Tel Aviv Review

Jew Bites Dog: Tidbits from the Yiddish Press of Yore

Dr Eddy Portnoy discusses his book “Bad Rabbi and Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press”, a compendium of stories that is at once a quirky and piercing window into the pre-WWII Jewish culture of New York and Warsaw.

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Lessons in Disillusionment: Hans Kohn and the Crisis of Nationalism

Adi Gordon, professor of Jewish and European intellectual histories at Amherst College, discusses his new book “Towards Nationalism’s End”, an intellectual biography of 20th-century nationalism scholar and lapsed Zionist official Hans Kohn.

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Not Just Jihad: Every War Is Holy in Its Own Way

Ron Hassner, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses his book “Religion on the Battlefield”, which explores the place occupied by religious faith and practices in modern warfare.

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Post-Zionism: A Post-Mortem

Eran Kaplan discusses his book “Beyond Post-Zionism”, a critical analysis of an intellectual fad that took the Israeli political and intellectual debate by storm in 1990s, and seems to have disappeared, since then, into thin air.

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All the Middle East’s a Stage, and Jews and Arabs Merely Players

Dr. Lee Perlman discusses his new book, “But Abu Ibrahim, We’re Family!”, exploring several theater productions, all with a joint Jewish-Arab component, as a potential backdrop for peace building.

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Zionesses: Women in Israeli Cinema

Dr. Rachel Harris discusses her new book, “Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema”. How do the evolving representations of women relate to broader changes in Israeli society and culture?

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Rebel with a Cause: The Story of a Legendary Jewish Spy

Sarah Aaronsohn was a young Jewish woman who during the First World War operated a pro-British spy ring under the nose of the Ottoman authorities in Palestine. Her tumultuous life, tragic death, and considerable contribution to the Allied war effort are revisited in a new book.

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Take Notice: The Power of the Unremarkable

How do our linguistic priorities characterize the way we perceive the world, and how do they reinforce cultural norms? Eviatar Zerubavel, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, explains.

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Are We Living in an Unprecedented Age of People Power?

Prof. Erica Chenoweth, a scholar of international relations, says that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of non-violent protests in the world. She knows because she counts them, rigorously; she also counts when they work and why.

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On Hell and Other People: The Enduring Relevance of Existentialism

Dr. Dror Yinon reviews a series of lectures on Existentialism that recently took place at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He lays out the fundamentals of this philosophical tradition and analyzes its ongoing relevance in the age of populism and post-truth.

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