New Books Network

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman about his book Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become? (Jewish Publication Society, 2023), the 2023 National
Jewish Book Award Finalist in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.
Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the
Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. His work has consistently
addressed what constitutes Jewish peoplehood across a landscape of
internal difference.

Hartman's central argument distinguishes
between the Genesis covenant and the Exodus covenant. The Genesis
covenant is a covenant of belonging: membership in the Jewish people
that obtains by birth or by formal entry into the community, independent
of belief or practice. The Exodus covenant, by contrast, is a covenant
of aspiration, calling the people toward holiness, ethical development,
and spiritual growth. Where the first establishes identity, the second
establishes obligation.

In our discussion, Hartman emphasized
that the Genesis covenant requires each community, and each individual,
to relinquish the presumption of controlling a singular, authoritative
account of the Jewish story. Read together, the two covenants do not
divide the Jewish people into separate camps so much as describe the
full shape of Jewish belonging: one covenant that secures the people as a
people, and a second that gives that peoplehood its ongoing direction
and purpose. Jewishness, on this account, transcends denominational
boundaries—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, and otherwise—even
as each tradition supplies its own particular mode of enacting the
Exodus covenant's demand for growth.

Hartman situated this
framework within a longer pattern in Jewish intellectual history: the
recurring effort to locate an essential core beneath the full body of
commandments, exemplified by Hillel's reduction of the Torah to a single
ethical principle. This tendency toward distillation, he argued, helps
explain how communities as historically and culturally distinct as
Yemenite, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and secular Israeli Jews continue to
recognize one another as belonging to a single people, notwithstanding
significant divergence in practice. Shared calendar and shared
collective memory, in his formulation, do more to sustain peoplehood
than uniformity of observance.

The conversation turned to the
relationship between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. Hartman
located Zionism itself within the Genesis covenant: attachment to the
Jewish people's return to and sovereignty in the land of Israel is, on
his account, a constitutive part of Jewish family and belonging, not a
separate or optional commitment layered on top of it.

Hartman
further addressed the changing status of intermarriage, noting a shift
from its historical treatment as a violation of the Genesis covenant
toward broader acceptance, particularly in Diaspora communities. He
observed that a substantial proportion of Jewish spouses in
intermarriages maintain Jewish identity, practice, and communal
affiliation, complicating any straightforward inference from rising
intermarriage rates to communal decline. Jewish continuity, on this
account, is proving more resilient, and more complex, than earlier
demographic anxieties assumed.

The conversation closed on the
question of how Exodus Judaism—a Judaism oriented toward aspiration,
self-criticism, and moral striving—can be sustained in a period marked
by contested facts and by the anti-Zionism as antisemitism seen around
the world. Hartman offered no definitive resolution, but argued for the
continued value of engaging the argument itself: treating the Genesis
covenant as the foundation that preserves collective belonging, and the
Exodus covenant as the ongoing rationale for what that belonging is for.

As
we continue the discussion to find common ground and appreciation of
the greater Jewish story, follow Jewish Tapestry for engaging talks on
Jewish heritage communities.
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Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026) tells
the compelling story of the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group (JBG), a
five-thousand-strong military unit, recruited primarily from the Jewish
population of Palestine, and the only exclusively Jewish military unit
to fight under the British flag during the Second World War. Gianluca
Fantoni reconstructs the military and human experience of the brigade in
Italy and investigates its enduring and controversial place in memory
and public debate.

Formed in 1944, the JBG saw combat in the
final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with
distinction against German forces. After the war, many of its members –
who often had little or no military training, and included artists,
scientists, and farmers – engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle
Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork
for the future Israeli state. Others sought retribution against Nazis
and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and
the desire for justice.

Far more than a conventional military history, Soldiers, Angels, and
Avengers is both a critical study of the political uses of history and a
vivid, passionate narrative that brings to life the men and women of
the brigade. Accessible and engaging, this book offers readers a rare
lens through which to understand the intersections of war, memory, and
politics in twentieth-century Europe.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett
Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host
of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref
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In the mid-19th century, anyone who was anyone in the American West had heard of the Ute leader Wakara. Yet, by the early twenty first century, his story has been, if not forgotten, at the very least twisted and distorted into something that would have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries. In Wakara's America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books, 2025), University of Nebraska religious studies professor Max Perry Mueller not only sets the record straight on Wakara, his life, and his times, but also explains how and why his narrative grew to be so misused. It's a story of public history gone wrong, of grave robbing and NAGPRA, and above all about the complexities and contingencies of history. Mueller makes a convincing case that our understanding of Utah and the broader West has been incomplete without Wakara near the center of the story.
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Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in
history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances
individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World (Princeton
University Press, 2026) reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining
our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to
the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican
foundation.
Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom
and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the
environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in
technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric
of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests.
Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the
facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper
failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and
real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that
places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we
exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development
itself.
Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic
challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human
freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both
sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

Giulio Boccaletti
is an author whose writings on natural resources security have been
translated into several languages. He has held international leadership
positions in the private and not-for-profit sectors. He is the
scientific director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change,
one of Europe’s largest research institutions focused on Earth science
and transition economics, and cofounder of Chloris Geospatial, a
space-tech company specializing in Earth observations. His books include
Water: A Biography, and his work has been featured in acclaimed PBS series such as H2O: The Molecule That Made Us, Human Footprint, and The Future of Nature.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
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Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US
citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism.

Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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