AJS Honors Its Authors

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Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time
Victoria Aarons, Holli Levitsky, and Hilene Flanzbaum, editors
Academic Studies Press

This original collection of essays written by scholars and poets explores the life and work of Hyam Plutzik, whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change during the Holocaust and WW II.

The Story's Not Over Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives
Victoria Aarons
Wayne State University Press

This edited collection considers Jewish women graphic novelists and the richly figured ways in which Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place, or, the spaces—emotional, geographical, psychological—that women inhabit.

Mother's Milk: Essays on Child-reading, the Household and the Making of Jewish Culture
Deena Nechama Aranoff
Indiana University Press

This book proposes centering the earliest phases of child-rearing in the history of Jewish cultural production arguing that some of the most enduring aspects of Jewish culture are produced in the household and in the context of family relations.

Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy
Yaron Ayalon
Brill

A new history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the 18th century, focusing on leadership, charity, and literacy.

Judaism, History, and the Environment: Climate Change and Natural Disasters
Dean Phillip Bell
Bloomsbury

This book places Jewish environmental history into conversation with contemporary thinking about history, religion, and the environment to suggest new ways to understand and respond to contemporary climate change and natural disasters.

Emmanuel Levinas and His Interlocutors
Hanoch Ben Pazi
Academic Studies Press

This book creates philosophical dialogues between Emmanuel Levinas and other thinkers and writers; some are based on Levinas's actual interlocutors, while others are imagined philosophical, theological and ethical conversations.

National and Transnational Paths of Latin American Jews: Modernity, Community, Society, and the State
Judit E. Bokser Liwerant
Brill

The book studies Jewish life in Latin America with a global perspective, through a dynamic past-present timeline. It combines the national, regional and transnational dimensions by analyzing central crossing axes: the national within the diasporic, and the transnational dialectically traversing both.

Jewish Law: New Perspectives
Yonatan Y. Brafman and Suzanne Last Stone, editors
De Gruyter

This collection combines the detailed work characteristic of scholarship on Jewish law with an orientation towards its broader academic and cultural significance.

Moses Maimonides: A Very Short Introduction
Ross Brann
Oxford University Press

This book examines the interrelation of Moses Maimonides' intellectual, literary, communal, and professional ventures and how he moved seamlessly between specialized, private, and public Jewish and Muslim spheres.

Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices
Adam Chalom and Jodi Kornfeld, editors
Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press

An anthology of the most important ideas and essays of Humanistic Judaism, with clear answers to "How can you be Jewish and celebrate Judaism if you don't believe in God?"

Modern Jewish Ethics Since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, & Issues
Jonathan K. Crane, Emily Filler, and Mira Beth Wasserman, editors
Brandeis University Press

Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.

How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity
Krista N. Dalton
Princeton University Press

This book demonstrates that early rabbis were not an insular specialist group, but rather were embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety, with social relationships which sustained the production of rabbinic expertise.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World
Dina Danon and Nancy E. Berg, editors
University of Pennsylvania Press

This book investigates the lives of Jews among Muslims in the modern age, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire and after its demise.

American Jewish Year Book 2023
Arnold Dashefsky and Ira M. Sheskin, editors
Springer Nature

Continuation of a reference work spanning 1899 to the present; includes access to major review articles and population statistics written by prominent scholars and practitioners.

Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust
Rachel B. Deblinger
Indiana University Press

This book expands our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of American discourse by highlighting American Jewish communal narratives in the wake of World War II.

Ben Hecht's Theatre of Jewish Protest
Garrett Eisler
Rutgers University Press

This book is an historical study of playwright Ben Hecht’s stage works championing Jewish causes during the World War II era. It also features full texts of the plays themselves, including We Will Never Die and A Flag is Born.

The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation
Angela Roskop Erisman
Cambridge University Press
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This book takes a new look at the literary history of the Torah and the character of Moses by studying the genres used to write the complaint episodes.

Jewish Studies and the Gospel of St John, editors
Zev Garber and Kenneth L. Hanson
Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Topics explore the Fourth Gospel in regard to the origins of Christian anti-Judaism/antisemitism, though other exegetical treatments from a Jewish frame of reference are presented.

Reading across Cultures: Translating Romances, Fables, and Poetry in Medieval Ashkenaz
Caroline Gruenbaum
Cornell University Press

This book explores Hebrew translations of Old French and German tales by medieval Ashkenazi Jews, revealing how these "secular" stories—drawn from Christian and classical sources—reflect a shared literary culture in medieval Europe.

Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice
Chaya T. Halberstam
Oxford University Press

The first book on the trial story motif in ancient Jewish literature, from the trial of Jesus to Talmudic case reports. It traces a consistent counter-tradition of judges and judgment entangled in the messy world of relationship and affect.

