The Podcast of Jewish Ideas (Torah in Motion)

Welcome to The Podcast of Jewish Ideas!!

In this episode JJ introduces himself, the podcast, and what we hope to do together in the coming episodes, we do hope you enjoy.

In this episode J.J. and Professor Ariel Mayse of Stanford get into the major ideas that set early Hasidism apart, and how those ideas inform Hasidism to this day.


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Ariel Evan Mayse joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, after previously serving as the Director of Jewish Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan.

Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in Israel. His current research examines the role of language in Hasidism, manuscript theory and the formation of early Hasidic literature, the renaissance of Jewish mysticism in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the relationship between spirituality and law in Jewish legal writings, and the resources of Jewish thought and theology for constructing contemporary environmental ethics.

In this episode Dr. Jon Levenson and JJ get into questions about good, evil, and the Book of Job.


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Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies, began teaching at Harvard in 1988, having previously taught at the University of Chicago and at Wellesley College. His work concentrates on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, including its reinterpretations in the "rewritten Bible" of Second Temple Judaism and rabbinic midrash. In addition, one of his courses deals with the use of medieval Jewish commentaries for purposes of modern biblical exegesis, and another focuses on central works of Jewish theology in the twentieth century. Levenson has a strong interest in the philosophical and theological issues involved in biblical studies, especially the relationship of premodern modes of interpretation to modern historical criticism. Much of his work centers on the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, both in antiquity and in modernity, and he has long been active in Jewish-Christian dialogue. His book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (Yale University Press, 2006) won a National Jewish Book Award and the Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award in the category of Best Book Relating to the Hebrew Bible published in 2005 or 2006. Choice, a publication of the American Library Association, listed Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2012) as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. His latest book is The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016). In all his work, Levenson's emphasis falls on the close reading of texts for purposes of literary and theological understanding.

On this episode JJ and Dr. Shapiro get into the limits of Orthodox theology, as well as The Limits of Orthodox Theology.




Marc B. Shapiro holds the Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton. A graduate of Brandeis (BA) and Harvard (PhD), he is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews and is a popular scholar in residence at synagogues around the world. He has written Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy and The Limits of Orthodox Theology, both of which were National Jewish Book Award Finalists. Other books of his include Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters, and Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History. In 2019 he published Iggerot Malkhei Rabbanan which contains more than thirty years of correspondence with some of the world's most outstanding Torah scholars. He regularly publishes widely read scholarly articles on the Seforim Blog and is currently writing a book on the thought of Rav Kook. Dr. Shapiro leads a number of the Torah in Motion Jewish history trips.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Miriam Goldstein dig into the ideas the animated the Rabbis (and Karaites) of the early Islamic period.

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Miriam Goldstein is a professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A specialist in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts, she focuses on interreligious relations in the medieval Arabic-speaking world as well as Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis. She is author of A Judeo-Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus: The Toledot Yeshu Helene Narrative (Tübingen, in press) and Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (Tübingen, 2011) and is editor of Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (Jerusalem, 2019) andBeyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (Philadelphia, 2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature. Her current major project is a critical edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic commentaries of the Baghdadi Karaite scholar Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani, currently focusing on the books of Genesis and Exodus.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Alter explore the literary approach to the Bible, Dr. Alter's magnificent translation, and the impact of both of these works on the study of Bible in the university and the yeshiva. Also typescenes and how Dr. Alter met his wife at a modern-day well.


Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus
Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the
Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of
Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim
Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has
written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to
the present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.
He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His
twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on
biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of
Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-
length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, Nabokov, and the self-reflexive
tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into ten
different languages. Among his publications over the past thirty
years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka,
Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Imagined Cities (2005), Pen of
Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Art of
Bible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021).
His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary
was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In September 2023 his
biography of Amos Oz will appear.
In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles
Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the
Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the
American Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 the American
Academy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature.
He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and three other institutions.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Derek Penslar get into the evolution of Zionism, and the ideas (or lack of ideas) of Theodore Herzl.

