AJS Honors Its Authors

Behind Ancient Bars: Narratives of Incarceration in the Hebrew Bible
Hadar Aviram
University of California Press

This book challenges conventional assumptions about incarceration and modernity through creative rereadings of five carceral stories: Joseph, Esther, Daniel, Samson, and Jeremiah--identifying them as vehicles of political critique and celebrations of human resilience.

Speaking of Hebrew: What Language Does for American Jews
Sharon Avni
Wayne State University Press

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews, this book examines how debates about Hebrew illuminate American Jewish identity, authenticity, and belonging, revealing language ideologies that shape contemporary Jewish life.

Catalysts of Connectedness: The Transformative Power of Critical Experiences in Identity Formation
Adina L. Bankier-Karp
Springer

Why do some Australian Jews stay deeply connected while others drift away? This book uncovers the hidden dominoes and dimmer switches that shape identity—and transform belonging across generations.

Unrecognized: A Palestinian Bedouin Feminist in Israel
Lihi Ben Shitrit and Mona Al-Habanin
Rutgers University Press

This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert.

What Animals Teach Us About Families Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature
Beth Berkowitz
University of California Press

Reading the four "animal family" laws of the Bible alongside rabbinic interpretations, Berkowitz reimagines family to include new forms of life and alternative modes of kinship.

Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship
Lila Corwin Berman
Princeton University Press

This book is a groundbreaking history of how modern American citizenship has worked—and not worked—for Jews in the United States.

Les débuts de la philosophie juive dans l'antiquité
René Bloch
Éditions du Collège de France

This book grew out of four lectures on Philo of Alexandria: "Torah and Cosmopolitanism," "Jewish Myth and Greek Myth," "Dreams and Mystery Cults," and "Geographical Determinism and the Jewish Diaspora."

Wit Happens: Global Jewish Humor
Jenny Caplan, Jarrod Tanny, and Avinoam Patt, editors
Wayne State University Press

This book collects essays addressing the global variety and diversity of Jewish humor in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature
Ofer Dynes
Stanford University Press

This book offers a new history of the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. It reveals how Jewish fiction participated in the remaking of the political order in partitioned Poland.

Recipient of a 2025 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

A Jewish Physician's Response to the Black Death: Abraham Caslari's Tractate on Pestilential Fevers and Fever Types
Susan L. Einbinder
Arc Humanities Press

Now available in English for the first time, Jewish physician Abraham Caslari's 1348 Hebrew tractate analyzing and recommending treatments for the Black Death was one of the earliest written responses by a contemporary physician.

A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938
Aya Elyada
Stanford University Press
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This book explores the afterlife of Old Yiddish literature in the works of modern German-Jewish authors, translators, and intellectuals, highlighting its ideological underpinnings and cultural implications.

The Emotional Experience of Jewish Secularization since the Early Modern Era
Shmuel Feiner
Liverpool University Press Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment

The book offers a wide-ranging exploration of Jewish secularization as both an intellectual transformation and an emotional experience, examining how Jews responded to processes of secularization with anguish, alienation, and anxiety.

Jean Améry: Identity, Time, Failure
Ilit Ferber
Oxford University Press

The first comprehensive philosophical study of Jean Améry's oeuvre, repositioning him as a major twentieth-century thinker whose reflections on exile, aging, and voluntary death form a sustained meditation on identity, time, and failure.

Emotion in the Jewish Mystical Tradition
Lawrence Fine, Joel Hecker, and Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, editors
Littman Library of Jewish Civiization

This edited volume, with contributions by leading scholars, explores a neglcted topic in the study of Jewish mystical tradition, through the lens of the history of emotions.

Jouer la judéité: Le théâtre yiddish à Paris (1919-1939)
Michèle G. Fornhoff-Levitt
Classiques Garnier
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This is the first book-length study of Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris, exploring its artists, repertoires, practices, and the multiple ways Jewishness was constructed, negotiated, and performed for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

The Fragility of Mind: Confrontation Stories Between Rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud
Yuval Fraenkel
Magnes Press

This book examines Talmudic conflict stories as a distinct narrative genre. Through literary poetics, the author investigates how accidental slights escalate into tragic ruptures, exposing profound emotional and moral tensions.

The Movers: Israeli Art in the Third Millennium
Noam Gal
McGill-Queen's University Press

The first scholarly survey of contemporary art from Israel, this book opens a portal to appreciate key artworks in video, sculpture, painting, drawing and installation, as continuations of various visual and literary Jewish cultures before and after the founding of Zionism.

Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern
Kata Gellen
University of Toronto Press

Following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the province of Galicia inspired the literary imagination of two writers, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, who explored the place of Jewish tradition in modernity.

The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film
Olga Gershenson, editor
Oxford University Press

Thirty-eight chapters by leading international scholars provide a state of the field and push it in new directions—from Bollywood to Ethiopian Jews to Haredi women filmmakers.

Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance
Chad S.A. Gibbs
University of Wisconsin Press

This book draws upon new sources and methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance and women's lives at Treblinka—both before and during the August 1943 revolt against the guards.

Jewish Messiahs Abroad: American Encounters with the Sabbatian Past
Nan Goodman
Oxford University Press

This book tells the previously untold story of how a messianic movement that shook the Jewish world of Europe and the Ottoman Empire for over 250 years affected Jews (and some non-Jews) in America.

Maimonides' Moral Psychology: The Emotions, The Virtues, and the Good Life
Alexander Green
Oxford University Press

This book explores how contrasting emotional paradigms— of love, moderation, courage, humility, anger, justice, and compassion—reflect Maimonides’ competing visions of nature, virtue, and the good life.

The Feminine Paradox: Ezer Kenegdo, Opposition that Births a Luminous World
Chava Green
Inner World Press

This book is a translation of and commentary on Torah Ohr Bereshis ("It is Not Good for Man to Be Alone") by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi.

Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge
James A. Grymes
Citadel

An inspirational tale of survival, defiance, and heroism, this book shares the true story of Moshe Gildenman, who led a successful partisan unit in the guerrilla war against the Nazis.

Critical Jewish Studies Now: The Relational Politics of Memory
Re'ee Hagay and Itamar Haritan, editors
Palgrave Macmillan
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A multidisciplinary exploration of the possibility of Jewish critique amid crisis, tracing resonances between Mizrahi experience and Black thought, Palestinian and Jewish questions, and queer disruptions of traditionalist continuity.

West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Wayne State University Press

This book repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish literature by telling the stories of five fascinating but forgotten women writers from California.

Translating the Self: Rewriting National Literature Between Hebrew and Yiddish
Yaakov Herskovitz
SUNY Press

This book explores Hebrew-Yiddish literary self-translation, revealing how this practice became a flashpoint for debates about Jewish national culture, identity, and the nature of literary originality itself.

The Secret Doctrine of the Jews: Jewish Theosophists and the Kabbalah
Boaz Huss
SUNY Press

This book is a comprehensive exploration of the Jewish adherents of the Theosophical Society and their impact on modern Jewish culture and the development of modern forms of Kabbalah.

Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust: History, Memory, and Imagination
Laura Jockusch
Bloomsbury Academic

A critical exploration of the history and imagination of "Jewish revenge," both as an antisemitic stereotype used by Nazi perpetrators and as a coping response of Jews during and after the Holocaust.

Queering Jewish Cultural Heritage in Europe: Iridescently Yours
Sacha Kagan and Miranda L. Crowdus, editors
Routledge

This interdisciplinary study at the intersection of Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Ethnomusicology and other disciplines, develops more inclusive, polyvalent, and iridescent practices in the handling and management of Jewish cultural heritage in Europe.

Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe
Jordan R. Katz
Stanford University Press

This book reveals how Jewish midwives stood at the crossroads of tremendous changes in both Jewish communities and surrounding Christian municipalities and were integral to the expansion of medical bureaucracies through their work.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Gender, Judaism, and American Identity in the Rise of Mass TourismJewish Women at Home in the World:
Melissa Klapper
NYU Press

This book vividly reveals how American Jewish women's travels transformed both their personal identities and the meaning of diaspora itself.

Keeping Contact: Jewish Cultural Initiatives Across Cold War Borders
Rebekah A. Klein-Pejsova and Jacob Ari Labendzs, editors
Purdue University Press

This book explores how Jewish individuals and organizations maintained their relationships across hostile Cold War borders, tracing their practices of diaspora through circulating artifacts, people, knowledge, and even bodily remains.

Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1873-1930
Rebecca Kobrin
Harvard University Press
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This book tells the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.

Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations
Hannah Kosstrin
Oxford University Press

This book is about how Jewish migrations manifest in the body, and how American audiences understand Israel through the dance that they see when movements indicate minoritarian Jewish subjectivities.

