Seforimchatter

Seforimchatter is a podcast for people who care about Jewish books as objects, as texts, and as history. Nachi Weinstein hosts. The guests are rabbis, professors, historians, authors, and editors, and they are given room to talk. Episodes tend to be organized around one thing rather than many. That might be a new edition, a single author, or a single auction catalog. The Radak episode is a good example of the form: an overview of a two-volume Hebrew-English annotated edition published through Feldheim, with Yoram Bogacz, framed by the plain fact that the Hebrew had been out of print and hard to come by for years. A follow-up conversation with a scholar who published an academic study of the same commentary was flagged for the next day. That is the show's habit. It circles a subject from more than one angle. Mini-series appear too, such as one on the life and seforim of Rav Elazar Fleckles, built around a new edition of his work. Those episodes wander into archival territory, including a document describing how communal duties were divided in Prague after a chief rabbi was no longer appointed. Then there is AuctionChatter. Rabbi Moshe Maimon returns for these, and the two work through forthcoming sales from houses including Legacy Judaica and Genazym. They read the catalog lot by lot. A Menashe ben Yisrael Tanakh becomes a short lesson in Amsterdam type and why it was boasted about in Europe. A little-known handbook for scribes, on which names in the verses are sacred and which are not, gets described with obvious affection. Listeners are told when auctions are viewable in person and encouraged to come say hello. SmallTalk is the shorter format, usually keyed to a newly published book, as in the conversation with Rabbi Dr. Yosef Sokol about identity, the experience of living differently in different settings, and what psychological and Torah sources say about that gap. Hebrew and Yiddish terms are used naturally and without translation, so some background helps. Sponsorships are read openly and often relate to the books or auctions under discussion. With more than four hundred episodes, the archive functions as a working reference on the seforim world, and the tone throughout is that of a knowledgeable conversation between people who would be having it anyway.