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Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History. He takes a comparative and transnational approach to Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism. Penslar’s books include Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (2006), The Origins of the State of Israel: A Documentary History (with Eran Kaplan, 2011), Jews and the Military: A History (2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020/German ed. 2022), Zionism: An Emotional State (2023) and Unacknolwedged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism (co-edited with Stefan Vogt and Arieh Saposnik, 2023). He is currently writing an international history of the 1948 Palestine War. Penslar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. At Harvard, Penslar is a resident faculty member at The Center for European Studies and as of July will be the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Simkovich dig into the differences between the Pharisees and the Saducees, and air some more second temple laundry.


Dr. Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and the director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She is the author of The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (2016), and Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism (2018), which received the 2019 AJL Judaica Reference Honor Award. Simkovich’s articles have been published in the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal for the Study of Judaism, as well as on online forums such as The Lehrhaus and the Times of Israel. She is involved in numerous local and international interreligious dialogue projects which help to increase understanding between Christians and Jews.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Lenn Goodman discuss Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, and the challenges of a brand new translation. Also: What Strauss, Pines, and the UChicago school of interpretation got wrong.

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Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He was honored with the Baumgardt Prize of the American Philosophical Association, and with a volume in Brill Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. He is a rare humanities winner of the Sutherland Prize, Vanderbilt University’s highest research award. Goodman’s book-length contributions in Jewish philosophy include The Holy One of Israel (2019), Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (2017), Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, his Gifford Lectures (2008), Judaism, Human Rights & Human Values (1998), God of Abraham (1996, which won the Gratz Centennial Prize), Judaism, Human Rights & Human Values (1998), and On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (2008). Goodman has also written extensively on Islamic philosophy, including work on Razi, Farabi, Avicenna, Ghazali, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Khaldun. His books in general philosophy include In Defense of Truth, Coming to Mind: The Soul and its Body (co-authored with D. Greg Caramenico), Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere, and Creation and Evolution. Goodman has lectured widely, in Oxford, Jerusalem, Taiwan, Morocco, and in many venues in the United States and Canada. His new translation/commentary of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed (co-authored with Phillip Lieberman), and a companion volume of his own titled A Guide to Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, will be published by Stanford University Press early in 2024. He is now at work on a new book titled God and Truth.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg try to figure out what exactly we mean when we say "the Early Modern Period", also legal codes, and the scientific revolution.




Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg is Assistant Professor of Jewish History. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and the Humanities from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tamara is a historian of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Jewry. Her research deals with the transmission of Jewish religious knowledge in early modern Europe, especially Jewish law,or "halakha" in early modern Ashkenaz (the German lands, Northern Italy, Central and Eastern Europe).
For her doctoral thesis, Tamara studied how these communities passed on their halakhic knowledge in the sixteenth century at a time of profound change at a communal, technological, and intellectual level. Communities were dismantled and rebuilt in new locations, the printing press was transforming the realities of text, and systematized organizational schemes became the standard order for Jewish legal writings. These three shifts completely changed how this culture passed on its traditions. Tamara analyzed these changes, employing rabbinic responsa (answers about concrete questions of Jewish law) to examine their significance. She is currently working on a monograph that treats this transformation (Remaking Rabbinic Culture) and another dealing with early modern rabbinic responsa as an alternative genre to legal codifications (Law and Disorder).
Tamara has written numerous articles on early modern Jewry, including on topics such as rabbinic responsa and epidemics, scholarly archives and practices of organizing knowledge among rabbis, print and its impact on the conception of knowledge and religious law, and Renaissance art in rabbinic responsa. Her articles have appeared in the Journal for the History of Ideas, AJS Review, Critical Inquiry, Tablet, and other publications.
Tamara's research interests include questions of religious law, legal authority, codification, knowledge organization, scholarly culture, intellectual practices, the material history of books, print history, and the intersection of technology and information.
Prior to joining NYU, Tamara was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows, a Starr Fellow at Harvard's Center for Judaic Studies, and a Berkowitz Fellow at NYU Law.

In this episode J.J. and Peter Cole discuss Jewish poetry, aesthetics, and why Samuel ibn Naghrillah would probably make an excellent rapper.

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Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, Peter Cole is the author of six books of poems—most recently Draw Me After (FSG, November 2022) and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG, 2017)—as well as many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (The American Poet), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a body of work that defies traditional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom writes, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.” Among his many honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Jewish National Book Award, the PEN Prize in Translation, and, in 2007, a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

In this episode J.J. and Dr. Miriam Feldmann-Kaye get into the nature of postmodernism and how it relates to Judaism. Also, meta-narratives and mega-narratives.


