Derek Penslar discusses Chaim Nachman Bialik's Kishinev poems, and what they have meant to him in the past and today.

Critical Sources

Derek Penslar

Vanessa Ochs discusses Shabbat tables,missing chairs, and new or remade rituals that emerged in the wake of October 7.

Vanessa Ochs

Arie Dubnov considers Moshe Dayan's 1956 eulogy in the memory of Ro'i Rotberg, who was killed by Palestinians on a kibbutz in the south of Israel to ask what that iconic speech tells us about neighbors, borders, and the Israeli nation-building project.

Arie Dubnov

Drawing on a comparison to activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Michal Kravel-Tovi explores how civil societies in Israel and elsewhere confront the absence of state structures.

Michal Kravel-Tovi

Elisheva Baumgarten discusses the ever changing concept of “Home” through two different medieval texts about the Jews who settled in Speyer, Germany.

Elisheva Baumgarten

Religion & Spirituality

Judaism

The Critical Sources podcast series features Jewish studies scholars discussing a source that matters to them, offering a window into how scholars seek evidence, ask questions, and interpret the past and present. 

Host Avinoam Patt asks five different scholars to discuss a source—a poem, a speech, an object—that’s been on their mind since the October 7 massacre in southern Israel and in the months of war following it. How did they think about it before October 7, and what has it meant to them since?

The Critical Sources podcast series is produced with support from Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies and Temple University’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History.

Derek Penslar

Critical Sources

More episodes from "Critical Sources"

Derek Penslar

Vanessa Ochs

Arie Dubnov

Michal Kravel-Tovi

Elisheva Baumgarten