About The Last Dekrepitzer

The fiddler busking in the Columbus Circle subway station in 1965 is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole survivor of the obscure Dekrepitzer Hasidic sect known before the war for its rebbes’ fiddling. The Last Dekrepitzer follows the life and spiritual quest of Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher a/k/a Sam Lightup, from his isolated shtetl in the mountains of southern Poland, where he is brought up to be the future rebbe, to the wharves in Naples, where he jams with Black soldiers waiting to ship home at the end of the war. Dressing him in the uniform and dog tags of an AWOL soldier, they smuggle him home to rural Mississippi. He lives for years among the Blacks, speaks Black English, preaches and plays the blues with the Brown Sugar Ramblers trio. His marriage to a Black woman, Lula Curtin, legal by Jewish law though forbidden under Mississippi law, results in a cross burning that forces them to flee to Manhattan. He plays on the streets of Harlem and Midtown with the Reverend Gary Davis, the great blind guitarist whose mission is saving souls for the next world. Shmuel Meir’s devout wife, though she knows herself to be the Dekrepitzer Rebbitzen, is spurned by the Jewish community. Through it all, Shmuel Meir fiddles his prayers in defiance of God. But God gives the Dekrepitzer Rebbe no peace.

About Howard Langer

Howard Langer’s novel, The Last Dekrepitzer, won a 2025 National Jewish Book Award. It is his first novel. He began writing The Last Dekreptizer in 2021 when he was 70 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunder’s presentation, Howard began writing the next morning.

Howard graduated the City College of New York in 1977. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A.in English from the University of Toronto. While Howard won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate, he ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable. His pro bono work has been recognized by the Philadelphia Bar Association and Community Legal Services among others. His text, The Competition Law of the United States, is in its fourth edition. He has published a number of short non-fiction pieces in recent years in Tablet and the Algemeiner.

In Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together (St. Martin’s Press / On Sale: August 26, 2025), Ilana Kurshan reveals how literature weaves an invisible thread through the tapestry of family life. Kurshan, a mother of five living in Jerusalem, struggles to balance her passion for books with her responsibilities as a parent. Gradually she learns how to relate to reading not as a solitary pursuit and an escape from the messiness of life, but rather as a way of forging connection and teaching independence. Introducing her children to sacred and secular literature—including the beloved classics of her childhood—she becomes both a better mother and a more compassionate reader. 

Chief among the books Kurshan reads with her children is the Torah, whose ancient wisdom illuminates her family’s path. Children of the Book, structured in five parts corresponding to the first five books of the Bible, traces the profound parallels between the biblical narrative and the daily rhythms of parenthood – from the first picture books that create the world through language for little babies, to the bittersweet moment our children begin reading on their own, leaving us behind, atop the mountain, as they enter new lands without us. 

A luminous meditation on how shared stories become the foundation for family bonds, Children of the Book celebrates a life richly lived through literature.

About the Author

Ilana Kurshan��is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem, serving as a translator, a foreign rights agent, and as the book reviews editor of��Lilith��magazine. Kurshan is the author of��If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize��for Jewish literature.

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

What does Judaism teach about killer robots? Cultured meat? Genetically engineered people? What does it mean to rest on Shabbat when electronics are embedded all around? In a pandemic, whose life should be saved first? Can a person be declared dead after the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart continues to beat on life support? How can ancient religious norms address the radically transformed reality of a technocentric society? In this volume, Torah and Technology: Circuits, Cells, and the Sacred Path, Rabbi Daniel Nevins draws on 3,000 years of biblical and rabbinic texts to respond to pressing questions of contemporary life. These essays are presented in the form of responsa, or rabbinic guidance for Jews committed to practicing halakhah, but they are also of interest to any person who confronts ethical quandaries in our technocentric times.

