mysterious process that combines the elements of writing – rhythm and voice, meaning, structure and nuance – with the challenge of problem-solving. The American writer Harry Mathews said, “translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing, since it demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech.”

Anna Birkenhauer-Molad is an award-winning translator and teacher of literary translation, whose work has brought some of the best Hebrew prose and poetry to the German-reading public. Among the authors whose writings she has translated are: David Grossman, Aharon Applefeld, Haim Baer, Yoel Hoffman and Yehuda Amichai.

In 2018, Anna was awarded the German Medal of Honor by the President of Germany for her contribution to cultural relations between Germany and Israel.

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Housing Insecurity and Homelessness: A Nonprofit Approach

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The problem of housing insecurity and homelessness consumes the resources of many of the world’s major cities. Homelessness undermines urban cultures, exacerbates social and health problems for those directly affected, and reduces the quality of life of city dwellers generally.

Short of homelessness, many people experience the problem of home insecurity, in which they are forced by circumstances to move frequently, or when they cannot maintain or repair their housing.

Today’s guest talks with us about a non-governmental approach to housing insecurity. Efrat Altshul Schorr is a member of the board of an Israeli nonprofit organization, Tenufa Bakihila, which provides home repair and personal family advocacy to people who live on the edge.

Efrat Altshul Schorr, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist who leads a multidisciplinary team of clinical researchers. She is also a successful entrepreneur. Efrat brings all of her skills and experiences to her leadership of the non-profit effort to relieve housing insecurity in Israel.

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Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)

Wed, 17 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 1948, Israel’s founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering.

Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of its founders? Using Israel's Declaration of Independence as his measure, Gordis provides a thorough, balanced perspective on how the Israel of today exceeds the country’s original aspirations and how it has fallen short. He discusses the often-overlooked reasons for the establishment of the State of Israel; the flourishing of Jewish and Israeli culture; the nation's economy and its transformative tech sector; the Israeli-Arab conflict; the distinct form of Judaism that has emerged in the Jewish state; the nation's complex relationship with the Diaspora; and much more.

In Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams? (Ecco Press, 2023), Gordis brings moderation and clarity to the prevailing discourse. And through weighing Israel’s successes, critiquing its failures, and acknowledging its inherent contradictions, he ultimately suggests that the Jewish state is a success far beyond anything its founders could have imagined.

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Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)

Wed, 10 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich.

Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life.

In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton, 2023), Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

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Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 03 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the race to discover real solutions for the conflicts that plague contemporary society, it is essential that we look to precedent. Many of today's conflicts involve ethno-religious tensions that modern wisdom alone is ill-equipped to resolve. In Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (Oxford UP, 2021), Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth asks us to consider ancient religious and traditional cultural solutions to such present-day issues.

Roth presents thirty-six case studies featuring third-party peacemakers drawn from Jewish classical, medieval, and early-modern rabbinic literature. Each case is explored through three layers of analysis - text, theory, and practice. The first layer offers historical and literary analysis of textual case studies, many of which are critically analyzed here for the first time. The second layer examines the theoretical model of third-party peacemaking imbedded within the selected cases and comparing them to other cultural and religious models of third-party peacemaking and conflict resolution. The final layer of analysis, based upon the author's personal experience of religious conflict resolution and peacemaking, looks at the practical implications of these case studies as models for modern peacemaking.

Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism serves as an inspiration for fostering indigenous practices of third-party peacemaking and mediation in the modern era.

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Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question...

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (Pantheon, 2023), Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”—the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

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Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ritual is one of the oldest, and certainly most enigmatic, threads in the history of human culture. It presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now.

In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behavior. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a wide range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In birthday parties and coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.

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David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him.

In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power.

Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler (Random House, 2022) paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini.

Just as Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Pope and Mussolini became the definitive book on Pope Pius XI and the Fascist regime, The Pope at War is destined to become the most influential account of his successor, Pius XII, and his relations with Mussolini and Hitler. Kertzer shows why no full understanding of the course of World War II is complete without knowledge of the dramatic, behind-the-scenes role played by the pope.

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Russ Roberts, "Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us" (Portfolio, 2022)

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Algorithms and apps analyze data and tell you how to beat the traffic, what books to buy, what music to listen to, and even who to date—often with great results. But what do you do when you face the big decisions of life—the "wild problems" of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived—that can’t be solved by measurement or calculation?

In Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us (Portfolio, 2022), president of Shalem College and host of EconTalk, Russ Roberts offers puzzled rationalists a way to address these wild problems. He suggests spending less time and energy on the path that promises the most happiness, and more time on figuring out who you actually want to be. He draws on the experience of great artists, writers, and scientists of the past who found creative ways to navigate life’s biggest questions. And he lays out strategies for reducing the fear and the loss of control that inevitably come when a wild problem requires a leap in the dark.

Ultimately, Roberts asks us to see ourselves and our lives less as a problem to be solved than a mystery to be experienced. There's no right decision waiting to be uncovered by an app or rational analysis. Reality is harder than that and, perhaps, a little more interesting.

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Adrian Bejan, "Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" (World Scientific, 2022)

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Poets and philosophers are fascinated by time and beauty. They are two of our most visceral perceptions. In Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies (World Scientific, 2022), Adrian Bejan — a physicist — explains the scientific basis for the perception of time (“mind time”) and beauty. His is an evolutionary argument for understanding both perceptions, based on visual processing and change.

To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous to survival; hence, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large.

Time and beauty are jointly understood to explain why the global pandemic had decelerated our mind time. The author asserts that this understanding arms us with techniques to slow down our mind time (which accelerates with age), and to create the conditions for living longer and more creatively. In the process, he offers answers to key questions about cognition. Why does the mind "try" to make sense of a new mental image? Why is there a natural tendency to organize a new input and mentally position it among past perceptions?

The author suggests that principles of physics is the basis for other disparate perceptions as well, from time and beauty to ideas, message, shape, perspective, art, science, illusions, and dreams.

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Arthur Keefer, "Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Is the search for meaning a luxury of the modern world or have human beings always struggled to find meaning in the human condition – in the face of suffering, injustice and the finality of life?

In Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World (Cambridge UP, 2022), Arthur Keefer offers a timely assessment of Ecclesiastes and what it has to do with the meaning of life. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that this Hebrew Bible text associates the meaning of life with various types of suffering in life.

Keefer situates Ecclesiastes within its ancient intellectual world. Offering an analysis of contemporary texts from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, he demonstrates that concerns about meaning and suffering were widespread in the greater Mediterranean world. Ecclesiastes, however, handled the matters of suffering and meaning in an unprecedented way and to an unprecedented degree. With its rigorous commitment to precise definitions of life's meaning, Keefer provides a comprehensive set of definitions for “the meaning of life” as well as a conclusive point of reference for interpreters of Ecclesiastes.

He also opens avenues for the interdisciplinary interpretation of texts from the ancient world.

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Susannah Heschel, "The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany" (Princeton UP, 2010)

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 05:00:00 -0000

The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power.

In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism.

Was Jesus a Nazi?

During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.

Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.

The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

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Hagai Boas, "The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From?" (Routledge, 2022)

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

This is the story of organ transplantation, told from the organ’s point of view.

Organs for transplantations come from two sources: living or post-mortem organ donations. These sources set different routes of movement from one body to another.

Postmortem organ donations are mainly sourced and allocated by state agencies, while living organ donations are the result of informal relations between donor and recipient. Each route traverses different social institutions, determines discrete interaction between donor and recipient, and is charged with moral meanings that can be competing and contrasting.

The political economy of organs for transplants is the gamut of these routes and their interconnections, and this book explains what such a political economy looks like: its features and contours, its negotiation of the roles of the state, market and the family in procuring organs for transplantations, and its ultimate moral justifications.

Drawing on Boas’ personal experiences of waiting, searching and obtaining organs, each autobiographical section of the book sheds light on a different aspect of the political economy of organs – post-mortem donations, parental donation, and organ market – and illustrates the experience of living with the fear of rejection and the intimidation of chronic shortage.

Boas combines a rigorous academic analysis of the political economy of organ supply for transplantation with autobiographical narratives that illuminate the complex experience of being an organ recipient.

The author, Hagai Boas invites your comments and questions. Contact him at Hagaib@vanleer.org.il

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Mary-Frances O'Connor, "The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss" (HarperOne, 2022)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience.

