On Blood Libel: Magda Teter and Ruth Franklin

Magda Teter and Ruth Franklin talk about Teter’s new book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, in which Teter examines how the myth of blood libel emerged in medieval Europe, and spread with the invention of the printing press and persists today.

Magda Teter is professor of history and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. The author of Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation and Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland, she has received support from the John Simon Guggenheim and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundations, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation, among others. She has published numerous articles in English, Polish, and Hebrew, and serves on the editorial boards of Polin, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Association for Jewish Studies Review. She is also a co-founder and editor of the Early Modern Workshop. She worked on Blood Libel during her Cullman Center Fellowship in 2017-2018, as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow.

​Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at the New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in biography, a Leon Levy fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2012-2013.

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