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Dr. Miriam Feldmann Kaye is a Lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. A graduate of the Universities of Cambridge, London and Haifa, Miriam is Editor of the international St Andrews University Encyclopaedia of Jewish Theology. Her fields of thought, teaching and research are: Modern Continental Philosophy of Religion, Jewish Theology in the modern and postmodern periods, Ethics, Biblical Interpretation, Interreligious Theology and the Study of Religions. Miriam previously co-founded and directed the Faith and Belief Forum Middle East, a dialogue project in Israel dedicated to developing relations between faith communities in partnership with the Hebrew University and the Truman Research Institute for the Development of Peace and Reconciliation. Miriam’s publications include her book Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age, (LUP & Littman). She was included in the Jewish News’ Aliyah 100 list recognising those who have made a significant contribution to the State of Israel.

J.J. and Dr. Shaye Cohen go deep into the world of the mishnah and try to mark the boundaries between the world of the mishnah and the world of history.



Shaye J. D. Cohen is the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, one of the oldest and most distinguished professorships of Jewish studies in the United States. Before arriving at Harvard in July 2001, Prof. Cohen was for ten years the Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Prof. Cohen began his career at the Jewish Theological Seminary where he was ordained and was for many years the Dean of the Graduate School and Shenkman Professor of Jewish History. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient History, with distinction, from Columbia University in 1975. The focus of Prof. Cohen's research is the boundary between Jews and gentiles and between Judaism and its surrounding cultures. What makes a Jew a Jew, and what makes a non-Jew a non-Jew? Can a non-Jew become a Jew, and can a Jew become a non-Jew? How does the Jewish boundary between Jew and non-Jew compare with the Jewish boundary between male Jew and female Jew? On these and other subjects Prof. Cohen has written or edited ten books and over sixty articles. His study of circumcision and gender in Judaism is entitled Why aren't Jewish Women Circumcised? (2005). He is perhaps best known for From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (1987; second edition 2006), which is widely used as a textbook in colleges and adult education, and his The Beginnings of Jewishness (1999), which has been widely discussed in scholarly circles. He has also appeared on educational television, including From Jesus to Christ and Nova on PBS, Mysteries of the Bible on A&E, and various programs on the History Channel. Prof. Cohen has received an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary and appointments as Croghan Distinguished Visiting Professor of Religion (Williams College), the Louis Jacobs Lecturer (Oxford University), the David M. Lewis Lecturer (Oxford University), Lady Davis Visiting Professor of Jewish History (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the Block Lecturer (Indiana University), the Roland Visiting Lecturer (Stanford University) and the Pritchett Lecturer (University of California, Berkeley). Prof. Cohen lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife Miriam May and children Ava, Jonathan, Ezra, and Hannah.

J.J. and Dr. Yonatan Brafman define philosophy of halakha and discuss the competing halakhic philosophies of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Eliezer Berkovits.



Yonatan Brafman is an assistant professor of Modern Judaism in the Department of Religion and a member of the Program in Judaic Studies. He is a scholar of modern Jewish thought and a philosopher of religion. His research focuses on the intersection of Jewish thought, Jewish law, and contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy. He also studies the implications of religious ritual for critical social theory and praxis.
Previously, he was assistant professor of Jewish thought and ethics and the director of the Handel Center for Ethics and Justice at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has held fellowships in the Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University (2014–2015), the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at New York University Law School (2012–2013), and the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University (2008–2010). He holds a PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Jewish Thought from the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where he also received his BA, MA, and MPhil.

J.J. and Dr. Ruth Wisse unpack the world or modern Yiddish literature from its beginnings with Rav Nachman of Breslov through Chaim Grade and the contemporary state of Yiddish studies.


Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her books on literature include The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture (2000); No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (2013); A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (1988); The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971). On politics, Jews and Power (2007, 2020); If I am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992), and a memoir Free as a Jew (2021). She publishes frequently in Mosaic, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and elsewhere.