In The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (HarperOne, 2022), neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O’Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future that encompasses their absence.

Based on O’Connor’s own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain does what the best popular science books do, combining storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace.

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Amy Gajda, "Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy" (Viking, 2022)

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Should everyone have privacy in their personal lives? Can privacy exist in a public place? Is there a right to be left alone, even in the United States?

The battle between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know has been fought for centuries. You may be surprised to realize that the original framers were sensitive to the importance of privacy interests relating to sexuality and intimate life, but mostly just for the powerful and the privileged.

The founders demanded privacy for all the wrong press-quashing reasons. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously promoted First Amendment freedoms but argued strongly for privacy too; and presidents from Thomas Jefferson through Donald Trump confidently hid behind privacy despite the public interest in their lives.

Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that’s doubly dangerous, as author Amy Gajda argues. Too little privacy leaves ordinary people vulnerable to those who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy and dodge accountability. Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022) carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law allows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today’s full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased privacy completely.

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Sustainable Agriculture in the Global South: A Religious Response to the Global Food Crisis

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Micha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engaged in Tikkun Olam – fixing the world – locally and globally. Tevel B’Zedek provides community development support for sustainable agriculture in remote rural areas.

Odenheimer is an activist and former journalist who reported from worldwide locations including Somalia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. Born in California and educated at Yale, Odenheimer is an ordained Orthodox rabbi for whom reducing global poverty is a religious imperative.

Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but hundreds of millions of people still go hungry. After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise today, reportedly affecting nearly 10% percent of people globally. The growing food crisis is driven largely by wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change.

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Suicide Prevention: Grassroots Intervention for High-Risk Groups

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Suicide has been on the rise in recent years, most frighteningly among young people. Suicide is second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34. Gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are at particular risk.

Every year in the U.S., more people die by suicide than in car accidents, and more suicide deaths occur than homicide and AIDS deaths combined.

In this episode Renee Garfinkel and Hannah Rothstein discuss the myths and facts about suicide, its warning signs, and how friends and family, teachers and others can help.

Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project.

If you’re thinking about suicide or you’re in crisis right now,

In U.S. call or text 988 or contact 988lifeline.org to talk with someone online.

In Israel: call suicide hotline *1201 (press 3 for languages, then select English).

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Corinne E. Blackmer, "Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Why do some scholars sacrifice truth and logic to political ideology and peer acceptance?

With courage and intellectual integrity, queer scholar-activist Corinne Blackmer stages a pointed critique of scholars whose anti-Israel bias pervades their activism as well as their academic work. In contrast to the posturing that characterizes her colleagues’ work, this work demonstrates true scholarship and makes an important contribution to the field of Israel studies.

In Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism (Wayne State UP, 2022), Blackmer demonstrates how the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to delegitimize and isolate Israel has become a central part of social justice advocacy on campus, particularly within gender and sexuality studies programs. The chapters focus on the intellectual work of Sarah Schulman, Jasbir Puar, Angela Davis, Dean Spade, and Judith Butler, demonstrating how they misapply critical theory in their discussions of the State of Israel.

Blackmer shows how these LGBTQ intellectuals mobilize queer theory and intersectionality to support the BDS movement at the expense of academic freedom, open discourse, and intellectual integrity.

Send comments and suggestions to: reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, "Minority Of One: The Unchaining of an Arab Mind" (2020)

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

― George Orwell, 1984

How do people change? How does someone living in a closed and oppressive society develop insights and a worldview at odds with everything around them and everyone they know?

This is the journey of change for one such person.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, born in 1989 in Cairo, Egypt received a conservative Muslim education and grew up religiously devout, originally wanting to become a jihadist. While witnessing the creeping radicalization of society, he developed his own personal beliefs, pursuing with strength and determination the right to live freely.

He participated in the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and soon afterward sought political asylum in the United States which was granted in 2014. Hussein has since served as an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Language at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, become a U.S citizen in 2017, served in the U.S Army Reserve, and is currently a public speaker, a blogger and an advocate for peace and education.

Through a very circuitous route, Hussein Aboubakr grew to challenge the all-pervasive propaganda in his native Egypt, driving its citizens to hate the West and all Infidels, in particular The United States, the state of Israel and the Jewish people. His deeply inquisitive intellect led him to suffer interrogations, imprisonments and torture, until finally being granted political asylum in the U.S.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Addressing Hunger, Food Insecurity--Local Solutions to a Global Problem

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We live in a time of food paradox. In a world of historically unprecedented abundance, many don’t have enough to eat.

Life-limiting obesity coexists with malnutrition - at the same time, sometimes in the very same place.

Food is the complex and critical subject that we will talk about today with Joseph Gitler who works to address the issue at a local, concrete level. He feeds the hungry.

Back in 2003 Joseph Gitler was moved to act when he saw significant food waste in Israel at a time of rising poverty. He founded the nonprofit organization Leket, that has since become the largest food rescue organization in the country.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Culturally Competent Health Care, Equality in Health Care: The Case of Muslims and Jews in the UK

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The health care sector frequently emphasizes “Cultural competence”, an elastic concept that stretches from the simplest recognition of diversity of patient populations, to include policy implications of patients’ overall worldviews re the body, health, and decision-making.

The issue, highlighted again in the recent U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, gained prominence during Covid-19 pandemic, with the challenge of so-called marginal groups’ access to and compliance with vaccination programs.

Legislation for equality impacts minority health care. It has brought both benefits and unintended consequences.

We will talk about these important issues with today’s guest, Ben Kasstan, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the University of Bristol and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research explores public health, specifically, what health protection means and according to whom. Ben’s published works on public health issues include maternity care, childhood vaccinations, and sexuality education.

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Keith W. Campbell, "The New Science of Narcissism: Understanding One of the Greatest Psychological Challenges of Our Time" (Sounds True, 2020)

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

“Narcissism” is truly one of the most important words of our time―ceaselessly discussed in the media, the subject of millions of online search queries, and at the center of serious social and political debates. But what does it really mean?

In The New Science of Narcissism (Sounds True, 2020), Dr. W. Keith Campbell pulls back the curtain on this frequently misused label, presenting the most recent psychological, personality, and social research into the phenomenon.

Rather than pathologizing all behaviors associated with the label, Campbell reveals that not only does narcissism occur on a spectrum, but almost everyone exhibits narcissistic tendencies in their day-to-day behavior. Drawing from real-life incidents and case studies, The New Science of Narcissism offers tools, tips, and suggestions for softening toxically selfish behaviors both in yourself and others. Here you will discover:

· An exploration of personality disorders connected with and adjacent to narcissism

· Why minor narcissistic tendencies are common in most people

· The foundational difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism

· The “recipe” of mental and emotional traits that combine into narcissism

· How to identify when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and what you can do about it

· Why the 21st century has seen the rise of a “Great Fantasy Migration” into evermore insular subcultures

· The connection between narcissistic tendencies and leadership

· Why “the audience in your pocket” of social media has exacerbated culture-wide narcissistic tendencies

Though narcissism looms large in our cultural consciousness, The New Science of Narcissism offers many different options for understanding and treating it. With Campbell’s straightforward and grounded guidance, you’ll not only discover the latest and best information on the condition, but also a hopeful view of its future.

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Robin Dunbar, "How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious?

Our species diverged from the great apes six to eight million years ago. Since then, our propensity toward spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when, and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today?

In How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Oxford UP, 2022), Robin Dunbar explores these and other questions, mining the distinctions between religions of experience--as practiced by the earliest hunter-gatherer societies--and doctrinal religions, from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their many derivatives.

Examining religion's origins, social functions, its effects on the brain and body, and its place in the modern era, Dunbar offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of the quintessentially human impulse to reach beyond.

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Jerry Z. Muller, "Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Genius or Charlatan?

This is the story of Jacob Taubes, the controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life

Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life.

Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. Jerry Muller traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, and how his journey led him from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism.

Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton UP, 2022) offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Erich Schwartzel, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy" (Penguin, 2022)

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies.

The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China’s citizens—and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America’s unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world.

Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (Penguin, 2022) is packed with memorable characters who have—knowingly or otherwise—played key roles in this tangled industry web: not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court, "The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity" (Cambridge Scholars, 2021)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court's book The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) gives voice to the Israeli Druze through in-depth interviews with 120 people, 60 young adults and 60 of their parents’ generation. How is this traditional group, bound together through the centuries by their secret religion and strong value system, dealing with modernization? Can their religion, and their very identity, survive the meeting with the modern, technological world? What resources do the young and the not-so-young bring to the task of preserving their community and helping it to flourish as the world changes around them?

The people in this text answer these questions through the telling of their stories, in which they express their values, opinions, beliefs and aspirations. The book draws out theoretical, practical, religious and sociological implications from this analysis, in order to shed light on the challenges faced by other traditional societies meeting modernity.

More about their methodology is available in their brand-new book, Insider-Outsider Research in Qualitative Inquiry: New Perspectives on Method and Meaning.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Ramadan Violence: A Conversation with Ambassador Dore Gold

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A hilltop at the heart of Jerusalem, Israel, is known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been the site of Muslim rioting during the month-long religious holiday of Ramadan.

How did a holiday dedicated to fasting, prayer and charitable-giving become a time of violence – and not in Jerusalem alone? Recent years have seen Ramadan attacks in countries as different as France and Syria, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Somalia. Nevertheless, there is something distinctive about violence on the Temple Mount, a location that some have called ground zero.

Ambassador Dore Gold will provide insight into the dangerous dynamic of Ramadan violence: What incites it? Who benefits from it? And how can it best be countered?

Ambassador Dore Gold is the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Among his many articles and books books are The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Iran Defies the West and Tower of Babel: How the United Nations has Fueled Global Chaos.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile,” S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. “But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.” Agnon’s act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and the Holy Land (to say nothing of the later State of Israel) are often two-faced in Agnon’s Hebrew writing. Depending on which side of the lens one views Eretz Yisrael through, the vision of what can be achieved there appears clearer or more distorted.

These themes wove themselves into the presentations at an international conference convened in 2016 by the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies in New York City, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Agnon’s Nobel Prize. The essays from that conference, collected in Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel (Pickwick Publications, 2021), explore Zionism’s aspirations and shortcomings and the yearning for the Land from afar from S. Y. Agnon’s Galician hometown, which served as a symbol of Jewish longing worldwide.

Contributing authors: Shulamith Z. Berger, Shalom Carmy, Zafrira Cohen Lidovsky, Steven Gine, Hillel Halkin, Avraham Holtz, Alan Mintz, Jeffrey Saks, Moshe Simkovich, Laura Wiseman, and Wendy Zierler.

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Andrew Lawler, "Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City" (Doubleday, 2021)

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City (Doubleday, 2021) takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist.

In 1863, a French senator arrived in Jerusalem hoping to unearth relics dating to biblical times. Digging deep underground, he discovered an ancient grave that, he claimed, belonged to an Old Testament queen. News of his find ricocheted around the world, evoking awe and envy alike, and inspiring others to explore Jerusalem’s storied past. In the century and a half since the Frenchman broke ground, Jerusalem has drawn a global cast of fortune seekers and missionaries, archaeologists and zealots, all of them eager to extract the biblical past from beneath the city’s streets and shrines.

Their efforts have had profound effects, not only on our understanding of Jerusalem’s history, but on its hotly disputed present. The quest to retrieve ancient Jewish heritage has sparked bloody riots and thwarted international peace agreements. Because of their authenticity, archeological findings confirm the long and deep Jewish history in Jerusalem and serve to cement the Jewish claim to the most contested city on the planet.

Today, the earth below Jerusalem remains a battleground in the struggle to control the city above.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Peter Mandaville, "Islam and Politics" (Routledge, 2020)

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Peter Mandaville's Islam and Politics (3rd Edition; Routledge, 2020) is a basic and comprehensive account of political Islam in the contemporary world.

It provides a broad introduction to all major aspects of the interface of Islam and politics in an accessible style with sufficient depth for the academic classroom.

Features include:

Exploration of the origins and development of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and various regional affiliates of the global Salafi-Jihadi movement.
Coverage of contemporary debates about radicalization and violent extremism.
Examination of questions of Islam’s compatibility with democracy; the role of women; and Islamic perspectives on violence and conflict.
Discussion of major theoretical debates in the literature on political Islam, the debate on Islamic exceptionalism and whether Islamist politics can be understood using the conventional tools of comparative political science and International Relations.

Islam and Politics is followed by Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia's Global Influence on Islam, a new book edited by Peter Mandaville, that explores the impact of the distinctly rigid and austere form of Islam, propagated worldwide by Saudi Arabia.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Erica Brown, "Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile" (Maggid, 2020)

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Biblical Book of Esther reads like a classic fable, a drama of actors who are recognizable archetypes. There is Esther, the beautiful orphan who becomes queen, Ahasuerus, the buffoon king, Haman, the prototype of evil, and Mordecai, the wise, courageous, and loyal hero.

The Book of Esther takes us to the heart of destiny’s moments: a beautiful but unlikely queen evolves into a Jewish leader. A wise and trusted courtier expands his platform of influence, and a vulnerable minority facing death becomes a powerful people in a land not their own.

In Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile (Maggid, 2020), Dr. Erica Brown offers us a close textual and thematic reading of this familiar story of courage and heroism against a background of hate and political ineptitude.

This ancient story sheds its light on today's most pressing problems: contemporary antisemitism, sexual tyranny and the absence of leadership.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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In Science We Trust?: An insider Conversation with Health Policy Reporter, Fran Kritz

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Americans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths.

What is going on?

Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built cars based on science. Science is characterized by observation, empirical findings, and replication. At least that’s the way it is supposed to be. Not long ago, Americans and most people around the world trusted the integrity of science. But that trust has been in decline for years, to our collective detriment.

Why did science lose so much of the public trust?

How does that loss relate to the decline of trust in other institutions?

What are the trust-related issues for minorities?

What can the scientific enterprise do to regain our trust?

Fran Kritz is a passionate journalist who has covered health and health policy for decades. Her reporting experience gives her a unique view of the changes in the relationship between the public and its medical and scientific experts. She has written for NPR, the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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R. David Lankes, "The New Librarianship Field Guide" (MIT Press, 2016)

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Can libraries be radical positive change agents in their communities?

R. David Lenkes offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities —librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve.

Lankes reminds libraries and librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way.

The libraries of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened their doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities—students, faculty, scholars, law firms—in other ways. All libraries are about community.

In The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT Press, 2016), Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Gideon Sapir and Daniel Statman, "State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical-Legal Inquiry" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either.”

The relationship between religion and state presents complex challenges to liberal democracies around the world. In this work, Gideon Sapir and David Statman

Propose a comprehensive theory about state and religion relations, providing tools to think systematically about questions in this field
Use a clear philosophical underpinning for its analysis
Offer a detailed case study of the arrangements in Israel which encourages sensitivity to the unique circumstances of different countries

State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical-Legal Inquiry (Cambridge UP, 2019) begins with a philosophical analysis of the two main questions regarding the role of religion in liberal states: should such states institute a 'Wall of Separation' between state and religion? Should they offer religious practices and religious communities special protection?

Sapir and Statman argue that liberalism in not committed to Separation, but is committed to granting religion a unique protection, albeit a narrower one than often assumed. They then use Israel as a case study for their conclusions.

Although Israel is defined as a Jewish state, its Jewish identity need not be interpreted religiously, requiring that it subjects itself to the dictates of Jewish law (Halakha). The authors test this view by critically examining important topics relevant to state and religion in Israel, such as marriage and divorce, the drafting of yeshiva students into the army, and the character of the Sabbath.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Jonathan Schanzer, "Gaza Conflict 2021" (Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2021)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Jonathan Schanzer about his new book Gaza Conflict 2021 (Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2021).

The May 2021 conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas generated headlines around the world. However, much of the reporting was uninformed and misleading, ignoring the context of history, funding, political dynamics, and other key components of the story. Hamas initiates conflict with Israel every few years. But the reporting rarely improves. Social media has only further clouded the picture. Hamas is rarely held responsible for its use of "human shields," blindly firing rockets at civilian areas in Israel, or diverting aid that should benefit the people of Gaza. The Islamic Republic of Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, has been the primary patron of Hamas since the group's inception in the late 1980s. Hamas has received additional assistance over the years from Qatar, Turkey and Malaysia. These countries are fomenting conflict, while others, such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have tried to minimize it. Gaza is therefore ground zero in a struggle for the future stability of the Middle East. The Biden administration has important choices to make. Its intent to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal could have significant consequences, given that sanctions relief to Iran will likely yield a financial boon for Hamas, along with other Iranian proxies. The Biden administration must also come to terms with "The Squad," a small but loud faction of the Democratic Party that seeks to undermine the US-Israel relationship.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Seth David Radwell, "American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation" (Greenleaf, 2021)

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Why are Americans so angry? American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (Greenleaf, 2021) explores history to find the answer to a divided America

Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlightenments to our raging political division. He also demonstrates that reasoned analysis and historical perspective are the only antidote to irrational political discourse.