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction
Naama Harel
Rutgers University Press

This book critically explores the entanglements between Jewishness, gender, and animality and its manifestation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Through interdiscursive analysis and close readings, the effeminate Jew is examined vis-à-vis the animalized woman.

On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death
Roni Henig
University of Pennsylvania Press

This book is a critique of the discourse of language revival in modern Hebrew literature, while exploring the figurative discourse of revival in the work of Hebrew authors and thinkers working between 1890 and 1920.

After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World
Marc D. Herman
University of Pennsylvania Press

This books offers a new perspective on medieval Jewish legal thought and its integration in the wider Islamic world. Legal theory in medieval Islamic lands is analyzed and reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law.

Grounded Spirituality: Aspects of Rabbinic Culture in its Late Antique Context
Marc Hirshman
Oxford University Press

This book examines a series of themes engaged by rabbinic literature including primacy of learning, philosophy, mysticism , love and universalism and the relevance of its contemporary study.

Imagining Early American Jews
Michael Hoberman
Oxford University Press
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This book focuses on how popular audiences learn about early Jewish American history, looking closely at contemporary historical novels, museum curation, and genealogy as modes of historical inquiry—and mythology.

Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine
Ofer Idels
Rutgers University Press

Exploring Hebrew culture’s selfhood and ideology through the lens of modern sports, this study uncovers Zionism’s marginalization of athletics and offers a historiographical reconsideration of the embodied essence of the “New Jew.”

Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations
Sheila E. Jelen, Hannah Holtschneider, Peter J. Davies, and Christoph Thonfeld
Palgrave

This book considers one of the most intriguing, but still under-researched, aspects of testimony: how the remembering and telling of an individual Holocaust survivor changes through time, through shifting contexts and with increasing age.

Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity
Mariusz Kalczewiak
Indiana University Press

This book explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s.

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration
Victoria Khiterer
Purdue University Press

This book discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre.

Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946
Kateřina Králová
Brandeis University Press

The Jews of Greece returned home after having been in hiding, combatants, deportees and refugees during World War II to face isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of a civil war.

Teaching and Learning in Jewish Day Schools
Jonathan B. Krasner, Jon A. Levisohn, and Sharon Avni, editors
Brandeis University Press

This volume directly confronts and questions some bedrock principles of Jewish education and addresses how day schools intersect with broader societal issues, including race, gender, ethnicity and class.

Free-Range Religion: Alternative Food Movements and Religious Life in the United States
Adrienne Krone
The University of North Carolina Press

This book is an ethnographic study of Jewish and Christian alternative food movement organizations that showcases the complex ways that religion lives and works within food production, marketing, and distribution.

Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States
Alexis M. Lerner
University of Toronto Press
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This book is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states.

Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship in Jorge Luis Borges
Yitzhak Lewis
Rutgers University Press

This book demonstrates the relevance of Jewish intellectual traditions for understanding Borges’ views on authorship and literature. It explores Borges’ engagement with the Judaic, contextualizing this within Argentine debates about nationalism and literature, postcolonialism and aesthetics.

Jewish Marital Captivity: The Past, Present, and End of a Historical Abuse
Shulamit S. Magnus
New York University Press

This is the first global, social history of Jewish women's marital captivity, from the 7th century Middle East, across the Jewish medieval world and Jewish ethnicities, to the present in the US and Israel.

Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler
Michael A. Meyer
CCAR Press

Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925–2000) shaped Reform Judaism, advocating for patrilineal descent, interfaith outreach, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality; his legacy is explored in this definitive biography.

Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson
Goldie Morgentaler, editor
Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Soderlind, translators
McGill Queens University Press

This is the translated post-war correspondence of two women Holocaust survivors, Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson, friends since childhood, who became acclaimed Holocaust novelists in Yiddish and Swedish.

Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
Sharon Ann Musher
NYU Press
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This book provides a window into the lives of American Jewish women in New York City and Palestine during the interwar period by tracing the journey of Hadassah Kaplan, second daughter of Reconstructionism founder Mordecai Kaplan.

Antisemitism, an American Tradition
Pamela S. Nadell
W.W. Norton

This book investigates the manifestations of Jew hatred in the US, starting with its roots in colonial times and continuing to today.

Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors' Voices and Their Future in Challenging Times
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Wolf Gruner, and Miriam Offer, editors
Bloomsbury

Close to a time when there will be no more survivors to speak about their suffering, this innovative study takes much-needed stock of the past, present and future of Holocaust testimony.

Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Ofer Ashkenazi, editors
SUNY Press

The volume highlights the significant role of photography in modern Jewish history and memory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, it offers innovative approaches to central themes in modern Jewish history.

New Directions in Israeli Media: Film, Television & Digital Content
Yaron Peleg, Eran Kaplan, and Ido Rosen, editors
University of Texas Press

This book explores how globalization, digital platforms, and technological innovation have transformed Israeli cinema, television, and online content into a dynamic force on the international stage.