J.J. and Dr. Simon Goldhill try to nail down exactly what Midrash really is and try to place the classical Rabbis in their historical context.




Simon Goldhill is a Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College. His latest book is Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Previously, Professor Goldhill was Director of CRASSH from 2011-2018. CRASSH is dedicated to interdisciplinary research, with 16 faculty research groups, Humanitas Visiting Professors, and longer term interdisciplinary research projects.

J.J. and Dr. Naomi Seidman wonder why Jews want to claim Freud so badly, and if that claim has merit.

Dr. Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her publications include Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference (Chicago, 2006), The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford, 2016), and Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Littman, 2019), which won a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. She is presently working on a study of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish translation.

J.J. and Dr. Noah Feldman attempt uncover what Maimonides was really trying to do in his halakhic and philosophical works.


Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chairman of the Society of
Fellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli
Law, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular
emphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law and
religion, and the history of legal ideas. Feldman is the author of 10 books, including his latest forthcoming title, Bad Jew: A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (Farrar Straus and Giroux, Spring 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Michah Gottlieb shed light on the origins of the Haskalah in Berlin, and examine Mendelssohn's role in it.



Michah Gottlieb is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at NYU. An expert on the German Haskalah and its reverberations, he has authored several books and dozens of articles. His books include *Faith and: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought* (Oxford University Press, 2011) and most recently *The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise* (Oxford 2021, paperback 2023), which won the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize from the American Historical Association. His current research project focuses on Maskilic Musar literature.

J.J. and Dr. Tamar Rudavsky trace the responses to Maimonides among Medieval Jewish Philosophers.


T.M. Rudavsky is Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. She specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy and has edited three volumes: Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Perspectives(1984), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (1995); along with Steven Nadler, she is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (Jan, 2009). Her volume Time Matters: Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy appeared in 2000, her recent book on Maimonides appeared in the “Great Minds” series with Blackwell-Wiley Press in 2010; and her most recent work Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Science, Rationalism, and Religion appeared in July 2018. The author as well of numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, her major research continues to focus on issues connected to philosophical cosmology in medieval Jewish and scholastic thought.

J.J. and Dr. Daniel Matt become wiser and gain understanding while discussing the Kabbalistic ideas of The Zohar .



Daniel Matt is a prominent scholar of Kabbalah and the Zohar. He has been featured in Time and Newsweek and on National Public Radio. His books include The Essential Kabbalah (translated into eight languages), Zohar: Annotated and Explained, and God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality (revised edition, 2016). In 2022, his biography of Elijah the Prophet (Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation) was published by Yale University Press in their series Jewish Lives. This book was awarded the inaugural Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Book Prize, established by Yeshiva University. Some years ago, Daniel completed an 18-year project of translating and annotating the Zohar. In 2016, Stanford University Press published his ninth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, concluding the Zohar’s main commentary on the Torah. For this work, Daniel has been honored with a National Jewish Book Award and a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Koret award hailed his translation as “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.” Daniel received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and for twenty years served as professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel lives in Berkeley with his wife Hana. He currently teaches Zohar online. For information about these ongoing Zohar courses, see his website: danielcmatt.com

J.J. and Dr. Leora Batnitzky look for hidden truths in Strauss' thought.



Dr. Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish studies and professor of religion at Princeton University. She is the author of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation and Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton).

J.J. and Dr. Sam Lebens prove God?! (Or at least, they discuss the history of some Jewish arguments for God.)


Samuel Lebens is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa. He works in a wide array of philosophical fields including metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of fiction, and most centrally, the philosophy of religion. His recent books include, The Principles of Judaism (Oxford University Press), A Guide for the Jewish Undecided (Maggid Books), Philosophy of Religion: The Basics (Routledge) and (with Tatjana von Solodkoff) Thinking about Stories: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Fiction (Routledge). His website is www.samlebens.com

J.J. and Dr. Christoph Schulte contract a serious case of mystical curiousity, and diminish the mysteries around the idea of Tzimtzum.




