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Between the Lines: Between Two Worlds
Mar 20, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war.
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Between the Lines: Perfect Enemy
Mar 13, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
In a covert laboratory under the streets of Tel Aviv, Akiva Cohen, an Israeli scientist, clones Hitler from old samples of his DNA. Akiva wants to change the world for the good; but he is betrayed by those who want to use this new Hitler for unimaginable terror. Akiva is plunged into a desperate struggle to stay alive and salvage his dream, leading to a trail of murders across the country, collaboration with Hamas terrorists, and the uncovering of a devastating conspiracy at the highest levels of Israeli society. Perfect Enemy is an exciting, suspenseful thriller that poses uncomfortable questions about trauma and revenge, the desire for peace, religious extremism, and the schisms of the Middle East.
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Between the Lines: Postwar Stories
Feb 27, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Dr. Rachel Gordan joins us to discuss her book Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. But by the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity.
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Between the Lines: Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital
Feb 5, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture.
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Between the Lines: Soloveitchik’s Children
Jan 22, 2024 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Professor Arnold Eisen, chancellor emeritus and professor of Jewish Thought at JTS and author Daniel Ross Goodman discuss Soloveitchik’s Children, a book that delves into how three of Soloveitchik’s most influential disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy—Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, Rabbi David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks—learned from and adapted his teachings in their own ways, while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.
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Between the Lines: Professor Schiff’s Guilt
Dec 12, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Israeli author Agur Schiff discusses his novel Professor Schiff’s Guilt. In this gripping story, an Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before leaving Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. This satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust.
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Between the Lines: Shadows We Carry
Nov 21, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of JTS Meryl Ain discusses her new award-winning novel, Shadows We Carry. In this sequel to the award-winning post-Holocaust novel The Takeaway Men, the Lubinski twins struggle with their roles as women and coming to terms with their family’s Holocaust legacy at the same time […]
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Between the Lines: Palestine 1936
Nov 7, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Oren Kessler discusses his book Palestine 1936 which tells the epic story—for the first time in English—of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine, the forgotten first “Intifada” that was a seminal event in the birth of Israel and the Middle East conflict, with lasting repercussions.
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Between the Lines: Religicide
Oct 30, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Georgette Bennett speaks about her book, Religicide, coauthored with Jerry White, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which documents the global persecutions of people for their faiths, including the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, and other human rights catastrophes. It amplifies the voices of survivors and offers a blueprint for action, calling on government, business, civil society, and religious leaders to join in a global campaign to protect religious minorities.
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Between the Lines: Dwell Time
Oct 24, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture
In her memoir, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, Rosa Lowinger, a leading sculpture and architectural conservator, interweaves the materials and science of her work with the
story of her Jewish Cuban family and their state of double exile: from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and then Cuba in early 1961.
Between the Lines: Qohelet
Oct 18, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Sukkot
In Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living, philosopher Menachem Fisch and artist Debra Band together probe the biblical thinker’s inquiry into the value of life “under the sun.”
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Between the Lines: Where I Am
Jun 20, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Dana Shem-Ur‘s book is a piercing novel about life abroad in a cultural setting not one’s own: Reut is an Israeli translator living in Paris with a French husband and their child. She’s made sacrifices for her family but now feels a simmering discontent and estrangement that erupts at a festive dinner party with affluent, intellectual friends. During the sumptuous meal, she navigates a tangle of cultural codes with which she’s never been fully at ease. This is a novel about big life choices that examines a woman’s attitudes toward belonging to a man, to a culture, to a language. Where I Am is an intimate, witty book portraying a profoundly human yearning to stop everything, to lay down one’s head, and to feel―if only for a moment―at home.
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Between the Lines: The Confidante
Jun 13, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Christopher C. Gorham discusses his book The Confidante, the first biography of Anna Marie Rosenberg, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant with only a high school education who went on to be dubbed by Life Magazine, “the most important woman in the American government.” Her life ran parallel to the front lines of history, yet her influence on 20th-century […]
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Between the Lines: The Kabbalistic Tree
Mar 29, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
The Kabbalistic Tree, by J.H. Chajes, is the first book to explore the esoteric artifacts at the heart of Jewish mystical practice for the past 700 years: ilanot (trees). Melding maps, mandalas, and mnemonic memory palaces, ilanot provided kabbalists with diagrammatic representation of their structured image of the Divine. Scrolling an ilan parchment in contemplative study, the kabbalist participated mimetically in tikkun, the […]
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Between the Lines: Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
Mar 14, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
SHANDA: A MEMOIR OF SHAME AND SECRECY Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of JTS The word “shanda” is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public […]
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Between the Lines: Sephardic Food and Culture
Mar 8, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Dr. Hélène Jawhara Piñer and Dr. Benjamin Gampel discuss how the mass conversion of Iberian Jews in the late 14th and 15th centuries, initially triggered by the anti-Jewish riots that swept Castile and Aragon in 1391, led to distinctive and identifiable food and eating practices among those Jews who were compelled to embrace the Christian faith.
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Between the Lines: We Are Not One
Feb 7, 2023 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces the debate about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, from its 19th-century origins. Following Israel’s 1948/49 War of Independence (called the Nakba or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six Day War, however, almost overnight, support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews’ collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel’s image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and on college campuses. We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.
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Between the Lines: The Stories They Tell
Dec 13, 2022 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Dr. Judith Hauptman upends the long-held theory of the immutability of halakhah, Jewish law. In her detailed analysis of over 80 short halakhic anecdotes in the Babylonian Talmud, she shows that the Talmud itself promotes halakhic change. She leads the reader through one sugya (discussion unit) after another, accumulating evidence for her rather radical thesis. Along the […]
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Between the Lines: The Object of Jewish Literature
Dec 5, 2022 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
THE OBJECT OF JEWISH LITERATURE: A MATERIAL HISTORY JTS Professor Barbara E. Mann discusses her latest book, The Object of Jewish Literature, a history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an object. With the rise of digital media, the “death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object […]
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Between the Lines: Choosing Hope
Nov 14, 2022 By Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary | Public Event video
Throughout our history, Jews have traditionally responded to our trials with hope, psychologist David Arnow says, because we have had ready access to Judaism’s abundant reservoir of hope. The first book to explore the depths of this reservoir, Choosing Hope journeys from biblical times to our day to explore nine fundamental sources of hope in Judaism.
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