New Hebrews: Making National Culture in Zion
Yaron Peleg
Cambridge University Press

This book considers the making of early Zionist culture through innovations in language, literature, space, identity, art and music, and the controversial legacies of these innovations today.

Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War against Israel and the Jews
Monty Noam Penkower
Academic Studies Press and Touro University Press

This volume offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.

In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea
Tomer Persico
Eylon Levy, translator
NYU Press

This book examines the central role that the idea that all people were created in the image of God played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes―selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning―a cultural history of the West is explored.

Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of The Mortal Storm
Alexis Esther Pogorelskin
Bloomsbury Press
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This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Europe's Jews on the eve of war.

The Jewish South: An American History
Shari Rabin
Princeton University Press

This book offers a panoramic view, from European colonization to today, of a group of people with a distinctive religious heritage and a southern history older than the United States itself.

Adventures of Rabbah & Friends: The Talmud’s Strange Tales and Their Readers
James Adam Redfield
Brown Judaic Studies

This book takes a new reader-centered approach to some of the Talmud’s most challenging stories, illustrating how these tales have interacted with diverse interpretive frameworks from ancient myth to modern mysticism.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettosos
Sven-Erik Rose
Brandeis University Press

A study devoted to how authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions.

Unpacking My Father's Bookstore
Laurence Roth
Rutgers University Press
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A critical analysis and personal account detailing the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, a microcosm of the LA Jewish community from 1966 to 1994.

Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism
Eli Rubin
Stanford University Press
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A comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism, complete with fresh portraits of its leaders. Combining history, philosophy, and literature in a single narrative, Kabbalah emerges as crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Jewish Philosophy: The Basics
Tamar Rudavsky
Routledge Press (Taylor and Francis)

This book introduces two thousand years of Jewish philosophy, from its earliest inception to the current era. Chapters cover major figures in the medieval, modern and contemporary periods.

The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Scholar: The Unconventional Life and Thought of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838)
David B. Ruderman
De Gruyter Brill

This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jewish engraver, biblical scholar, and translator Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838), who immigrated to London where he resided for some forty years.

An Unorthodox History: British Jews since 1945
Gavin Schaffer
Manchester University Press

This book offers a new postwar history of British Jews, exploring inclusion and exclusion, looking at marginalised groups within Jewish history and culture, and offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, religiosity and Zionism.

Hatred of Jews-A Failure of Holocaust Education?
Melanie Carina Schmoll
BoD
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After October 7, the question almost automatically occurs: Has Holocaust education failed? In comprehensible explanations, this book shows the potential failures in Holocaust education and why the teaching of history still matters.

Jewish Ideas of France: Migration, Diaspora, and Empire
Meredith Scott and Nick Underwood, editors
Routledge

This book explores Jewish experiences in France and the Francophone world through nuanced questions and representations offers an intertwining of perspectives that challenge geographical, chronological, and theoretical boundaries.

Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds
Noam Sienna
Indiana University Press

This book delves into the multifaceted significance of books among North African Jews and sheds light on the intricate interplay between books and the dynamic world in which they existed.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust
Lisa Silverman
Oxford University Press

This book compares the development of antisemitism immediately after the Holocaust in East and West Germany, Austria, and the United States, and introduces the concept of the figural Antisemite.

Devoted Resistance: Jewish Feminist Art in the US and Israel
David Sperber
Brill

This book examines the contribution of the feminist art movement, which has developed in traditional Jewish spheres, demonstrating how art, theology, feminism, and critical thinking interwind.

Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto
Kenneth Stow
Harvard University Press

To guarantee a supply of kosher meat in the Roman Ghetto, despite canonical prohibitions, Jewish butchers collaborated with Christians. This nuanced portrait of inter-religious relations also says much about the Roman Jewish diet.

Blood Libels, Hostile Archives: Reclaiming Interrupted Jewish Lives
Magda Teter
CEU Press

This book reclaims Jewish lives from narratives found in “hostile archives,” produced explicitly to manufacture malicious tales and pass them as “facts.” It explores history and memory in two towns: Trent and Sandomierz, sites of anti-Jewish libels where their legacies still reverberate today.

The Future of American Jewish Pasts
Beth S. Wenger, Lila Corwin Berman, and Deborah Dash Moore, editors
University of Pennsylvania Press

This book imagines the next chapters in the study of American Jewish life. Traditional approaches to American Jewish life are reconceived and new topics explored to present a vision of a rich future for American Jewish studies.

At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Lucas F. W. Wilson
Rutgers University Press

This book reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, were rendered archives of trauma that in turn traumatized members of the second generation.

Recipient of a 2023 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941
Sarah Ellen Zarrow
Cornell University Press
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This book illuminates the work of museologists to preserve the Jewish past and demonstrate Jewish belonging, offering a nuanced understanding of the ways Polish Jews saw their present and dreamed of their future.

Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

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2019