Prof. Dr. Christoph Schulte is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the
University of Potsdam since 2001 and for many years head of the Department of Jewish and
Religious Studies. He studied Philosophy, Jewish Studies, Theology and Journalism in Heidelberg,
Berlin and Jerusalem, did his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin 1987 and was a fellow and Visiting
Professor in Jerusalem (1989-91), Montreal (1991), Paris (1992-93), Chicago (1995), Aix-en-
Provence (1997-98), Philadelphia (2009/10), Zurich (2014), Basel (2016), Haifa (2017/2023), and
Hamburg (2020). He received the Gleim-Preis (Halberstadt 2003) and the Inklusionspreis (Potsdam
2022). His most recent book publications are Von Moses bis Moses: Der jüdische Mendelssohn
(Hannover 2020), Mendelssohn-Studien (Hannover 2023) and Zimzum: God and the Origin of
the World (Philadelphia 2023).

J.J. and Dr. Jeremy Brown circulate some of the Jewish responses to Copernicus.


Jeremy Brown is the author of New Heavens and a New Earth; The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (Oxford University Press 2013) and Influenza; The Hundred Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History (Simon and Schuster 2018). He is an emergency physician and Director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health. Jeremy is the author of over forty peer-reviewed papers and four books, including two textbooks of emergency medicine published by Oxford University Press. He and his wife, Erica live in Silver Spring, Maryland. They have four children, three more by marriage and two beautiful grandchildren.

J.J. and Dr. Jonathan Garb march down the various paths of the Ram"chal's thought, and straighten out some mysteries of his life, thought, and reception.

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Jonathan Garb is the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2014, he received the Israel Academy of Sciences and
Humanities’ Gershom Scholem Prize for Kabbalah Research. His latest book is: Does God Doubt? R.
Gershon Henoch Leiner’s Thought in Its Contexts (Brill, 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Neil Rogachevsky skip down the winding (theoretical) road towards Israeli independence, and tell the story of the drafting of Ben Gurion's declaration of independence. 

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Neil Rogachevsky is assistant professor and associate director at the Straus Center of Yeshiva University, where he teaches Israel studies and political thought. His commentary and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Atlantic, Mosaic, Commentary, Jewish Review of Books, American Affairs, Ha’aretz and other publications. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

J.J. and Dr. Maren Niehoff comment on Philo's ideas and attempt to weave him back into the fabric of Jewish history. 

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Before joining the Dept. of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Maren R. Niehoff was a Junior Fellow at Harvard and received her doctorate and MA from Oxford University. Her BA studies were split between Berlin and Jerusalem. Today she is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among her numerous publications are Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (Yale 2018; Polonsky Prize 2019) and Homeric Scholarship and Biblical Exegesis in Alexandria (Cambridge 2011; Polonsky Prize 2011).  Currently, she completes a translation and commentary of the Philonic treatise On the Freedom of Every Righteous Person (Brill). Her research interests include the New Testament and rabbinic literature in the Land of Israel.

J.J. and Dr. Menachem Fisch decided that this is the time for studying the philosophy of the book of Qohelet, and they don't study it in vain.
 
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Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University and Co-Director of the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics. He has published widely on the history of 19th century British science and mathematics, on rationality and agency, and the philosophy of Talmudic legal reasoning. His recent work explores the limits of normative self-criticism, transformative dialogue, rabbinic
literature’s dispute of religiosity, the rationality of scientific framework transitions, Jewish
resources for a pluralist political liberalism, the theo-political roots of Israel's retreat from
political Zionism, and reflexive emotions.

J.J. and Dr. Eric Lawee comment on Rashi's astounding career, and refuse to gloss over his contentious journey to join the Jewish canon. 
 
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Eric Lawee is a professor in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. His Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic (2019; paperback 2021), published by Oxford University Press, won the 2019 Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship of the Jewish Book Council and was finalist for a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. He holds the Rabbi Asher Weiser Chair for Medieval Biblical Commentary Research and has just completed a six-year term as director of Bar-Ilan's Institute for Jewish Bible Interpretation.

Dr. Rebecca Goldstein and J.J. communicate the story of Spinoza's herem and outline the radicalism of his Ethics. 

Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the first episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.

