New Books in Jewish Studies

We laugh without thinking — but what if laughter is one of the most revealing human acts?

In this episode of The Van Leer Institute Series On Ideas, Dr. Tikva Blaukopf Schein explores laughter not as humor, but as power. Across ancient Roman and rabbinic texts, laughter could strengthen leadership, threaten institutions, or expose hidden fear. The same laugh that comforts one audience can unsettle another.

Our conversation moves from classical literature to contemporary academic life, touching on scholarship, family, identity, and the challenges facing Jewish and Israeli scholars today. Along the way emerges a surprising idea: societies become nervous about laughter precisely when they feel most fragile.

Thoughtful, personal, and deeply relevant, this episode asks why humans so often laugh in moments of crisis — and what that laughter reveals about hope, survival, and meaning.
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S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern Jewish drama. This talk by scholar Gabriella Safran explores its roots: in Jewish folklore, the scandalous blood libel trial in Kiev in 1913, and the political passions of Russian-Jewish revolutionaries. In composing the play, An-ski was torn between two Jewish myths, each still modern: the tragic ambivalence of the dybbuk, a lost, wandering soul, and the technological triumphalism of the golem, a robot set in motion by practical kabbalah and capable of defending the Jews from every harm.

This lecture originally took place on June 3, 2020.
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In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (that is, bilingual) parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons’ unexpected success—their send-up of Yiddish radio, “Joe & Paul,” was a bona fide hit, however improbable—inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-rate studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Capitol Records issued (possibly to their own amazement) a steady stream of these Yinglish albums by Katz all through the 1950s and into the ‘60s. These in turn inspired Allan Sherman, a TV gameshow writer/producer, to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs. Though hardly any of Sherman’s lyrics had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded—phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically—to Yiddish beginnings.

Close readings of selected tracks by the Bartons, by Katz, and by Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.

This lecture originally took place on July 9, 2020.
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Across Greece, once-thriving Jewish communities stood for more than two thousand years. From the Romaniote Jews of Ioannina to the great Sephardic center of Salonika, Jewish life shaped the cultural and urban fabric of the eastern Mediterranean.

During the Holocaust, approximately 87 percent of Greek Jewry was murdered — one of the highest destruction rates in Europe. Entire communities disappeared almost overnight.

What remained were buildings — sometimes abandoned, sometimes altered, sometimes barely recognizable — silent witnesses to lives erased.

For more than three decades, architect, researcher, and author Elias V. Messinas has devoted his life to documenting, restoring, and re-interpreting these synagogues and Jewish spaces.

His major works include:


The Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace, a foundational architectural and historical survey,


The Synagogue of Verona, a landmark study in restoration practice,


Kahal Shalom: The Synagogue of Kos — A Chronicle of Research, Restoration, Sanctity and Ecology, and

his recent reflective work, The Synagogue, which explores memory, encounter, and meaning through these spaces.

Messinas is both architect and historian — but perhaps most importantly, a custodian of memory, working to preserve places whose congregations no longer exist.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator, and host of the New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here and also contributes here.
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Today, techniques such as fermenting and foraging are increasingly appealing to those seeking to create economical, nourishing, waste-free meals. This panel, moderated by Jane Ziegelman and featuring chefs Ari Miller and Jeremy Umansky, will explore today’s innovative tactics and the historical precedents for these strategies in the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant kitchen at the turn of the 20th century.

This panel discussion originally took place on November 18, 2020.
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