Antisemitism, an American Tradition with Pamela S. Nadell (Norton, 2025)

Pamela S. Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and is Director of the Jewish Studies Program. A specialist in American Jewish history and women’s history, she teaches a variety of courses in Jewish civilization. Pamela Nadell’s books include America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton, 2019), named Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Reviewed in the New York Times, America’s Jewish Women was praised as “a welcome addition to the American historical canon.”A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Nadell’s other titles include Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1985 (Beacon Press, 1998).She consults for museums including the Weizman National Museum of American Jewish History and the Tree of Life Humanity Center.She lectures widely, frequently appears on podcasts, and has written for, among others, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and Hadassah Magazine. She has testified before Congress about antisemitism on college campuses several times, most recently in the December 2023 hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. Pamela S. Nadell’s Antisemitism, an American Tradition (2025) argues that antisemitism is not a recent anomaly in the United States but a deep-rooted, recurring feature of American life from colonial times to the present. Nadell traces nearly four centuries of anti-Jewish hatred—from 17th‑century colonial prejudices and religious test oaths, through 19th‑century exclusion, the “high tide” of the 1930s, and into today’s surge—showing how old tropes about “evil Jews” keep reappearing in new forms. She foregrounds the experiences and voices of Jewish men, women, and children, documenting how antisemitism shaped everyday life, opportunities, and communal strategies.The book stresses that antisemitism cuts across politics, race, and religion; it is not confined to one party or movement but has appeared on multiple sides of American society. Alongside chronicling hate, Nadell highlights how Jews fought back—through advocacy, legal action, institution-building, and solidarity with other groups. Rather than treating U.S. antisemitism as a side note to European history, Nadell makes it the central subject across 400 years, insisting it is an “American tradition” in its own right. She explicitly aims to tell the story “through the eyes of its victims,” using personal and communal memories to show impact, not just ideology. The book connects classic Christian anti-Judaism and older stereotypes to modern conspiracy theories, showing how they reinforce each other rather than replacing one another. Antisemitism is often described as a millennia-old hatred rooted in late antique and medieval Christian Europe.Nadell’s contribution is to relocate and reframe that story within U.S. history. She demonstrates that when Europeans immigrated to America, they brought these ancient prejudices with them, and those ideas became embedded in American institutions and culture from the start. By documenting persistent patterns—test oaths, quotas, job discrimination, propaganda, violence—she challenges narratives of American exceptionalism that treat antisemitism as marginal or limited to extreme moments. Her work helps scholars and policymakers see contemporary spikes not as isolated outbreaks but as the latest phase of a long-standing American pattern. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Liz DeWolf speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Ex Situ,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows an American living in Istanbul, navigating the end of a relationship, alongside the appeal and alienation of living abroad in a layered, complex city. Liz also discusses her process and revision methods, the themes she often returns to, and her work as a nonfiction book editor. Liz DeWolf writes fiction and edits nonfiction books about politics and culture. Originally from Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. Her fiction has appeared in The Common, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. ­­Read Liz’s story in The Common here.Learn more about her work here.*The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a 2025 Reese’s Book Club pick and longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement. XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony (Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li argues that the drama gave form to experiences that had remained unspoken, while social media allowed personal testimony to circulate without institutional permission. The book is part of the new short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’. In this podcast, Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley talks with Dr Li about television, empathy, digital testimony, and the opportunities and inequalities within Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Themes include: Why Taiwan’s #MeToo movement came late - the gap between progressive laws and the cultural conditions that still discourage survivors from speaking.The ‘perfect victim’ - how Wave Makers challenges the assumption that only women who conform to conventional ideas of femininity deserve belief and justice.The feminist snap - why the line ‘Let’s not just let it go this time’ gave viewers a language for recognising accumulated injustice.Empathy and narrative identity - how fictional characters help audiences interpret their own experiences and respond to others.Digital testimony and affective publics - how social media weakens traditional gatekeeping while introducing new risks and struggles for attention.Women’s solidarity - how the drama examines agency, family relationships and the historical expectation that women define themselves through men.The limits of visibility - why migrant domestic workers remain especially vulnerable and often unable to speak without risking their livelihoods or immigration status. One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that art can give structure to what Raymond Williams called ‘emergent feelings’: experiences without an accepted public language. Through recognisable characters and an accessible story, Wave Makers transformed a familiar instruction to remain silent – ‘just let it go’ – into a shared refusal. The podcast also considers how the hashtag changes testimony. Survivors can now address audiences directly, rather than relying entirely on journalists and other institutional gatekeepers. Yet visibility remains uneven. Stories involving celebrities and senior politicians attract attention more readily than those of migrant domestic workers, who may face dismissal, loss of visa status or deportation if they speak publicly. Li is cautious about treating Wave Makers as a formula for political change. No television programme can produce a movement on demand. Popular culture can nevertheless offer language and recognition when audiences are ready to respond. The story of Wave Makers is ultimately about the unpredictable movement between fiction and public life: a drama helped people recognise experiences they had been encouraged to dismiss, while digital platforms allowed the words ‘me too’ to become testimony, solidarity and action.Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary Rawnsley) of the short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’. Dr Xinling Li is an independent scholar based in New York. He studied at Cambridge University.