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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. She then returned to her alma mater as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, where she taught the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. She has also been a Professor or Fellow at Rutgers, Columbia, Trinity College, Yale, NYU, Dartmouth, the Radcliffe Institute, the Santa Fe Institute, and the New College of the Humanities in London.
Goldstein is the author of six works of fiction, the latest of which was Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, as well as three books of non-fiction: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity; and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.
In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism. Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and Freethought Heroine 2011 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In that year she also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, entitled "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature," which was published by University of Utah Press.
In September, 2015, Goldstein was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. The citation reads: "For bringing philosophy into conversation with culture. In scholarship, Dr. Goldstein has elucidated the ideas of Spinoza and Gödel, while in fiction, she deploys wit and drama to help us understand the great human conflict between thought and feeling.

J.J. and Dr. Yitzhak Melamed untangle Spinoza's famed Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and assess the religiosity of its author, a supposed atheist. 

Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the second episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.

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Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He holds an MA in philosophy and the history of science and logic from Tel Aviv University, and a PhD in philosophy from Yale University (2005). He has been awarded the Fulbright, Mellon, and American Academy for Jewish Research Fellowships, as well as the ACLS Burkhardt (2011), NEH (2010), and Humboldt (2011) fellowships for his book on Spinoza and German Idealism. He is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013) which offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza's metaphysics. He edited Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2010; coeditor: Michael Rosenthal), and Spinoza and German Idealism (Cambridge University Press, 2012; coeditor: Eckart Förster). 

J.J. and Dr. Daniel Schwartz examine the convoluted legacy and enduring relevance of Spinoza.

Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the second episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.

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Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor of modern Jewish European and American intellectual and cultural history at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is the author of two monographs: The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton, 2012), which was a co-winner of the 2012 Salo W. Baron Prize awarded annually by the American Academy for Jewish Research to the best first book in Jewish studies and a 2012 National Jewish Book Award Finalist; and Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard, 2019), which was recently translated into Italian. He has also edited a documentary reader entitled Spinoza's Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy (Brandeis, 2019) that is part of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. He is currently writing an intellectual, cultural, urban, and Jewish history of the Upper West Side of Manhattan from the 1940s to the 1980s. 

J.J. and Dr. Susannah Heschel survey the fascinating life and brilliant ideas of Abraham Geiger. This guy was flagrantly influential. A practicing rabbi, a leader in the Wissenschaft das Judentums movement and a founder of Islamic studies in Europe, he was on the intellectual vanguard of the 19th century Reform movement, so strap in for a great conversation. 

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Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press), and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und Deutsch-Jüdische Selbstbestimmung (Mathes und Seitz). She has a forthcoming book, co-written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press. Heschel has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Frankfurt and Cape Town as well as Princeton, and she is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and a yearlong Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2011-12 she held a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and during the winter term of 2024 she held a research fellowship at the Maimonides Institute at the University of Hamburg. She has received many honors, including the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. Currently she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. She is an elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy for Jewish Research.  

J.J. and Dr. Martin Goodman go antiquing! They discuss the most important Jewish historian of the Roman period–Josephus Flavius. What did he write? Who was he writing for? And what ideological framework motivated his histories? 

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Martin Goodman is Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has written extensively on Jewish and Roman history. His books include Rome and Jerusalem (2007), A History of Judaism (2017), Josephus's The Jewish War: a Biography (2019), and, most recently, Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World (2024).

J.J. and Dr. Joanna Weinberg make their way back to sunny 15th century Italy and the surrounding centuries to visit some of the more interesting Jewish characters of the Italian Renaissance. They weave their way through cross-cultural influences and intra-cultural tensions during this remarkable era of rebirth. 

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Joanna Weinberg is Professor Emerita in Early Modern Jewish History and Rabbinics at the University of Oxford where she taught rabbinic literature and medieval and Jewish literature and history. She has translated and edited the works of the major Jewish Renaissance scholar Azariah de’ Rossi. More recently, she collaborated with Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) on the Hebrew studies of the great Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon (Harvard University Press, 2011) Together with Anthony Grafton  she has recently completed a book on the major German Reformed Hebraist Johann Buxtorf and his paradoxical approaches to Jews and Jewish literature. With Michael Fishbane she edited  and contributed to Midrash Unbound. Transformations and Innovations (Littman Library, 2013). With Scott Mandelbrote she edited and contributed to Jewish Books and Their Readers; Aspects of Jewish and Christian Intellectual Life in early modern Europe , Leiden: Brill, 2016. Together with Piet van Boxel and Kirsten Macfarlane  she had edited the volume The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe  Oxford University Press in the Oxford-Warburg Studies at the end of May 2022.