“Did my vision of America ever exist at all, or was it but a myth?” Searching for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of our civic life, Radwell’s very personal and yet broadly shared question propelled his search back to the nation’s founding for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of its civic life - and led to a surprising discovery. Today’s battles reflect the fundamentally divergent visions of our country that emerged at the nation’s founding and have been vying for prominence ever since. The founding principles that shaped the United States may be rooted in the Enlightenment era. But the origin of our dual Americas is a product of two distinct Enlightenments - Radical and Moderate.

Radwell shows the impact of this schism on American history from the early expansion of the U.S. through Jim Crow and The Age of Trumpism.

In an optimistic final section, Radwell lays out an analysis of our current governmental structure and a plan to move forward, arguing that it is only by embracing Enlightenment principles that we can build a civilized, progressive, and tolerant society - where Americans can firmly ground their different views in rationality.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. We invite your comments and suggestions: reneeg@vanleer.org.il.

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Julian E. Zelizer, "Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement" (Yale UP, 2021)

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.”

So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith.

In Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale UP, 2021), author Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel’s early years and foundational influences—his childhood in Warsaw and early education in Hasidism, his studies in late 1920s and early 1930s Berlin, and the fortuitous opportunity, which brought him to the United States and saved him from the Holocaust, to teach at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. This deep and complex portrait places Heschel at the crucial intersection between religion and progressive politics in mid-twentieth-century America. To this day Heschel remains a symbol of the fight to make progressive Jewish values relevant in the secular world.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Ümit Kurt, "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Ümit Kurt, born and raised in Gaziantep, Turkey, was astonished to learn that his hometown once had a large and active Armenian community. The Armenian presence in Aintab, the city’s name during the Ottoman period, had not only been destroyed―it had been replaced. To every appearance, Gaziantep was a typical Turkish city.

Kurt digs into the details of the Armenian dispossession that produced the homogeneously Turkish city in which he grew up. In particular, he examines the population that gained from ethnic cleansing. Records of land confiscation and population transfer demonstrate just how much new wealth became available when the prosperous Armenians―who were active in manufacturing, agricultural production, and trade―were ejected. Although the official rationale for the removal of the Armenians was that the group posed a threat of rebellion, Kurt shows that the prospect of material gain was a key motivator of support for the Armenian genocide among the local Muslim gentry and the Turkish public. Those who benefited most―provincial elites, wealthy landowners, state officials, and merchants who accumulated Armenian capital―in turn financed the nationalist movement that brought the modern Turkish republic into being. The economic elite of Aintab was thus reconstituted along both ethnic and political lines.

The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard UP, 2021) draws on primary sources from Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British, and French archives, as well as memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts, and newly discovered property-liquidation records. Together they provide an invaluable account of genocide at ground level.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Edward Slingerland, "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" (Hachette, 2021)

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Ever since Noah exited the ark, human beings have been wanting to get drunk and high.

Why?

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Hachette, 2021) is the latest attempt to answer that question. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve several distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication.

From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with case studies and science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!

If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.

The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

There’s nothing more vital to survival than water.

“Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person.

Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink (Thomas Dunne, 2020) is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the U.S. and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. Contamination is not the only critical water issue. The U.S. government predicts that forty of our fifty states-and 60 percent of the earth's land surface-will soon face alarming gaps between available water and the growing demand for it. Without action, food prices will rise, economic growth will slow, and political instability is likely to follow.

Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also had an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors-the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan-every day.

Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Let There Be Water reveals the methods and techniques of the often-offbeat inventors who enabled Israel to lead the world in cutting-edge water technology.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Emmanuel Navon, "The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel (Jewish Publication Society, 2020) retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the Jewish psyche. He sheds light on the people of Israel’s foreign policy through the ages: the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Jewish diasporas in Europe from the Middle Ages to the emancipation, the emerging nineteenth-century Zionist movement, and Zionist diplomacy following World War I and surrounding World War II.

Navon elucidates Israel’s foreign policy from the birth of the state in 1948 to our days: the dilemmas and choices at the beginning of the Cold War; Israel’s attempts to establish periphery alliances; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel’s relations with Europe, the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United Nations, and the Jewish diasporas; and how twenty-first-century energy geopolitics is transforming Israel’s foreign relations today.

Navon’s analysis is rooted in two central ideas, represented by the Star of David (faith) and the scepter (political power). First, he contends that the interactions of Jews with the world have always been best served by combining faith with pragmatism. Second, Navon shows how the state of Israel owes its diplomatic achievements to national assertiveness and hard power—not only military strength but economic prowess and technological innovation. Demonstrating that diplomacy is a balancing act between ideals and realpolitik, The Star and the Scepter draws aspirational and pragmatic lessons from Israel’s exceptional diplomatic history.

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Hillary Kaell, "Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Child sponsorship, originally a project of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, has become one of today’s most profitable private fund-raising tools for global organizations, including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton UP, 2020) is an investigation of two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, that reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don’t travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities.

Hilary Kaell traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship’s lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. She shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God’s eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the very inequities they claim to redress.

Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Christian Globalism at Home explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home.

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Danny Adeno Abebe, "From Africa To Zion" (Miskal, 2021)

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 1984, in an unprecedented act of brotherhood, Israel airlifted thousands of persecuted and starving Ethiopian Jews from Africa to Israel. They had been waiting in Ethiopia for millennia, sustained by the hope to return home to the Holy Land.

Among the refugees was an 8-year-old boy, Danny Adeno Abebe. Now an Israeli journalist, Abebe tells the story of his family and his village, and the journey they traveled from Ethiopia through Sudan to Israel, and the even longer distance from a rural village life without indoor plumbing, electricity, or books, to a modern society. Many who left the villages did not survive the hardships of the journey, and many of those who did reach the Promised Land were emotionally wounded in the process.

Immigrants in all times and places struggle with loss. They struggle to understand and adapt to their new country, to find a way to fit in, and to expand their identity to incorporate the old and the new. But few must leap a cultural gap as wide as that which this group faced.

In his new country, Adeno Abebe encountered rejection as well as embrace. He experienced both astonishing support and appalling prejudice. As he matured, he recognized that both attitudes exist among his former countrymen in Africa, as well.

From Africa To Zion (Miskal, 2021) is an extraordinary life story, but above all—it is a story about people, about love, and about the importance of family, regardless of skin color or ethnicity.

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Riaz Dean, "Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century-Central Asia, India and Tibet" (Casemate, 2019)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“A map is the greatest of all epic poems, its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” --Gilbert Grosvenor

The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India.

These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate efforts to explore and chart out uncharted regions. Two distinct groups would rise to this challenge: a band of army officers, who would become the classic Great Game players; and an obscure group of natives employed by the Survey of India, known as the Pundits.

While the game played out, a self-educated cartographer named William Lambton began mapping the Great Arc, attempting to measure the actual shape of the Indian subcontinent. The Great Arc would then be lauded as one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science.

Meanwhile, the Pundits, travelling entirely on foot and with meagre resources, would be among the first to enter Tibet and reveal the mysteries of its forbidden capital, Lhasa. Featuring forgotten, enthralling episodes of derring-do combined with the sincerest efforts to map India’s boundaries, Riaz Dean's book Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century Central Asia, India and Tibet (Casemate, 2019) is the thrilling story of espionage and cartography which shrouded the Great Game and helped map a large part of Asia as we know it today.

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Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture.

In Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (U Chicago Press, 2021), Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment.

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Assaf Shelleg, "Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford UP, 2020) offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand and the histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.'

Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.

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Margaret MacMillan, "War: How Conflict Shaped Us" (Random House, 2020)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

-Isaiah 2:4

The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.

Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?

Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.

