New Books in Jewish Studies

Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’s Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context.

Elżbieta Janicka focuses on the case of the former German Nazi death camp Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries, the majority from Poland. While keeping in mind that “Treblinka” is as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station at Treblinka the village, Janicka examines symbolic topography, such as the symbols and narratives that are imprinted into these sites under the auspices of the Treblinka Museum. Regarding the unrestricted Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable for Poland, Janicka raises the question: Why doesn’t the present Polish strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation?

Janicka argues that while Polish cultural institutions do not deny the Holocaust itself, they practice a form of denialism by obscuring the reality of Polish involvement in the Holocaust. This lecture fits into a broader debate about Polish public institutions that promote a counter-history of the Holocaust and have at their disposal extraordinary means of propaganda both within Poland and abroad.

This lecture originally took place on February 19, 2026.
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Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European
intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of
articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical
works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear
writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis
digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm
was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was
embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow
intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including
Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel,
E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.

In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal
traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by
exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to
uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his
pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern
history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first
substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed,
The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into
the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in
conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates
globally.
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It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.

Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman.

This lecture originally took place on December 21, 2023.
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How do you build bridges after living through one of history's greatest ruptures? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Shimon Redlich to discuss his memoir Bridge Builder: My Life Since the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2026), the concluding volume of his remarkable four-part autobiographical journey.

Picking up in the late 1950s, Bridge Builder follows Redlich from his years as a student in Jerusalem and the United States to his distinguished career as a professor at Ben-Gurion University. Along the way, he reflects on friendships that crossed religious and national boundaries, his encounters with Jews and non-Jews across Eastern Europe, and his willingness to engage difficult historical and political questions with honesty and empathy.

More than a memoir, the book is a meditation on memory, reconciliation, and intellectual curiosity. Drawing on both personal recollection and meticulous historical research, Redlich explores what it means to carry the legacy of the Holocaust while refusing to let it become the only lens through which to view the world. His story is one of survival, but also of dialogue, scholarship, and the lifelong work of building understanding across divides.

Together, Redlich and Katz discuss the relationship between memory and history, the challenges of confronting painful pasts, and why bridge-building remains one of the most important—and difficult—tasks of our time.

About our contributors:

Shimon Redlich, a child survivor of the Holocaust, was born in Lwow in 1935 and lived in nearby Brzezany until 1945, when he was repatriated to Lodz. He left Poland for Israel in 1950. He studied at the Hebrew University, Harvard, and New York University. He taught history at Ben-Gurion University for almost forty years. Redlich has written numerous books and articles on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe and his memoirs, of which this book is the fourth and final volume.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid and the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS).
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In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.

Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel
as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete
a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding
and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with
former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project
of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the
United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German
and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing
the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman,
together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.

The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a
more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research
identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq;
the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead
descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews
from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct
Judeo-Arabic dialect.

Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.

Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the
expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a
deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their
assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs
thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists
to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi
journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the
wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.

Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and
dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one
million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth
century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence
rather than inherited assumption.
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