J.J. and Dr. Shai Secunda set Talmudic discourse ablaze. They put the Talmud in its Zoroastrian and Sasanian context, and have bloody good discussion about how Judaism interacted with its socio-religious environment in the first few centuries of the Common Era. 

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Dr. Secunda is a religious studies scholar who has taught at universities in Israel and the United States, including the Hebrew University and Yale University, where he was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow. He previously served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and lecturer in the university’s comparative religion and Hebrew literature departments. His academic interests range from rabbinic and Middle Persian literature to classical Jewish history, the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian context, Zoroastrianism, and critical approaches to the study of religion, including gender and religion.

Professor Secunda is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context (forthcoming with Oxford University Press); and editor of Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (with Steven Fine, 2012) and Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity (with Uri Gabbay, 2014). He has also contributed book chapters to the Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism, and Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies and the International Society of Iranian Studies. Professor Secunda has taught at Bard since 2016.

J.J. and Dr. David Myers scientifically examine the thought and legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. 


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David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn
Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for
History and Policy. He also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author or editor of
more than fifteen books in the field of Jewish history, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American
Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), which
was awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies.

J.J. and Dr. Jacob Howland round up a storm of fascinating comparisons between Talmudic and Platonic methods of discourse. 

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Jacob Howland is Provost and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin. He is the author of five books on Plato, Kierkegaard, and the Talmud. His articles have appeared in The New Criterion, Commentary, Newsweek, the Claremont Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, City Journal, Mosaic, Tablet, the New York Post, UnHerd, Quillette, Forbes, and The Nation, among other venues.

J.J. and Dr. Aaron Segal freely choose to wade through the murky medieval and contemporary debates over the existence of free will. 

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Aaron Segal is Associate Professor of Philosophy and John and Golda Cohen Chair in Jewish Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His publications include Do We Have a Soul? A Debate (Routledge, with Eric Olson), the edited volumes, Jewish Philosophy Past and Present (Routledge), Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age (Oxford), and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: A Critical Guide (Cambridge), and numerous articles in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and Jewish philosophy.  His website is https://aaronsegal.huji.ac.il/

J.J. and Dr. Ephraim Kanarfogel comment on the happenings in Medieval Ashkenaz and add their spin on to the era of the Tosafists.
 
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Dr. Ephraim Kanarfogel is the E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Law at Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. Among his books are Jewish Education and Society in the High Middles Ages (1992); Peering through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period (2000); The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (2013); and Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe (2021), all published by Wayne State University Press. In addition, he is the author of more than one hundred articles in the fields of medieval Jewish intellectual history and rabbinic literature. Professor Kanarfogel is a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and he serves, along with Prof. Jay Berkovitz, as Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Jewish History. He has been a long-term fellow at the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has held visiting appointments at Penn and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Professor Kanarfogel has won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship, the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Medieval Jewish History from the Association of Jewish Studies; and the prestigious Goren-Goldstein International Book Award for the Best Book in Jewish Thought, 2010-2013.

J.J. and Dr. Yair Furstenberg contextualize the ethical teachings of the Tannaim. 

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Yair Furstenberg is associate professor and currently serving as head of the Talmud Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the history of early rabbinic literature and law within its Greco-Roman context. In his publications he examines the emergence of Jewish legal discourse during the Second Temple period and its later transformation by the Rabbis. His current project "Local Law under Rome" funded by the European Research Council aims to integrate rabbinic legal activity into its Roman provincial context. Among his publications: Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism: From the Temple to the Mishnah, University of Indiana Press 2023; Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity: From the Books of Maccabees to the Babylonian Talmud, CRINT, Brill 2023 (with J.W. van Henten and F. Avemarie); “The Rabbinic Movement From Pharisees to Provincial Jurists”, Journal for the Study of Judaism 55 (2024): 1-43; and particularly relevant to this talk:  ‘Rabbinic Responses to Greco-Roman Ethics of Self-Formation in Tractate Avot’, M. Niehoff and J. Levinson (eds.), Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity, Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 2020, 125-148.

