New Books in Jewish Studies

Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.

In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.

This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.
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Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to
discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism.

In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance
companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers,
claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly
spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers,
cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement
the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination.

Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial
transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the
complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why
some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how
insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial
interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened
with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that
reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it
does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths.

Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they
persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten
episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of
antisemitism in the United States.
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This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros sonidos festival.

This panel discussion originally took place on March 10, 2025.
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There is an academic interest in the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous professor from Vienna.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Seidman about this newly published book, led by scholar Ken Frieden.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on June 6, 2024.
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The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they
immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full
legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights
worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila
Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that
both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed
repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the
public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were
Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The
answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine
Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could
exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law
changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political
ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with
today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman
concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions
about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution.
The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law
and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and,
often, unsettling debates about who is American.

Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish
migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a
Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National
University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

William E.
Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish
American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140.

Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum

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