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Pete Davis, "Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Most of us have had this experience: browsing through countless options on Netflix, unable to commit to watching any given movie—and losing so much time skimming reviews and considering trailers that it’s too late to watch anything at all. In a book borne of an idea first articulated in a viral commencement address, Pete Davis argues that this is the defining characteristic of the moment: keeping our options open. We are stuck in “Infinite Browsing Mode”—swiping through endless dating profiles without committing to a single partner, jumping from place to place searching for the next big thing, and refusing to make any decision that might close us off from an even better choice we imagine is just around the corner. This culture of restlessness and indecision, Davis argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today: We want to keep our options open, and yet we yearn for the purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments.

In Dedicated: The Case for Commitment In An Age of Infinite Browsing (Simon and Schuster, 2021), Davis examines this quagmire, as well as the counterculture of committers who have made it to the other side. He shares what we can learn from the “long-haul heroes” who courageously commit themselves to particular places, professions, and causes—who relinquish the false freedom of an open future in exchange for the deep fulfillment of true dedication. Weaving together examples from history, personal stories, and applied psychology, Davis’s candid and humble words offer a meaningful answer to our modern frustrations and a practical path to joy.

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Lydia Denworth, "Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The phenomenon of friendship is universal and elemental. Friends, after all, are the family we choose. But what makes these bonds not just pleasant but essential, and how do they affect our bodies and our minds?

In Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond (Bloomsbury, 2020), science journalist Lydia Denworth takes us in search of friendship's biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations. She finds friendship to be as old as early life on the African savannas--when tribes of people grew large enough for individuals to seek fulfillment of their social needs outside their immediate families. Denworth sees this urge to connect reflected in primates, too, taking us to a monkey sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a baboon colony in Kenya to examine social bonds that offer insight into our own. She meets scientists at the frontiers of brain and genetics research and discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, our genomes, and our cardiovascular and immune systems; its opposite, loneliness, can kill. At long last, social connection is recognized as critical to wellness and longevity.

With insight and warmth, Denworth weaves past and present, field biology and neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed for friendship across life stages, the processes by which healthy social bonds are developed and maintained, and how friendship is changing in the age of social media. Blending compelling science, storytelling, and a grand evolutionary perspective, Denworth delineates the essential role that cooperation and companionship play in creating human (and nonhuman) societies.

Friendship illuminates the vital aspects of friendship, both visible and invisible, and offers a refreshingly optimistic vision of human nature. It is a clarion call for putting positive relationships at the center of our lives.

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Randolph M. Nesse, "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry" (Dutton, 2019)

Fri, 28 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry (Dutton, 2019), a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.

Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Cary Nelson, "Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities" (AEN, 2021)

Tue, 25 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“Allying with a Hamas cell (on a Palestinian university campus) is not the same as joining the College Republicans at the University of Kansas...in the West Bank and Gaza, we are not in Kansas anymore” - Cary Nelson

Why is there no academic freedom on university campuses in the Palestinian territories? In Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities (AEN, 2021), Cary Nelson examines this question in the first empirical study of campus life under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governance.

For years, anti-Zionist activists have accused Israel of undermining academic freedom and campus free speech in both Gaza and the West Bank. Not in Kansas Anymore demonstrates conclusively that the major threats to academic freedom come from Palestinians themselves, including from both the Palestinian Authority and from paramilitary and terrorist groups, Hamas most prominent among them.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Scott Berkun, "How Design Makes the World" (2020)

Tue, 11 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives?

In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.

Whether you spend time in a studio or a boardroom, an office or the outdoors, How Design Makes the World empowers you to ask better questions—and to understand the designs in everything that matters.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Melvin Konner, "Believers: Faith in Human Nature" (Norton, 2019)

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Believers: Faith in Human Nature (Norton, 2019) is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen"--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens--known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species.

Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different ways--some revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among us--holding their own by having larger families--to increasingly reject prejudice and aggression.

A colorful weave of personal stories of religious--and irreligious--encounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Eva Illouz, "The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before.

In The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations (Oxford UP, 2019), Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one's will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down "unloving." While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve.

Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and "unloving." The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism that is characterized by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex.

The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Jason Manning, "Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts.

Drawing on Donald Black’s theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction (University of Virginia Press, 2020) presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but under-appreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Paul Vallely, "Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg" (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020)

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

In this magnum opus, Paul Vallely guides the reader on a journey through the history and meaning of giving in religion and society.

Vivid with anecdote and scholarly insight, this magisterial survey – from the ancient Greeks to today's high-tech geeks – provides an original take on the history of philanthropy. It shows how giving has, variously, been a matter of honor, altruism, religious injunction, political control, moral activism, enlightened self-interest, public good, personal fulfillment and plutocratic manipulation.

Its narrative moves from the Greek man of honor and Roman patron, via the Jewish prophet and Christian scholastic – through Puritan proto-capitalist, Enlightenment activist and Victorian moralist – to the robber-baron philanthropist, the welfare socialist, the celebrity activist and today's wealthy mega-giver. In the process it discovers that philanthropy lost an essential element as it entered the modern era. The book then embarks on a journey to determine where today's philanthropists come closest to recovering that missing dimension.

Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020) explores the successes and failures of philanthrocapitalism, examines its claims and contradictions, and asks tough questions of top philanthropists and leading thinkers – among them Richard Branson, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Jonathan Ruffer, David Sainsbury, John Studzinski, Bob Geldof, Naser Haghamed, Lenny Henry, Jonathan Sacks, Rowan Williams, Ngaire Woods, and the presidents of the Rockefeller and Soros foundations, Rajiv Shah and Patrick Gaspard. In extended conversations they explore the relationship between philanthropy and family, faith, society, art, politics, and the creation and distribution of wealth.

Highly engaging and meticulously researched, Paul Vallely's authoritative account of philanthropy then and now critiques the excessive utilitarianism of much modern philanthrocapitalism and points to how philanthropy can rediscover its soul.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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J. Jay Garfinkel, "Heirlooms : Memory and Cherished Objects" (One Family Foundation, 2020)

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Everyone will lose someone they love at some point in their life; a spouse, a parent, or a child. Having to deal with the clothes or personal effects that remain can be a heartbreaking experience. It is a challenge: what is one to do with all the small and large items that made up the material life of the one who’s gone - store them in the attic? Discard them? Donate them to charity or call the junkman?

In his recently released book, Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects, artist and writer Jay Garfinkel found another way. His unique book contains photographs of the personal effects of victims of terror attacks in Israel. He gave the families a way to preserve a piece of their legacy through a fine art photograph of their cherished object.

The subtitle of the book, Memory and Cherished Objects, was selected, says Garfinkel, because "the person we have lost will not make any new memories, so we need to create a space for them in our life. Heirlooms create a space where memory happens.”

The American-Israeli artist Jay Garfinkel tragically lost his son in middle age. His response was to create a dozen fine art photographs of his son's most treasured possessions that stirred memories. His exhibit-sized prints freed him to throw away everything else. It gave him some comfort. But real comfort came after he agreed to work with OneFamily, an Israeli NGO that assists families affected by terror and war. Over a period of 14 months, he met with 33 Israel families whose loved ones were murdered in terror attacks—and with their cooperation, he selected an object of the deceased, which he then documented as a still life photograph.

Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects describes his journey meeting families of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in different parts of the country. Garfinkel recorded intimate conversations about love, loss, and finding one's equilibrium by helping others find their way.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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N. Darshan-Leitner and S. M. Katz, "Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters" (Hachette, 2017)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Covid-19 is the global threat that owns today’s headlines, but the threat of international and domestic terrorism is still very much with us. Specifically, the widespread upheaval, uncertainty and global anxiety occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic has been seen by terror organizations as a golden opportunity to tie their messaging to information about the disease and intensify their propaganda for purposes of recruitment and incitement to violence. Whether it’s Boko Haram or ISIS, Hezbollah or Hamas, or the range of hate groups acting around the globe, terrorism continues to be a threat to decent people everywhere.

N. Darshan-Leitner and S. M. Katz's book Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters (Hachette, 2017) is a revelatory account of the cloak-and-dagger Israeli campaign to target the finances fueling terror organizations--an effort that became the blueprint for U.S. efforts to combat threats like ISIS and drug cartels. ISIS boasted $2.4 billion of revenue back in 2015, yet for too long the global war on terror overlooked financial warfare as an offensive strategy.

"Harpoon," the creation of Mossad legend Meir Dagan, directed spies, soldiers, and attorneys to disrupt and destroy money pipelines and financial institutions that paid for the bloodshed perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups. Written by an attorney who worked with Harpoon and a bestselling journalist, Harpoon offers a gripping story of the Israeli-led effort, now joined by the Americans, to choke off the terrorists' oxygen supply, money, via unconventional warfare.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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David Nasaw, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War" (Penguin, 2020)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries.

The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany.

A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin, 2020) tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com.

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Michael J. Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" (FSG, 2020)

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that you can make it if you try. The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time.

World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (FSG, 2020) points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com.

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Adina Hoffman, "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City" (FSG, 2017)

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

A remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City (FSG, 2017) is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.

The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this "most private of public servants" finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today's Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his grand Armenian-tile-clad buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to the cultural fluidity that has historically characterized Jerusalem at its best.

A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers the ramifying layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018)

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion-year history a single species is increasingly dictating Earth's future.

To some the Anthropocene symbolizes a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature. Whatever your view, just below the surface of this odd-sounding scientific word, the Anthropocene, is a heady mix of science, philosophy, and politics linked to our deepest fears and utopian visions.

In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Yale UP, 2018), scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin reveal a new view of human history and a new outlook for the future of humanity in the unstable world we have created.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Mike Shanahan, "Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History" (Unbound, 2016)

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers … rainforest royalty … more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Mike Shanahan's book Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History, Fed our Imaginations, and can Enrich our Future (Unbound, 2016) tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our pre-human ancestors, influenced diverse cultures and played key roles in the dawn of civilisation. They feature in every major religion, starring alongside Adam and Eve, Krishna and Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. This is no coincidence – fig trees are special. They evolved when giant dinosaurs still roamed and have been shaping our world ever since.These trees intrigued Aristotle and amazed Alexander the Great. They were instrumental in Kenya’s struggle for independence and helped restore life after Krakatoa’s catastrophic eruption. Egypt’s Pharaohs hoped to meet fig trees in the afterlife and Queen Elizabeth II was asleep in one when she ascended the throne. And all because 80 million years ago these trees cut a curious deal with some tiny wasps. Thanks to this deal, figs sustain more species of birds and mammals than any other trees, making them vital to rainforests. In a time of falling trees and rising temperatures, their story offers hope. Ultimately, it’s a story about humanity’s relationship with nature. The story of the fig trees stretches back tens of millions of years, but it is as relevant to our future as it is to our past.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Sumit Guha, "History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000" (U Washington Press, 2019)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

In History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000 (University of Washington Press, 2019), Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Betty Rojtman, "The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism.

Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be.

Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019).

A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture, is what makes us who we are.

Plomin explores the implications of these findings, drawing some provocative conclusions―among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into account. This book offers readers a unique insider's view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology.

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Joseph E. David, "Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? In these days of identity politics, these issues are more significant and more complex than ever.

Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. In his book Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging were formed, transformed, or dismantled.

The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies.

With thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

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Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius.

Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest social science research on creativity and its cultivation.

The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places (Simon and Schuster, 2016) is an intellectual odyssey that examines the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas, and has fun doing it. What inspires genius? Why do certain urban settings – and certain historical challenges – foster innovation?

Would geniuses like Socrates, Michelangelo, Einstein and Disney have flourished, had they found themselves in other locations and other historical circumstances?

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race" (Hot Books, 2020)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race (Hot Books, 2020) explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States. In his third book, renowned conservative entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist Armstrong Williams discusses his prescription for healing and atonement amidst today’s current social upheaval.

Race and racism are America's original sin, and four hundred years later, they still plague the nation, pitting groups against each other. Despite how much time has elapsed, many Americans remain befuddled by how to move forward; however, the time for solutions has come.

In this book, Armstrong Williams recounts his personal story and journey growing up working on his family farm in rural South Carolina, leading to an unexpected meeting with the late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, which turned into an unlikely relationship that led him to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

Williams calls for all Americans to stand up to represent America’s highest virtues and ideals, and he challenges us to look beyond the pale of race for something much deeper.

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Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020)

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the “schizophrenogenic” mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, bringing hope for paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The NBN’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford University Press) traces the origins of the idea, its development, and its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflicts, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society.

The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model.

Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights.

Alexander Kaye, Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair of Israel Studies; Assistant Professor, Department of Near East and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/

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Rafael Medoff, "The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust" (JPS, 2019)

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Like so many Americans, American Jews supported President Roosevelt. They adored him. They believed in him. They idolized him.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have.

Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society) reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust.

Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away—actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.

What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president’s private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt’s statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration’s policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Rabbi Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and coeditor of the institute’s online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace" (All Point Books, 2020)

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return."

In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts―has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region.

In The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (All Point Books, 2020), Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf―both liberal Israelis supportive of a two-state solution―reveal the origins of the idea of a right of return, and explain how UNRWA – an agency created for the Palestinians and not for the millions of other refugees - the very agency charged with finding a solution for the refugees – colluded with Palestinian, Arab and international political pressure to create a permanent “refugee” problem.

Schwartz and Wilf make a compelling and well-documented argument that this Palestinian demand for a “right of return” has no legal, moral or historical basis and make an impassioned plea for the US, the UN, and the EU to recognize this fact, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel ttps://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/

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Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation" (Yale UP, 2018)

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.

In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel.

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Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness.

Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness is as much of a risk as smoking. Loneliness shortens a lifespan as much as poverty. It is associated with addiction, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and even suicide. And more and more of us report feeling lonely.

Nevertheless, despite our 21st-century fears of an epidemic of loneliness, we know very little about it clinically, or historically. So Fay Bound Alberti’s new book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2019) has appeared at just the right time.

Alberti offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.

Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.

Dr Fay Bound Alberti is a Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of York.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Stephan Talty, "The Good Assassin" (HMH, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

History that reads like a thriller; The Good Assassin: How A Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down The Butcher of Latvia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) by Stephan Talty is the untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.

Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country.” But by 1945, he was the Butcher of Latvia, a man who murdered some thirty thousand Latvian Jews. Somehow, he dodged the Nuremberg trials, fleeing to South America after war’s end.

By 1965, as a statute of limitations on all Nazi war crimes threatened to expire, Germany sought to welcome previous concentration camp commanders, pogrom leaders, and executioners, as citizens. The global pursuit of Nazi criminals escalated to beat the looming deadline, and Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency, joined the cause.

Yaakov Meidad, the brilliant Mossad agent who had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann three years earlier, led the mission to assassinate Cukurs in a desperate bid to block the amnesty. In a thrilling undercover operation unrivaled by even the most ambitious spy novels, Meidad traveled to Brazil in an elaborate disguise, befriended Cukurs and earned his trust, while negotiations over the Nazi pardon neared a boiling point.

The Good Assassin uncovers this little-known chapter of Holocaust history and the pulse-pounding undercover operation that brought Cukurs to justice.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Pehr Granqvist, "Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View" (Guilford Press, 2020)

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Attachment theory is a popular lens through which psychologists have examined human development and interpersonal dynamics. In Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View (Guilford Press, 2020), Pehr Granqvist uses that lens to examine the psychology of religion and spirituality.

He focuses on the connections between early caregiving experiences, attachment patterns, and individual differences in religious cognition, experience, and behavior.

The function of a deity as an attachment figure is analyzed, as are ways in which attachment facilitates the intergenerational transmission of religion. The book suggests that the attachment perspective can aid in understanding mystical experiences, which are extraordinarily difficult to examine.

The “wider view” of the title encompasses connections between religion and mental health, and cultural differences between more and less religious societies.

Despite the density of the material, Granqvist's conversational writing style, concrete examples, and references to popular culture render complex concepts accessible.

Pehr Granqvist teaches in the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)

Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The social dynamics of “alternative facts”: why what you believe depends on who you know

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them?

In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018), Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not?

The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel. Contact: R.Garfinkel@yahoo.com

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Yael Tamir, "Why Nationalism?" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 04 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic.

But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism—one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is essential to democracy at its best. In Why Nationalism? (Princeton University Press, 2019), she explains why it is more important than ever for the Left to recognize these qualities of nationalism, to reclaim it from right-wing extremists, and to redirect its power to progressive ends.

