When Deborah Friedell and Adam Thirlwell met twenty years ago, they started a discussion about Jewish identity they are still puzzling over today. Revisiting Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), an American take on British antisemitism and the escapist allure of aliyah, Adam and Deborah discuss the nuances of Jewish experience and novel-writing across the A ... Show More
Oct 29
How Prediction Markets Work
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ... Show More
1 h
Oct 24
Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ... Show More
53m 35s
Oct 22
How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson al ... Show More
53m 25s
Jul 2015
#3 - Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem - Nostalgia and Naivety in Honor Culture
We’re halfway through Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem, the history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, you might want to do that for background, but this episode is an exploratory aside that can stand on its ow ... Show More
1h 45m
May 2024
The Emotional Legacy of the Holocaust with Judy Batalion
In this episode of Just the Right Book, Judy Batalion joins Roxanne to discuss her book, The Light of Days, out now from William Morrow & Company.
Buy the book from RJ Julia:The Light of Days - Judy BatalionSign up for our podcast newsletterJust The Right Book SubscriptionPromo C ... Show More
56m 33s
Aug 2022
HOW NATHANIEL DREW REINVENTS HIS CULTURAL IDENTITY (JUDAISM)
In episode #14 of Roots of Humanity, Nathaniel Drew, a 24-year-old YouTuber with Jewish ancestry, defines cultural identity as a living thing that shapeshifts over time. Drew questions his friend about cultural immersion, an intergenerational drive for them both, and about how Je ... Show More
39m 21s