New Books in Communications

In 1897 when the Forverts was founded, the need for a Jewish newspaper—a Yiddish newspaper that is—was self-evident: millions of Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants needed a reliable daily source of news in their own language. In the first few decades of the 20th century the Yiddish press blossomed in New York, peaking at five different daily papers and an estimated daily readership of approximately one million in New York City alone in the early 1920s. The major form of media for immigrant Jews and their offspring, the Yiddish press provided its readers with everything from international, national, and local news, to original and translated literature, both high and low, literary and theater criticism, politics, humor, advice columns, and more. Yiddish newspapers taught immigrants how to vote and even how to play baseball. Today, nearly 125 years after the first issue of the Forverts, the vast majority of American Jews speak and read English and can get their news from the mainstream English language press. And yet, the Jewish press—now mostly in English—remains an important journalistic outlet for topics of particular interest to the Jewish community. From Jewish TV shows, movies, books, music, and restaurants to the happenings of Jewish institutions and communities; from the Jewish angles and stories behind the news, to in-depth focus on topics such as Israel and antisemitism; Jewish publications fill the gaps of the mainstream press for a Jewish readership hungry for today's Jewish stories. Join us for a conversation with editors of today's major American Jewish publications about the role they play in the Jewish world. Moderated by Gal Beckerman (The New York Times Book Review) this panel will feature Alana Newhouse (Tablet Magazine), Jodi Rudoren (The Forward), and Philissa Cramer (Jewish Telegraphic Agency). This panel will explore questions including: Now that American Jews have so clearly assimilated into American society what is the need for a Jewish press? What audience do the editors of these publications target? How do they serve the American Jewish community as it grows diverse and diffuse? This panel was originally held on September 13, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Great books don't happen by accident. Sarah Crichton, one of publishing's most respected voices and the founder of Sarah Crichton Books at FSG, joins host Sarah Russo for an unfiltered conversation about what it takes to acquire, edit, and launch books that last. They cover everything: crashing books in secret, fighting for the right jacket design, discovering A Long Way Gone by child soldier, Ismeal Beah, the differences between being a publisher and an editor, what to understand about hiring a developmental editor, and more. Whether you're an author, aspiring editor, or publishing professional, this episode is a masterclass. For more information on Sarah Crichton’s work, visit her website: Sarah’s website or connect with her on LinkedIn Books mentioned in this episode: “Cyberwar” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ishmael Beah “What Is the What” by Dave Eggers “A Mighty Heart” by Mariane Pearl, co-written with Sarah Crichton “Portrait of a Marriage: A Memoir” by Judy Crichton and Jennifer Crichton “Fierce Attachments” by Vivian Gornick “The Odd Woman and the City” by Vivian Gornick “M Train” by Patti Smith Key Moments 00:44 — How Magazine Editors Think About Readers Sarah Crichton explains how her magazine background gave her a superpower most book editors lack: never forgetting the reader exists. 02:27 — What It Really Means to "Crash" a Book Sarah C. breaks down the secret, adrenaline-fueled process of rushing a book to publication in weeks instead of years. 05:09 — The Editor vs. Publisher Divide (And Why It's Disappearing) Hear about the traditional difference between an editor and a publisher — and why the line between them is blurring 07:22 — How She Turned a Rejected Manuscript into a National Phenomenon Sarah C. tells the story of discovering “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah — a book passed over by every publisher — and how a deliberate cover strategy and the first-ever Starbucks book pick turned it into a classroom staple. 14:58 — What Sarah Looks for in a Manuscript (and Why a Great Title Matters More Than You Think) Sarah reveals what makes her sit up when reading a submission, and the brutal reality of how critics decide what to review. 17:08 — Developmental Editors, Self-Publishing, and "Hitting the Lottery" Sarah gets candid about the economics of book doctoring, shares the story of self-publishing her late mother's memoir, and explains the role of a developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio & Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the second panel, Chenjerai Kumanyika led a discussion about the aesthetics of podcasting. Professor Kumanyika is an assistant professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, who specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. His podcast Empire City, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best podcasts of 2024. He was the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War, and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy. His current podcast is Unruly Subjects. The panel included Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has written about theatre and television. He is a Spring 2026 McGraw Professor of Writing in the Program in Journalism at Princeton University. He is the author of the novel, Great Expectations; Julia Barton is an award-winning podcast, audiobook, and radio editor. She was the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where she helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules. She’s the editor of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, Michael Specter’s Fauci, and Michael Lewis’s unabridged Liar’s Poker and companion podcast. Her 2019 series, Spacebridge, was called “dazzling” by The New Yorker. She writes the audio history newsletter, Continuous Wave. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Political historian Oscar Winberg has a fascinating new book titled Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics. This book weaves together quite a few different threads in examining the historical context in which the television show, All In The Family, landed on American television screens. Archie Bunker for President examines why this particular sitcom was a kind of inflection point within U.S. politics, within the media landscape at the time and moving forward, and how television production shifted and changed around this one particular television series. Winberg also lays out the path from the early 1970s, when All in the Family first aired, to our contemporary political moment, when celebrity and politics seem to be inescapably intertwined. As Winberg notes in our conversation, television as an entity is inherently conservative, since the functional model was about appealing to the lowest common denominator so that advertisers would be willing to pay for time during shows. In order to reach the most viewers, at least in the age of network television, the television series needed to appeal to the largest market possible, and not “turn off” viewers. What happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the television show All in the Family is that this dynamic shifts, and the case is made that it isn’t about reaching the most people, but about reaching the people who have the means and inclination to purchase what the advertisers are selling. This is part of the pitch that Norman Lear makes, that CBS executive Bob Wood finally decides to gamble on by greenlighting All in the Family. The dynamic inside the show itself is to focus on politics: to have the characters within the series discuss different political issues, and engage with the impacts of these issues, from women’s rights and reproductive health to homosexuality to racism and the anti-war movement. In designing All in the Family with Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Conner) clearly defined as a conservative and as a bigot, and with Archie’s daughter, Gloria Stivic (played by Sally Struthers) and son in law, Mike Stivic (played by Rob Reiner), as liberals and politically active, the show embedded politics within the narrative. Edith Bunker, played by Jean Stapleton, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was making its way through the ratification process while the series was airing, providing yet another avenue for political discussion within the show’s structure. There were quite a few other shows that were developed at the same time as All in the Family that took up similarly political themes in iconic ways, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to Maude. Political conversations were the fabric of these shows in much the same way as in All in the Family, where characters find themselves experiencing dimensions of politics in their lives and they discuss this with friends and family within the narrative construction. This also translated to Americans discussing these shows with each other at dinner, or at the “water cooler”, or at the beauty parlor or barbershop. Given the structure of television in the 1970s and 1980s, before cable and streaming services, options were more limited options, and many of these shows had great writers, actors, and showrunners. This was “appointment television” because there was no way to record or otherwise go back and watch the episode. Episodes were only available at their regularly scheduled time and day—which also meant that lots and lots of Americans were watching the same show at the same time. In some sense, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics is not only about how one television show remade American politics, but also about how All in the Family remade American television, opening up the networks to developing and airing television shows that integrate politics (of all kinds) into the narratives. There is still quite a lot of television, particularly network television, that is pitched to the broadest possible audience, but the narratives in police procedurals or hospital-centered series or sitcoms integrate different dimensions of politics into their storylines in ways that had not been done before All in the Family. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2025) details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progress—more diverse casts, “timely” social commentary, and redemptive nostalgia—yet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to address.Rebooting Inequality: Critical Takes on Film and Television Remakes (NYU Press, 2026) brings together twelve concise, theoretically rich essays that interrogate how Hollywood’s recycling of intellectual property sustains entrenched systems of racial, gender, and sexual inequality. Across genres and platforms, contributors explore how the industry’s nostalgic return to familiar stories masks an ongoing reliance on white, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks of storytelling and production.Blending critical race, feminist, and media studies, the collection analyzes dozens of recent film and television revivals, remakes, and reboots from Roseanne to Charlie’s Angels to ask what it means when entertainment markets strive for diversity while leaving the structures of inequality intact.Accessible yet deeply analytical, Rebooting Inequality exposes how nostalgia has become both a marketing strategy and a political tool, revealing how the “new” Hollywood continues to reanimate the past—profitably, repeatedly, and unequally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the 1984 New York City subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—and became both a fugitive and, later, a celebrated vigilante figure for many Americans frustrated by the social and economic tensions of the Reagan era. The book examines how media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News fueled public fear and anger, transforming Goetz into a hero while casting his victims as villains. Using archival materials and legal records, Thompson revisits the shooting’s lasting impact and argues that it marked a pivotal moment in modern American politics, media, and racial attitudes. Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications