Covers of the books mentioned in the post
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Summer Readings: CJS Faculty Recommendations

Each year we ask our CJS faculty to share which books they will be reading over the summer or which ones they recommend. Below are their suggestions:

Ayala Fader

  • K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularisum, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019) 
  • Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016)
  • Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (New York, Dutton, 2024)

Emanuel Fiano

  • Mira Balberg, Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023)
  • Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer, With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press 2023)

Hagit Halperin

  • Operation Babylon by Shlomo Hillel
  • The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by David Grossman.

Amy Levine-Kennedy

  • Times Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War by Jeremy Eichler, a book about “the power of music as culture’s memory” and “an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.” 

Daniel Soyer

  • Stephane Gerson, Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025)
  • Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (New York: Harper-Perennial, 2007)
  • Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2008)

Magda Teter

  • Dina Danon’s The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (2020), 
  • Devin Naar’s Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (2016)
  • Krista N. Dalton’s How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity (2025)
  • Simcha Gross’s Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity (2024)

Rabbi Katja Vehlow

  • Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia,from Revolution to Autocracy By Julia Ioffe