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Thomas Schatz returns us to an era when a newly enriched movie industry rediscovered its creative energy, and indie went mainstream without losing its edge.Between 1989 and 2004, all the old studios either merged with other media giants or were swallowed up by even bigger diversified behemoths, leading to an infusion of money and fast-tracking the digital revolution. Yet even as CGI and piles of cash fueled a new breed of blockbusters—Batman and Titanic, Toy Story and The Lord of the Rings—an indie ethos permeated the industry. And at the crossroads of commodification and aesthetic vision, auteurs ranging from Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino to Sofia Coppola and Ang Lee became household names.Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System's Last Hurrah with Thomas Schatz (U California Press, 2026) traces these trajectories, which increasingly clashed and commingled during the 1990s and early 2000s, resulting in nothing short of a new golden age—and perhaps the last gasp of the century-old studio system. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s (Brepols, 2026) takes one of those fundamental questions - how does knowledge circulate? - and says, like others: we must look at the media technologies through which that knowledge not only circulates, but is transformed. This edited collection does that by looking at the history of the projection lantern across the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The projection lantern, also known as the 'magic lantern', 'optical lantern', and 'sciopticon', amongst other names, is part of a long history of media technologies and techniques that have allowed users to project images onto surfaces for audiences to view. The optical lantern helped the projected image become a ubiquitous form of media, known by wide and diverse publics during a wave of 19th century media popularisation. From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, the optical lantern was an immensely important tool to disseminate knowledge both within and outside academia, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. This volume maps the lantern-illustrated lecture from various perspectives, with contributions on how to research historical audiences, on the spaces where projection was used, on the role of images as evidence, on the shifts in pedagogy that were supported by the projected image, and on the archives and sources that provide access to material that allows an understanding of the multiple ways in which the medium was used.Projecting Knowledge was edited by Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves, Nico de Klerk, Frank Kessler, and Jamilla Notebaard. Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves is a historian interested in the cultural dimensions of media, science, and technology. She earned her PhD at Utrecht University within the research project Projecting Knowledge, producing the first large-scale survey of public lantern lectures in Dutch society from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. She currently holds a postdoctoral position in the Technology, Innovation & Society group at Eindhoven University of Technology.Nico de Klerk is an independent researcher and archivist in the field of film and media history. Between 2018 and 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the project Projecting Knowledge at Utrecht University, which partly overlapped with his research for the project Educational Film Practices in Austria, 1918-1970, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut for Digital History, Vienna. His current research focuses on the film-illustrated lecture in the Netherlands between c. 1910 and 1940.Frank Kessler is professor emeritus of Media History at Utrecht University. He is one of the founders of KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and the KINtop – Studies in Early Cinema book series. His research interests focus on the emergence of cinema as a multi-facetted medium and a cultural form, as well as on nineteenth-century visual media. His most recent research is dedicated the optical lantern as a tool for knowledge communication.Jamilla Notebaard is a historian whose doctoral research explored the use of the magic lantern in Dutch academic education at the end of the nineteenth century. Her work reflects a deep interest in the history of science, particularly in the epistemic role of images in shaping knowledge within scholarly communities and beyond. She investigates how visual representations function as carriers of meaning, influencing both collective understanding and individual perception. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the inside flap:“In this lucid and inventive work, Ian Buchanan argues that the pivotal concepts ‘assemblage’ and ‘affect,’ which were separated at birth, need to be reunited. Indeed, it is only by bringing them back together that we can fully understand their meaning. of Assemblage Theory and Affect (Bloomsbury, 2026) proposes three agenda-setting arguments:1. Affect is a function of desire—its powers are the powers we attribute to desire. As such, like desire it should be considered a psychical agency. The assemblage, the body without organs and the abstract machine are all components of this psychical agency.2. Affect is a capacitating power—it empowers us to meet life. Affect is not the measure of our response to a given stimulus, it is rather the capacity we have to respond to a stimulus in the way that we do. This is the essential argument of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project which is a kind of survivor’s guide to late capitalism.3. The capacitating power of affect depends upon the combinations of bodies without organs and abstract machines that we have been able to put together by means of the assemblages available to us. This is what Deleuze means by an ethics of desire.”Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale [email protected] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kenneth R. Feinberg's What is Life Worth? New Edition with Reflections 25 Years After 9/11 (Rivertown Books, 2026) shares the story that inspired the acclaimed motion picture Worth, told by the man behind the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a moving saga of national tragedy and healing.Now with the author’s reflections on how today’s hyper-partisan America needs to unite to face our greatest challenges. Just days after September 11, 2001, attorney Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Congress to administer the federal 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a unique effort to compensate families victimized in the terror attacks. He was given an unlimited budget and total authority over how to spend it.Feinberg soon found himself under attack and mired in controversy. Traumatized and angry, some families threatened to sue over awards they considered skimpy; others were insulted by the very idea that a dollar value could be placed on the lives of their loved ones. Feinberg spent three years meeting 9/11 survivors and families, hearing their stories and absorbing their grief. Gradually, Feinberg earned the respect and support of the 9/11 families, over 97 percent of whom chose to participate in the fund rather than sue. What Is Life Worth? shares the lessons Feinberg learned about the power of compassion and the limits of any effort to place a value on human life. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.Mack Paul cofounded Morningstar Law Group, where he is a partner. He teaches land use law at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Mack served as chair of the Greater Triangle Regional Council and has written extensively about the development of the Triangle Region.Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.Roxanne L. Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge; Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman) Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (all Princeton).Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.YouTube Channel: here  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.