JTS Between the Lines: Author Conversations from the Library of JTS

A discussion with JTS's Dr. David G. Roskies about his powerful new collection of writings from the Warsaw Ghetto, recording the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves.Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists—and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by Roskies as “a civilization responding to its own destruction,” these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, JTS, serves as moderator.

Episode 1: Who Were the Rabbis?What led to the emergence of the group of scholars and teachers we call the Rabbis? What motivated them and what did they value? The Rabbis looked to their forebear, Hillel, as an exemplar of religious leadership, and in this episode, we’ll look at three stories they told about Hillel to see what we can learn about the Rabbis’ self-conception.Subscribe now:Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-evolution-of-torah-a-history-of-rabbinic-literature/id1488RSS: http://www.spreaker.com/show/4136441/episodes/feedCredits:Produced by Rabbi Tim BernardCover art: Rabbi Tim BernardTheme music: Stock media provided by u19_studios / Pond5

As hate crimes and domestic terrorism dominate the headlines, the legacy of the late Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum as a leader in interfaith and race relations in the United States and around the world becomes more and more relevant with each atrocity that is perpetrated in the name of racial purity, religion and rectitude. His widow, humanitarian and philanthropist Dr. Georgette Bennett, discusses the first-ever biography of Rabbi Tanenbaum, Confronting Hate: The Untold Story of the Rabbi Who Stood Up for Human Rights, Racial Justice and Religious Reconciliation by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. From his position as director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Tanenbaum was deeply involved in the historic Vatican II Council, which promulgated a landmark encyclical on Catholic-Jewish relations. Rabbi Tanenbaum also was one of the few Jewish leaders who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, Reverend Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders. Inspired by his tradition’s ethic of social justice, he worked tirelessly as a civil rights activist and helped lead the Soviet Jewry liberation movement.Confronting Hate details Rabbi Tanenbaum’s remarkable career and interactions with civil rights legends such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson as well as several US presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush. Above all, its authors bring to light the immense international influence and relevance that Rabbi Tanenbaum has for today’s world, more than twenty-five years after his passing. Indeed, at a time when our world is riven by conflict, partisanship and hate, the lessons of his life could not be more timely. This event was co-sponsored by The JTS Library, the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue, and the New York Board of Rabbis. Dr. Burton Visotzky, Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies and director of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue, JTS, served as moderator.

Four rabbis from a local community—one Orthodox, two Conservative, and one Reform—meet each week at a local kosher deli to discuss Jewish law, theology, and synagogue business. This new work of fiction from Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins is an opportunity to be the proverbial fly on the wall and find out what rabbis talk about when no one else is listening. Dov Peretz Elkins is a nationally known lecturer, educator, author, and book critic. He is a popular speaker on the Jewish circuit. Ordained at JTS, Rabbi Elkins is a recipient of the National Jewish Book Award, and is the author of over fifty books. His Chicken Soup For The Jewish Soul was on the NY Times best-seller list. Among Rabbi Elkins’ other books are Rosh Hashanah Readings: Inspiration, Information and Contemplation, Yom Kippur Readings, and The Wisdom of Judaism: An Introduction to the Values of the Talmud. His most recent books are Jewish Stories from Heaven and Earth: Inspiring Tales to Nourish the Heart and Soul (Jewish Lights), Tales of the Righteous (Gefen Publishing), In the Spirit: Insights for Spiritual Renewal in the 21st Century (Kodesh Press), For Those Left Behind: A Jewish Anthology of Comfort and Healing (Mazo Publishers), Four Rabbis At Lunch: Candid Conversations Among American Clergy (KTAV), and To Climb The Rungs: Memoirs of a Rabbi (Mazo Publishers).

Dr. Wendy Zierler's Movies and Midrash pioneers the use of cinema as a springboard to discuss central Jewish texts and matters of belief. Exploring what Jewish tradition, text, and theology have to say about the lessons and themes arising from influential and compelling films, Zierler uses the method of “inverted midrash”: while classical rabbinical midrash begins with exegesis of a verse and then introduces a mashal (parable) as a means of further explication, Zierler turns that process around, beginning with the culturally familiar cinematic parable and then analyzing related Jewish texts. ABOUT THE AUTHORWendy Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at HUC-JIR in New York. Prior to joining HUC-JIR she was a research fellow in the English Department of the University of Hong Kong.She received her PhD and MA from Princeton University and her BA from Yeshiva University. In December 2016 she also received an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation (SUNY 2017, Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, 2017) and of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing (Wayne State UP, 2004), and co-editor with Carole Balin, of Behikansi atah, a collection of the Hebrew writings of Hava Shapiro 1878-1943 (Resling Press, 2008). To Tread on New Ground: Selected Writings of Hava Shapiro, her English translation of Shapiro’s writings, also co-edited with Carole Balin, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2014. In 2017 she became Co-Editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. Most recently she joined the Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination track at Yeshivat Maharat.

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others—challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories.Dr. Burton Visotzky served as moderator.

At the age of 27, alone in Jerusalem in the wake of a painful divorce, Ilana Kurshan decided to begin learning daf yomi, the “daily page” of the Talmud. By the time she completed the Talmud after seven and a half years, Kurshan was remarried with three young children. If All the Seas Were Ink is her moving and remarkable memoir of this journey through heartache and humor, love and loss, marriage and motherhood—all guided by the pages of the Talmud, which become for Kurshan a conversation about how best to live one’s life in an imperfect world.

The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The Talmud, written in and for an agrarian society, was in many ways ill-equipped for the new economy. In the early Islamic period, the Babylonian Geonim made accommodations through their responsa, through occasional taqqanot, and especially by applying the concept that custom can be a source of law. Not previously noticed, in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides made his own efforts to update the halakha through codification. Mark R. Cohen's new book Maimonides and the Merchants suggests that, like the Geonim before him, Maimonides wished to provide Jewish merchants an alternative and comparable forum to the Islamic legal system and thereby shore up an important cornerstone of communal autonomy.

A discussion with Rabbi Ron Kronish on his new book, The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, A View from Jerusalem.Drawing on personal experiences from his 25-year career as founding director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, Rabbi Ron Kronish describes the theory and practice of interreligious dialogue, education, and action in Israel and Palestine in the context of the political peace process. The Rev. Chloe Breyer and Iman Boukadoum of the Interfaith Center of New York join in brief responses to the author.

Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a new political thriller from Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author Nathan Englander, unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And the General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence.From these vastly different lives Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined—a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong—who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner?Dr. Barbara Mann, Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literature, JTS, served as moderator.

In his new book, the winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship, JTS's Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History Dr. Benjamin R. Gampel uses rich new archival data to illuminate one of the major disasters that struck medieval Jewry: the anti-Jewish riots of 1391-92 in the lands of Castile and Aragon.Offering the most exhaustive and profound record to date of the ten fateful months between June 1391 and March 1392, during which hundreds if not thousands of Jews were killed or forcibly converted to Christianity, the book explores why the famed convivencia of medieval Iberian society—in which Christians, Muslims and Jews seemingly lived together in relative harmony—was conspicuously absent during this period. Taking into account the social, religious, political, and economic tensions at play, Gampel analyzes the evolution of this bloody wave of persecution, provides new perspectives on the riots' origins, and examines responses from the rulers of Aragon.