New Books in Jewish Studies

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026).

Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies.

Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them.

Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival.

About the Guest

Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe.

About the Host

Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life.
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The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Following the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture, author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew.

Join us for a discussion of this book with Rachel Rojanski in conversation with Rachel Brenner, Shachar Pinsker, and Sunny Yudkoff.

This book talk originally took place on May 27, 2020.
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Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch joined each other on stage for a lively discussion about the fascinating life and work of the "Jewish Mark Twain.”

This discussion originally took place on October 17, 2013.
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For centuries, Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world. Until World War II, this area was home to over forty percent of world Jewry: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland, and nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of American and European Jews originate from Eastern Europe, the history of this life and civilization is not well known, or has been reduced to a story of persecution and martyrdom. In his masterful three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia: 1350 to the Present Day, Polonsky avoids sentimentalism and mythologizing, and provides a comprehensive and detailed account of this great civilization. From the towns and shtetls where Jews lived, to the emergence of Hasidism and the Haskalah movement, to the rise of Jewish urbanization, and Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, Polonsky’s book dispels myths about this culture, while demonstrating the importance of Poland and Russia as a great center of Jewish life.

Winner of the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, and the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language between 2007 and 2011.

This book talk originally took place on October 22, 2013
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The beginnings of contemporary Jewry are often associated with Jewish figures in Western Europe such as Moses Mendelssohn. But in his book, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern offers a new and provocative narrative for understanding contemporary Jewish life, which begins in the East, with the leading East European mystic and rabbinic scholar of the 18th century, Elijah ben Solomon, or the “Vilna Gaon.” Eliyahu Stern joined in conversation with Jeremy Dauber for a discussion about the Vilna Gaon, his influence on modern Judaism, and why his legacy has been claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists and the Orthodox.

Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication Finalist for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature

Eliyahu Stern was the Tell fellow at the YIVO Institute in 2004.

This book talk originally took place on November 7, 2013.
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