Far from being an evil force, nationalism’s power lies in its ability to empower individuals and answer basic human needs. Using it to reproduce cross-class coalitions will ensure that all citizens share essential cultural, political, and economic goods. Shifting emphasis from the global to the national and putting one’s nation first is not a way of advocating national supremacy but of redistributing responsibilities and sharing benefits in a more democratic and just way. In making the case for a liberal and democratic nationalism, Tamir also provides a compelling original account of the ways in which neoliberalism and hyperglobalism have allowed today’s Right to co-opt nationalism for its own purposes.

Provocative and hopeful, Why Nationalism is a timely and essential rethinking of a defining feature of our politics.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Richard G. Tedeschi, "Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research and Applications" (Routledge, 2018)

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

During this global pandemic, many of us will experience trauma, which the authors define as a severely stressful life-altering event. A traumatic event is like an earthquake, shattering an individual’s coherent world-view the way an earthquake can shatter the foundations of buildings. A traumatic event is undesirable in the extreme and significant enough to challenge “the basic assumptions about one’s future and how to move toward that future…such as the loss of loved ones, of cherished roles or capabilities, or of fundamental, accepted ways of understanding life.”

Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research and Applications (Routledge, 2018), Richard G. Tedeschi and his colleagues (Jane Shakespeare-Finch, Kanako Taku and Lawrence G. Calhoun rework and overhaul the seminal 2006 Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth. It provides a wide range of answers to questions concerning knowledge of posttraumatic growth (PTG) theory, its synthesis and contrast with other theories and models, and its applications in diverse settings.

The book starts with an overview of the history, components, and outcomes of PTG. Next, chapters review quantitative, qualitative, and cross-cultural research on PTG, including in relation to cognitive function, identity formation, cross-national and gender differences, and similarities and differences between adults and children.

The final section shows readers how to facilitate optimal outcomes with PTG at the level of the individual, the group, the community, and society.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

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Adrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015)

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this volume Adrian Boas draws together an impressive range of academics, including work from renowned scholars as well as a number of though-provoking pieces from emerging researchers, in order to provide broad coverage of the major aspects of the period. This authoritative work will play an important role in the future direction of crusading studies.

This volume enriches present knowledge of the crusades, addressing such wide-ranging subjects as: intelligence and espionage, gender issues, religious celebrations in crusader Jerusalem, political struggles in crusader Antioch, the archaeological study of battle sites and fortifications, diseases suffered by the crusaders, crusading in northern Europe and Spain and the impact of Crusader art. The relationship between Crusaders and Muslims, two distinct and in many way opposing cultures, is also examined in depth, including a discussion of how the Franks perceived their enemies.

Arranged into eight thematic sections, The Crusader World considers many central issues as well as a large number of less familiar topics of the crusades, crusader society, history and culture. With over 100 photographs, line drawings and maps, this impressive collection of essays is a key resource for students and scholars alike.

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Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019)

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

With the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Katz tells the inside story of how Israel stopped Syria from becoming a global nuclear nightmare.

On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Although Israel often flew into Syria as a warning to President Bashar al-Assad, this time there was no warning and no explanation. This was a covert operation, with one goal: to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy in the Syrian desert.

From the “you are there” opening scene, the book is both a page-turner and robust journalism. Katz takes the reader on a complex journey through politics and personalities, intelligence, diplomacy and most of all, courage that led to the successful deterrence of an existential threat.

Renee Garfinkel is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines the emergence of self-knowledge as a determining legal consideration among the rabbis of Late Antiquity, from the third to the seventh centuries CE. Based on close readings of rabbinic texts from Palestine and Babylonia, Ayelet Hoffmann Libson highlights a unique and surprising development in Talmudic jurisprudence, whereby legal decision-making incorporated personal and subjective information, a process that included the rabbis’ willingness to limit their own power.

Hoffmann Libson examines the central legal role accorded to individuals' knowledge of their bodies and mental states in areas of law as diverse as purity laws, family law and the laws of Sabbath. By focusing on subjectivity and self-reflection, the Babylonian rabbis transformed earlier legal practices in a way that cohered with the cultural concerns of other religious groups in Late Antiquity. They developed sophisticated ideas about the inner self and incorporated these notions into their distinctive discourse of law.

Renee Garfinkel is a clinical psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Benjamin Balint, "Jerusalem: City of the Book" (Yale UP, 2019)

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

― Susan Orlean, The Library Book.

Benjamin Balint and Merav Mack's Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press, 2019) is a fascinating journey through Jerusalem’s libraries which tells the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. For the first time ever the stories are told of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In these authors’ hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

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Jerome Gellman, "The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today: 1950-2018" (Routledge, 2018)

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

“The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” – Genesis 8:21

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” - William Shakespeare

We share with other animals the experiences of violence; of pain, fear and loss, but human beings are the only species that reflects on those experiences and names their sources evil. From earliest times to yesterday’s news, humankind has always been concerned – some might even say obsessed – with evil. Nevertheless, so far we have failed to understand evil fully. Scholars and philosophers, theologians and psychologists, and thinkers of all persuasions continue to struggle with the existence of evil. This book presents the contemporary stage in that struggle.

The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today: 1950-2018 (Routledge, 2018), edited by Jerome Gellman, Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister, treats topics arising after the atrocities of World War II, while also exploring issues that have emerged over the last few decades. It exhibits the flourishing of analytic philosophy of religion since the war, as well as the diversity of approaches to the topic of God and evil in this era.

Renee Garfinkel is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Julia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Anti-Semitic incidents, ranging from vandalism through murder, are on the rise in Great Britain, and across Europe and North America.

Julia Neuberger - Senior Rabbi at West London Synagogue, a member of the House of Lords, chair of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and trustee of Full Fact, an organization dedicated to getting proper information and fair evidence before the public – writes for the contemporary reader who wants clarification of the way this insidious prejudice has reappeared in many parts of today’s society. She explains that anti-Semitism is not only a threat to Jews, but also to other minorities and to the society as whole, as it promotes paranoid conspiracy theories and irrationality.

Beginning with a history of anti-Semitism, from ancient times, through early Christianity, through the Middle Ages and on to Nazi ideology, Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019) also explores the boundary between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and anti-Semitic Israel -bashing.

Neuberger describes in detail the many manifestations of anti-Semitism in Britain, particularly, but by no means exclusively, as it has developed in the British Labor Party under Jeremy Corbin.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Lyn Julius, "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? And what lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East?

This neglected piece of history, as ancient as the Bible, and as modern as today’s news, is urgently relevant today, as minorities continue to face discrimination, persecution, ethnic cleansing and even genocide in parts of the Middle East.

Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years, long predating the rise of Islam. Yet, as Lyn Julius explains in her new book Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018), their indigenous communities throughout the region almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Those with foreign passports and connections generally left for Europe, Australia, or the Americas. The rest - including a minority of ideological Zionists - went to Israel. Today over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are “Mizrahim”, refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants.

This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East.

Renee Garfinkel is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

A former advisor to tech companies on how to make their products habit-forming, Nir Eyal found that his own smartphone use was adversely affecting his family life. He took a deep dive into research and literature on the subject, and emerged with this new book (with Julie Li), Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Bloomsbury, 2019). He takes his expertise and applies it to consumers, to give us all a fighting chance to maintain control of our lives – online and off.

Based on research and punctuated with personal experience, Indistractable offers a theoretical framework for the powerful distractions each of us encounters every single day, and offers practical suggestions for managing our most valuable and truly limited resources, our time and attention.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, "Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict" (Wasatia Press, 2016)

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

“Moderation in times of extremism is a revolutionary idea. It is a positive, courageous value, as opposed to a defeatist attitude. It is swimming against the tide, rather than following the crowd on a path obviously leading to the abyss. We need to create our own vision rather than just copy the vision of others.”

-Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi

In a time when Islam is increasingly identified by violent extremism and hostility towards Christians and Jews, Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi and his colleagues advocate for an Islam that is true to its Koranic foundations, which call for coexistence and cooperation with other religions.

Daoudi took a group of Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz – a courageous assertion against the Holocaust denial rampant in Palestinian society, and an effort toward cultivating empathy. Daoudi paid a harsh price for the peaceful journey: he lost his job at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem as head of the libraries and director of the American Studies Institute, his car was torched, and his life was threatened multiple times.

