New Books Network

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity—and the ultimate boundary transgression.

Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this book, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

Join YIVO for a discussion of Gollance's book with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

Buy the book

This book talk originally took place on October 26, 2023.
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Winston Churchill was born in a palace and was given a funeral worthy
of a king. His family had enjoyed an intimate association with the
British monarchy stretching back centuries. As King Edward VIII said of
him, 'I have never met anyone of royal blood who exemplified in such
high degree the ideal of the 'good king.'

Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Churchill's relationship with the various kings and
queens he served during his long political career, from young journalist
under Edward VII, through his dramatic fall from grace in the First
World War under George V, the frustrations of appeasement during the
interwar period and his relationship with Edward VIII during the
abdication crisis of 1936, culminating in his Finest Hour in the Second
World War under George VI and the coda of Churchill's public service to
his final monarch: Queen Elizabeth II.

Ted Powell analyses
Churchill's writings on monarchy and his role in preserving and
establishing monarchies outside Britain. At the core of the book is a
series of studies of Churchill's relationships with the monarchs he
served. These studies offer a two-way perspective, examining both
Churchill's view of individual monarchs and their attitudes towards him.
They shed light not only on Churchill's career but also on the changing
role of the monarchy in 20th century Britain.
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The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they
immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full
legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights
worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila
Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that
both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed
repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the
public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were
Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The
answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine
Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could
exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law
changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political
ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with
today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman
concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions
about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution.
The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law
and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and,
often, unsettling debates about who is American.

Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish
migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a
Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National
University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

William E.
Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish
American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140.

Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum

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Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. It argues that the Saturnalia, an educational dialogue from the fifth century ce, does not view its Greco-Roman models as hegemonic sources of authority but engages with these texts in dynamic and critical ways. In particular, Macrobius responds to both the literary and ethical agendas of his predecessors, a strategy which is termed ethical allusion. The book explores this intertwining of moral, social, and aesthetic commentary in the Saturnalia’s allusions to authors such as Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, and Virgil. It also examines Macrobius’ ethical allusions alongside the aesthetic practices and moral thought of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, and sheds light on the Saturnalia’s role in pioneering a late antique intellectual culture at once less hierarchical and less engaged with civic life.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Katherine Krauss is Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent.

Key Discussion Points & Timeline

Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners.

Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on.

Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter.

Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile.

Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners.

The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps.

Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails.

How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology.

The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Links & Resources Mentioned

The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.

Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction).

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