Joshua

M.

Karlip

Joshua M. Karlip is Associate Professor of Jewish History and Herbert S. and Naomi Denenberg Chair of Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, where he has taught both in the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Yeshiva College since 2007.  Karlip also will teach in the newly created Fish Center of Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University.  He also serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Jewish History.  His scholarship to date has focused on the relationship between traditional Judaism and modern secular Jewish movements such as Yiddishism.  He addressed this theme in his critically acclaimed book, The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, published by Harvard University Press in 2013.   Karlip’s forthcoming book, Oyfn Sheydveg: At the Crossroads: Jewish Intellectuals and the Crisis of 1939 (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020) is a critical edition, replete with a full English translation, annotation, and book-length introduction of a Yiddish journal that served as a forum for Jewish intellectuals to react to Nazism. 

Karlip’s current book project, Rabbis in the Land of Atheism: The Struggle to Save Judaism in Bolshevik Russia, tells the untold story of rabbinic resistance to the Soviet Union’s war on religion.  A close reading of rabbinic responsa, sermons, letters, and Hasidic expositions within their historical contexts will lead to a reconstruction of the silenced voices of Soviet rabbis and everyday Jews. It also will disprove the misconception of Soviet Jewish isolation in the interwar years, revealing a transnational network of rabbinic legalists and thinkers who grappled with maintaining the relevance of Jewish law and faith within a militantly atheistic state.