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Podcast: New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episode: Roslyn Weiss, "Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings" (Library of the Jewish People, 2023)
Description: Today I talked to Roslyn Weiss, editor of Hasdai Crescas: Collected Writings (Library of the Jewish People, 2023).Hasdai Crescas spent his life in public service - as a rabbi and community leader in desperate times in 14th-century Spain. Despite having limited time for writing, he produced several important works, which Collected Writings presents in their entirety. The first of these, Epistle to the Jews of Avignon, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish riots in Aragon in 1391, chronicling the unimaginable horrors the Jewish communities endured - mass conversions, suicides, deaths, and the loss of great To...