The College Commons Podcast

• Jordan D. Rosenblum: You Are What You Eat

  When it comes to pigs, however, maybe you are what you don’t eat… Maybe…Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book, Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (New York University Press, 2024), won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. According to The Wall Street Journal, “’Forbidden’ is an engaging and surprisingly cheerful study of that odd couple of the religious imagination, the Jew and the pig.” In addition, he is the author of Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2020); The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as the co-editor of four volumes: Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food (New York University Press, 2019); Animals and the Law in Antiquity (Brown Judaic Studies, 2021); With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021); and Religious Competition in the Third Century C.E.: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). He is currently working on a the history of kosher controversies.

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• Hannah Pollin-Galay: Yiddish, Vibrant among the Ashes

  Description: Hannah Pollin-Galay reveals the Yiddish of destruction, and its capacity to bring life and meaning.Biography: Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.

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• Joshua Leifer: The Jigsaw Puzzle of American Judaism and its Future

  Description: Complicated contours and tortuous fissures emerge as a picture of the American Jewish experience in Tablets Shattered.Biography: Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. He is a columnist for Haaretz. His essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024), won a National Jewish Book Award. He is currently a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University, where his research sits at the nexus of modern intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Holocaust memory. His dissertation project examines the politics of antisemitism and the crisis of the liberal order.

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• Ayelet Tsabari: “If music be the food of love, play on”

  Love of family, culture, and home, set to the music of Yemenite Jews in Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel.Ayelet Tsabari is the author of Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024. Her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019.Her first book, the story collection The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.She’s the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing.

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• Howard Langer: A Lost World in a New World

  Novelist Howard Langer transplants a fictional Hasidic Dynasty to the heart of segregated America, to discover a truly New World.Biography: Howard Langer was born in New York and brought up on the west side of Manhattan. His father served on the U.S.S. Missouri and was present at the Japanese surrender in 1945. His mother taught reading in Spanish Harlem for over thirty years. Howard attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A.in English from the University of Toronto, where he studied Shakespeare with the great scholar-poet Sheldon Zitner, who first published his remarkable books of poetry at age 75, decades after Howard graduated.Howard won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate. He ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable and his most notable case involved a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that had abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly. The case restored to the victims all that had been taken by the telemarketers. His pro bono work has been recognized by the Philadelphia Bar Association and Community Legal Services among others. His text on Antitrust law, The Competition Law of the United States, is currently in its fourth edition. He has published a number of short non-fiction pieces in recent years. Publications.He began writing The Last Dekreptizer in 2021 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunder’s presentation, Howard began writing the next morning what eventually morphed into the novel.Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.

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