Nevertheless, with his peace-affirming work on behalf of empathy and reconciliation, he – along with others - continues to promote an alternative to the destructive forces of anti-normalization, pro-boycott and violence in the Palestinian community…and beyond.

Today I talked to Daoudi about his book, co-edited with Prof. Munther S. Dajani Daoudi, Prof. Martin Leiner, Dr. Zeina M. Barakat, Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict (Wasatia Press, 2016).

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Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018)

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’s sentiments. In Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Harman takes scientific facts, as we know them today, and weaves them into narratives that have the tone, grace and drama of myth. Harman recognizes that despite the astounding achievements of science we are as humbled as the ancients by the existential mysteries of life. Has science revealed the secrets of fate or immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy insight into love?

Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe, and the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Here are the earth and the moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, and the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Rachel Werczberger, "Jews in The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel" (Peter Lang, 2016)

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Perhaps there’s something in the air in the Middle East, something that elevates spirituality. The Middle East, particularly Israel, is the legendary home of spiritual searching, of prophecy and religious expression. And in this historical birthplace of monotheism – of Judaism and its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam – religious vitality is as vibrant today as ever.

Although traditional forms of religious practice dominate throughout the Middle East, not everyone finds their spiritual needs satisfied by these practices. To some, traditional religious practices just don’t feel genuine. Yearning for authenticity and meaning in their religious lives, they are left frustrated.

We live in what has been called an “age of authenticity,” where the pervasive background belief maintains that individuals have their own particular way of being human - and of seeking transcendence - to which they can be true or untrue.

In Jews in The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel (Peter Lang, 2016, Rachel Werczberger examined two Israeli communities of spiritual seekers in Israel. Under the guidance of charismatic leadership, these communities tried to effect Jewish spiritual renewal by integrating Jewish tradition – especially Kabbalah and Hasidism – with New Age spirituality. Seeking authenticity, the two communities tried to construct a new Jewish spiritual identity with re-invented rituals. This is their story.

Renee Garfinkel is a clinical psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Seth J. Frantzman, "After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East" (Gefen, 2019)

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The enterprise of journalism is in crisis. Today’s journalists face accusations of “fake news” on the one hand, and harassment, arrest, and even the murder of reporters on the other.

At the same time, we who rely on journalists for information, are constantly bombarded by breaking news. Confronted by video and print updates in real time, it is increasingly challenging to keep up with, let alone understand, world events. Barrels of information continually roll towards us; how can we find the time and space to stop and consider – to digest the content of news and to reflect on what it all means? Seen through the whirlwind of information, the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, can appear more confusing and chaotic than ever.

Enter Seth Frantzman. His new book After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East (Gefen House Publishing, 2019) is just what is needed to help deal with the news confusion. The brutal Syrian civil war and the war against Isis left hundreds of thousands dead, and made millions more refugees. Frantzman spent months traveling throughout the Middle East to get a first-hand view of the region, its people and politics in war’s aftermath. He shares his insights and understanding in this important work.

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Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met.

Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors.

Nothing is value-free.

In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics.

Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics.

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Lynn Kaye, "Time In The Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The great writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” Time is the topic of a new book by Lynn Kaye, Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Thought at Brandeis University and Visiting Library Fellow at The Van Leer Institute Jerusalem.

With insights gleaned from art and literature, as well as a close reading of Talmud texts, Lynn Kaye examines how rabbis of late antiquity thought about time through their legal reasoning and storytelling, and what these insights mean for thinking about time today. In Time In The Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Kaye demonstrates that temporal flexibility in the Babylonian Talmud is a means of exploring and resolving legal uncertainties, as well as a tool to tell stories that convey ideas effectively and dramatically. Her book, the first on time in the Talmud, makes accessible complex legal texts and philosophical ideas. It also connects the literature of late antique Judaism with broader theological and philosophical debates about time.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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David Resnick, "Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

David Resnick combines two of his passions, movies and education, in his book, Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Films are powerful messengers which both project and reflect particular values, ideas and social behavior. Using many examples of Hollywood movies, Resnick analyzes the way movies perform in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including sports, arts and religion. In this lively and engaging interview David Resnick shares insights he gained through decades of experience in education and research.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Naftali Rothenberg, "Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Is love between man and woman the source of wisdom and the cornerstone of moral life? Naftali Rothenberg says it is, based on the works and life of the first century Jewish scholar and sage, Rabbi Akiva.

In Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Rothenberg explores the philosophy of love through the thought and life of Rabbi Akiva whose life was transformed by the love of his wife, Rachel. From this starting point, Naftali Rothenberg conducts a thorough examination of the harmonious approach to love in the obstacle-laden context of human reality. Discussing the deterioration of passion into simple lust, the ability to contend with suffering and death, and so forth, Rothenberg addresses the deepest and most pressing questions about human love. The readings and observations offered here allow readers to acquire the wisdom of love—not merely as an assemblage of theoretical arguments and abstract statements, but as an analysis of the internal contradictions and difficulties revealed in the context of attempts to realize and implement harmonious love.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or on Twitter @embracingwisdom

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Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas

Laughter and Leadership: A Conversation with Tikva Blaukopf Schein, Ph.D.

Elias V. Messinas, "Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace" (Bloch Publishing, 2011)

Steven Pinker, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" (Scribner, 2025)

Robert J. Coplan, "The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Michael Kimmel, "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Oren Harman, "Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History" (Basic Books, 2025)

Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?" (﻿Taylor & Francis, 2025

William Ury, "Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict" (Harper Business, 2024)

Michal Govrin et. al, "But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah" (de Gruyter, 2025)

Maya Arad, "The Hebrew Teacher" (New Vessel Press, 2024)

Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)

Danya Ruttenberg, "On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World" (Beacon Press, 2022)

Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Body: How the stress of Loss Can be an Opportunity for Healing (Harper One, 2025)

Nicole Nehrig, "With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, "The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism" (Jewish Publication Society. 2024)

David S. Wall, "Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age" (Polity, 2024)

Rebecca Lemov, "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" (Norton, 2025)

Cary Nelson, "Mindless: What Happened to Universities?" (Jewish Quarterly 259, 2025)

Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Elaine Pagels, "Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus" (Doubleday, 2025)

Sandra Matz, "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior" (HBRP, 2025)

David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)

Jerome Gellman, "The Problem of God in Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Keith J. Hayward, "Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood" (Constable & Robinson, 2025)

James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)

On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Eric Cline, "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel by Nachum Sarna

Matthew Levitt, "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" (Yale UP, 2008)

Anthony Bale, "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes" (Norton, 2024)

Writing on the Wall: A Conversation with William Kolbrener

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

Judaism is About Love: A Discussion with Shai Held

Seth J. Frantzman, "The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza" (Wicked Son, 2024)

Marilynne Robinson, "Reading Genesis" (FSG, 2024)

Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Jay Garfinkel, "Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness" (Illuminated Press, 2024)

Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici, "Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another" (U California Press, 2024)

Eyal Regev, "The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred" (Yale UP, 2019)

Judith Lewis Herman, "Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice" (Basic Books, 2023)

Thomas Sparr, "German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City" (Haus Publishers, 2021)

Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Seth D. Kaplan, "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)

Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)

Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek”): A Conversation with Ronen Koehler

Kenneth Miller, "Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep" (Hachette Books, 2023)

Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023)

Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

John Horgan, "Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right" ( Columbia UP, 2023)

What Can We Learn From A Pottery Shard? Uncovering the Ancient Past Through Biblical Archeology with Professor Aren Maeir

Con Coughlin, "Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny" (Picador, 2023)

John Perlin, "The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization" (Patagonia, 2023)

Dan Senor and Saul Singer, "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

The Enlightened Donor: How to Give Charity Wisely

Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Itamar Rabinovich, "Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs and the Region" (Brookings Institution Press, 2023)

Andrew J. Hoffman, "The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Gadi Sagiv, "Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Tara Isabella Burton, "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

The Art of Translation: A Discussion with Anne Birkenhauer Molad

Housing Insecurity and Homelessness: A Nonprofit Approach

Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)

Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)

Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)

Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)

Russ Roberts, "Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us" (Portfolio, 2022)

Adrian Bejan, "Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" (World Scientific, 2022)

Arthur Keefer, "Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Susannah Heschel, "The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany" (Princeton UP, 2010)

Hagai Boas, "The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From?" (Routledge, 2022)

Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?" (Taylor & Francis, 2025