Rabbi Nevins spoke with��Dr. David Kraemer,��Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, to discuss the book and how the responsa are a window into Jewish history—material and scientific history, culture, politics, society, and more. They explore such topics as the impact of religious responses to technological change in the broader society; what most worries them about emerging technologies; and how the Torah itself will change as a result of this encounter.

About the Author

Rabbi Daniel Nevins is Head of School at Golda Och Academy, a PK–12 school in West Orange, New Jersey. Previously, he served as Pearl Resnick Dean of the 91�첥 Rabbinical School, and as senior rabbi of Adat Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Rabbi Nevins has been a member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards for 25 years, and is known for landmark halakhic opinions related to sexuality, disability, bioethics, and technology.

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin E. Judd is a specialist in Jewish, transnational, and gender history, with particular interests in Holocaust studies, the history of antisemitism, the history of religion, the history of leadership, and the history of migration. She is the author of Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933.

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

In a covert laboratory under the streets of Tel Aviv, Akiva Cohen, an Israeli scientist, clones Hitler from old samples of his DNA. Akiva wants to change the world for the good; but he is betrayed by those who want to use this new Hitler for unimaginable terror. Akiva is plunged into a desperate struggle to stay alive and salvage his dream, leading to a trail of murders across the country, collaboration with Hamas terrorists, and the uncovering of a devastating conspiracy at the highest levels of Israeli society.��Perfect Enemy��is an exciting, suspenseful thriller that poses uncomfortable questions about trauma and revenge, the desire for peace, religious extremism, and the schisms of the Middle East.

About the Author

Alex Sinclair��is chief content officer at��, and an adjunct lecturer at the��. He has written and spoken widely on Jewish education, Israel-Diaspora relations, and Israeli politics, in both academic and popular contexts. He has worked or consulted for many of the finest Jewish educational and communal institutions in North America, Europe and Israel, including the Hartman Institute, the Schechter Institute, Hebrew Union College, and Hebrew College. Most notably, he served as a full-time or adjunct member of faculty for almost two��decades��at 91�첥. His first book, published in 2013,��Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and his debut novel,��Perfect Enemy, was published in November 2023. He holds an MA(Oxon) and MSt from Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD from Hebrew University. He lives with his wife and three children in Modi’in, Israel.

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

Dr. Rachel Gordan joins us to discuss her book Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. But by the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. 

About the Author

Rachel Gordan is an assistant professor of religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, where she is Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society. She received her PhD at Harvard and her BA at Yale.

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery��is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture.
��
Each essay presents readers with the extraordinary production and consumption of culture by Polish Jews in literature, film, cabaret, theater, the visual arts, architecture, and music. They show how this process was defined by a reciprocal cultural exchange that flourished between cities at the periphery—from Lwów and Wilno to Kraków and Łódź—and international centers like Warsaw, thereby illuminating the place of Polish Jews within urban European cultures.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Halina Goldberg is a professor of musicology and director of Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, editor of a special issue of the Musical Quarterly devoted to Jewish culture and music, and director of the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź.

Nancy Sinkoff is a professor of Jewish studies and history and academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the author of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History and Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. 

Part of Between the Lines: Author Conversations from The Library of 91�첥

Professor Arnold Eisen, chancellor emeritus and professor of Jewish Thought at 91�첥 and author Daniel Ross Goodman discuss��Soloveitchik’s Children, a book that delves into how three of Soloveitchik’s most influential disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy—Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, Rabbi David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks—learned from and adapted his teachings in their own ways, while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.

About the Author

Rabbi Daniel Ross Goodman, a western Massachusetts native, earned his PhD from 91�첥 in 2021 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His previous books include the 2020 novel��A Single Life��and his 2020 book on religion and film,��Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.��His new book,��Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America,��published this summer by the University of Alabama Press, is an adaptation of his 91�첥 doctoral dissertation, which he wrote under now-emeritus��91�첥 Professor of Jewish Thought Alan Mittleman. He is thrilled to be back at 91�첥 (at least virtually!) for this book talk this evening.��