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Reading the Bible and rabbinic literature to reimagine the bonds between animals. Moving beyond debates about the ethics of animal consumption to focus on animals' intimate lives, Beth A. Berkowitz examines the contribution of religious traditions and sacred texts to contemporary conversations about animals in What Animals Teach us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature (U California Press, 2026). Reading the four "animal family" laws of the Bible alongside their rabbinic interpretations from ancient times to today, she examines the bonds that animals form with each other and reimagines family to include new forms of life and alternative modes of kinship.

Humanitarian politics—and biblical law—tend to take for granted that human interests supersede animal interests and that our moral obligation extends only to avoiding unnecessary suffering, but necessity is determined by humans. What Animals Teach Us About Families looks at animal emotions, animal agency, family diversity, and human response to reconsider the obligations and opportunities the animal family presents.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Beth A. Berkowitz is Professor and Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion, Barnard College

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways.
Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement (U California Press, 2026) explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future.

Hanna Garth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, and coeditor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. In Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (U California Press, 2026), Cindy Any Nguyen examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice. Comprising government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and everyday library readers, this colonial public debated the role of libraries as educational resource, civilizing instrument, and literary heritage. 

Moving beyond procolonial or anticolonial nationalism framings, Bibliotactics advances a relational theory of power that centers public reading culture contextualized within the library infrastructure of the colonial information order. As the first comprehensive history of the colonial and national library in Asia, this book contributes new insights into publicity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the histories of Vietnam, libraries, and information.

Bibliotactics is available open access from Luminosa. Visit here to download a copy for free.

Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

In the midst of profound political changes in late seventh-century Egypt, after the end of Roman hegemony and during Islamic rule, a bishop named John from the city of Nikiu sat down to pen a chronicle. It is a puzzling and fascinating work that reimagines the established Roman genre of Christian world history as a dialectic between a Roman state that often failed to maintain Christian orthodoxy and Roman citizens who attempted to nudge the state in the direction of correct theology. In The Chronicle of John of Nikiu: Coping with Crisis in Post-Roman Egypt (U California Press, 2025) Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga treats the bishop's text as a historical artifact of Egyptian cultural and intellectual history, one of the last works of an educated elite forced to use the tools of Roman education to tackle the crisis brought on by the end of Roman Egypt. Placing the Chronicle in its broader setting, Yirga positions the text as quintessentially post-Roman, arguing that it was a rearticulation of imperial ideology for and by post-Roman subjects that allowed them to explain and cope with the failure of the Roman state to maintain control of Egypt.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee Knoxville

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.