The Postcolonial Jewish Question: Colonialism and the Politics of Difference in Postwar France
Mendel Kranz
University of Chicago Press

This book shows how France's colonial history reshaped postwar debates over Jewish thought and belonging, revealing how the Jewish question was transformed by decolonization and the afterlives of colonialism.

Judah ben Elia Hadassi's Eshkol ha-kofer
Daniel J. Lasker, editor
World Union of Jewish Studies

A scientific edition of one of the classics of Hebrew literature, long a scholarly desideratum. A vital source for Golden Age Karaism, as well as twelfth-century Byzantine Jewish life.

Unter den Dächern von Synagogen: Genisa-Funde aus Rheinland-Pfalz
Andreas Lehnardt
Nünnerich-Asmus Verlag

This comprehensive work provides an overview of the content and significance of Genizah finds on the history of Judaism in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

The Other in David Grossman's work in Light of Levinas’s Ethical Turn
Dorit  Lemberger
Springer Nature

This book's core theme is how Israeli author David Grossman has created a language that operates on both ethical and poetic levels. It examines the ethical aspect of Grossman’s fiction as inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas

Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles
Caroline Luce
NYU Press

This book shows how a cohort of young Jewish radicals from the borderlands of Eastern Europe was critical in reshaping multiracial left-wing activism in southern California.

Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust
Aliza Luft
Harvard University Press

A searing account of the French Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust, revealing how the nation’s most influential bishops shaped the course of Nazi persecution through closed-door negotiations and hollow promises.

Mishnah Commentators: Biographies, Commentaries, and Methodologies
Yosef Marcus
Herzog College

Contrasting thousands of Talmudic commentaries, few independent Mishnah explanations exist. This study explores why specific scholars chose this unique path and what their works reveal about centuries of Mishnah study.

Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I
Jeffrey A. Marx
NYU Press

This book explores the history of Jews and arson in America.

God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion
Samira K. Mehta
The University of North Carolina Press

This book traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans.

Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures
Agnes Mueller
Cambridge University Press

Analyzing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and antisemitism.

Gentile Women in Qumran: Female Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Carmen Palmer
De Gruyter

This book examines whether and how female converts may have entered the Qumran movement affiliated with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil. Volume III: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews
Monty Penkower
Academic Studies Press

A meticulously researched daily chronicle of the third six months of the Hamas-Israel war, examining its political, military, humanitarian, regional, and international dimensions through detailed historical analysis.

Confession: The Story of a Jewish Family during the Nazi Occupation of Poland
Calek Perechodnik
David Engel, editor
Yad Vashem

English edition of wartime writings by a Jewish policeman from Otwock, Poland, with detailed annotations and explanatory foreword and afterword tracing this unique document's history

Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History
Craig Perry
Princeton University Press

A new global history of the slave trade, the lives of enslaved people, and the role of slavery in the formation of Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture in the medieval Middle East.

Gentile Food Bans: Halakhah and the Fear of Intermarriage
David Raab
Routledge

This book demonstrates that Gentile food bans were originally based solely on ingredient concerns, and that only in amoraic Babylonia was fear of intermarriage a reality and attributed as the rationale of the bans.

Paper Tombs: Post-Holocaust Memorial Books and Prewar Jewish Life
Jennifer Rich
NYU Press

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume explores how post-Holocaust memorial books help to reshape our understanding of Jewish life and death in Eastern Europe.

Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion
Cara Rock-Singer
University of Chicago Press

This book develops a new analytic technique called ethnodrashy (a combination of rabbinical midrash and sociological ethnography) to explore the centrality of reproductive bodies to the intellectual, political, and spiritual life of American Judaism.

Recipient of a 2025 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis: A Guide to Close Reading of and Creative Writing on the Bible
Sarah Rosenson
Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press
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This book discusses the gaps left open in Genesis, and includes questions for the characters in the stories, which can serve as prompts for conversations or creative writing.

Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations
Rachel R. Rosner
Bloomsbury Academic

This book argues that theological language is central to Adorno's critical method, revealing religion and secularity as entangled while reshaping debates in critical theory and philosophy of religion.

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Steven J. Ross
Bloomsbury Publishing

This book traces the battle between four “Godfathers” of post-WWII white supremacy who pledged to finish the job Hitler had begun, and three Jewish groups who ran undercover operations aimed at putting them out of business.

Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book
Nora L. Rubel
Columbia University Press

This book is a cultural biography of a 1901 charitable cookbook originally compiled to teach immigrant girls American cooking, tracing its evolution into a Jewish culinary touchstone.

Black, Jewish, and Beautiful: Contemporary Blewish Voices
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan, editors
Syracuse University Press

This book is a diverse anthology of Black Jewish voices that includes essays, interviews, and thought pieces.

From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954
Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker, editors
Cornell University Press
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The International Workers Order (IWO) was founded during the Depression by leftist Yiddish speakers to provide insurance to members, then widened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor and immigrants, and to combat racism and antisemitism.

An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious World of Late Antiquity
Michael L. Satlow
Princeton University Press

This book uncovers a shared spiritual landscape that stretched beyond the confines of Judaism, Christianity, and the pantheon of Greek and Roman deities.

Encounters: Dialogue, Antisemitism, and the Israeli-Palestinian Divide
Benjamin E. Sax
Bloomsbury Academic

More than a study of antisemitism, the book is both a guide for practitioners of interreligious dialogue and a historical exploration of how Jews and others have defined antisemitism across centuries.

Rites of Empire: Reforming Judaism in Imperial Russia
Ellie Schainker
Oxford University Press

This book explores the religious reform impulse among Jews in the Russian Empire, moving beyond the narrative of Russian Jewry as Orthodox or secular, and demonstrating how many Russian Jews sought a synthesis between modernity and religious Judaism.

Older Jews and the Holocaust: Persecution, Displacement, and Survival
Christine Schmidt, Elizabeth Anthony, and Joanna Sliwa, editors
Wayne State University Press in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

This landmark book brings together sixteen scholars to explore the experiences of older Jewish adults before, during, and after the Holocaust and challenge the narratives focused solely on destruction.

Unity and Disunity in Isaiah
Ethan Schwartz
Wipf and Stock

This book offers a serious yet accessible overview of the contemporary scholarly debate about how the book of Isaiah was written.

Building and Consoling a Nation, The Yiddish Historians in Their Own Words. Selected Writings Newly Translated into Engish
Mark L. Smith
Academic Studies Press
Open Access

Before the Holocaust, when writing Jewish history in Yiddish was audacious, the “Yiddish historians” pioneered in nation-building – then, in consoling the survivors. This book offers 49 examples of these histories.

The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews' Campaign for Citizenship
David Sorkin
Yale University Press

This book is the first systematic study of the politics of emancipation in Europe and the United States.

Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism
Simone Stirner
Fordham University Press

A comparative study that advances a new understanding of post-Holocaust poetry by centering the relation between poetic form and the affective experience of grief.

Recipient of a 2025 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Sanctioned Bigotry: A Documentary History of Antisemitism in the United States
Britt P. Tevis, editor
Yale University Press

This book illuminates the history of antisemitism in the United States from 1654 to 2024 through thematically-organized and annotated primary sources, showing how Jews have challenged inequality and negotiated their place in America, both individuals and collectively.

The Polish Exile: Chabad Hasidism in the Interwar Years
Wojciech Tworek
McGill-Queen’s University Press

This book explores how Chabad Hasidism reinvented itself in interwar Poland, adapting to ideological and political upheavals while shaping the movement’s post-Holocaust global revival.

When She Remembered: Seven Women Who Transformed French Holocaust Memory
Ashley Valanzola,
Indiana University Press
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This book showcases an intertwined group of seven influential women, both well-known and lesser-known, who shaped the production of Holocaust memory in France from 1945 to the present.

Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100
Kalman Weiser
Wayne State University Press

A history of how YIVO carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement in America while remaining true to its eastern European Yiddishist, Diaspora nationalist ethos.

Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes: American Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel, 1963–2018
Amy Weiss
Oxford University Press

This book examines the evolution of the relationship between American Jews and evangelicals, arguing that Jewish interfaith partnerships with evangelicals developed as a necessary, adaptive strategy to deal with the shifting American political landscape.

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Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Yale University Press

The first full-length biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan, the celebrated and complex American Jewish religious personality of the 20th century, this book explores what made him tick.

Judaism Mediated: Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts
Laura Yares and Sharon Avni
NYU Press

This book explores how Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism through participation in cultural, digital, and leisurely spaces. It examines audience engagements with five different Jewish cultural arts settings.

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