J.J. and Dr. Eli Rubin revel in the traditional and rebellious thought of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, author of The Tanya, and first Rebbe of the Chabad Hasidic sect. 

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Eli Rubin, a contributing editor at Chabad.org, is the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (forthcoming from Stanford University Press). He was a co-author of Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Transformative Paradigm for the World (Herder and Herder, 2019), and received his PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London.

J.J. and Dr. Reuven Leigh finally bring Chabad into the 20th century! They inspect the life and thought of the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe–Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn. This is part two of our mini-series on the intellectual history of Chabad Hasidut. 

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Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod to argue with fellow listeners about Hasidic philosophies of language and perception. 

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Dr. Reuven Leigh is an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, UK, and is the director of Chabad of Cambridge. He studied at religious academies in Manchester and Montreal and upon graduating in 1999, he assumed a rabbinic internship in New Haven, Connecticut. He subsequently received his Rabbinic Ordination from the Central Lubavitch Yeshiva in 2001 and was appointed as a lecturer in Hassidic philosophy. His main research interest is the relationship between Theology, Philosophy & Modernity and he was awarded his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020.

J.J. and Dr. Yosef Bronstein resurrect some of the most fascinating ideas that animated the thought of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the 7th Lubavitcher Rebbe. This is part three of our mini-series on the intellectual history of Chabad Hasidut.

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Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod to argue with fellow listeners about Hasidic philosophies of language and perception. 

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Rabbi Dr. Yosef Bronstein received rabbinic ordination and a PhD in Talmudic Studies from Yeshiva University. He is the Rosh Bet Midrash of Machon Zimrat Ha’aretz, a community learning center and rabbinical training program in Efrat, Israel, and also teaches Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University’s Isaac Breuer College. He is the coauthor of Reshimot Shiurim al Masekhet Kiddushin (Rabbi Joseph b. Soloveitchik’s Talmud lectures on tractate Kiddushin) and the author of Engaging the Essence: The Torah Philosophy of the Lubavitcher Rebbe  (Maggid Books, 2024) and of The Authority of the Divine Law: A Study in Tannaitic Midrash (Academic Studies Press, 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal meditate on Talmudic responses to Christianity. 

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Michal Bar-Asher Siegal is a faculty member at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Vice President for Global Engagement. Her work focuses on aspects of Jewish-Christian interactions in the ancient world, and compares early Christian and rabbinic sources. She was an elected member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences, and served as visiting professor at both Harvard Law School and Yale. Her first book is Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2013; winner of the 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award). Her second book is Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity: Heretic Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2019; finalist, National Jewish Book Award, 2019).

J.J. and Dr. Shira Billet make sense of this remarkable Jewish idealist. 


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Shira Billet is Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics at JTS. She completed a PhD in the Department of Religion at Princeton University in 2019 with a dissertation on Hermann Cohen. Prior to joining the faculty at JTS, she was a postdoctoral associate in Judaic Studies and Philosophy at Yale University. Her most recent publication is "'Let the Historian be a Philosopher!': Hermann Cohen's Methodological Critique of Spinoza," in Spinoza in Germany: Political and Religious Thought Across the Long Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Tzvi Langermann enumerate many of the Ibn Ezra's most fascinating philosophical ideas. This is episode 1 of our series on the ideas of Abraham Ibn Ezra. 

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Y. Tzvi Langermann, is Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Bar Ilan University, He has published extensively on medieval science and philosophy, especially basing his research on unpublished manuscript materials. His most recent book is Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Sara Labaton dive into the mysteries of Ibn Ezra’s revolutionary commentary on the Bible. This is episode 2 of our series on the ideas of Abraham Ibn Ezra. 

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Dr. Sara Labaton is Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She was a member of the inaugural cohort of North American David Hartman Center Fellows. Sara received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Columbia University and a doctorate in Medieval Jewish Thought from the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between the esoteric and peshat hermeneutics in the commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra, particularly with regard to ibn Ezra’s understanding of biblical cultic rituals. Sara was a founding faculty member of Yeshivat Hadar, where she developed a Bible and Exegesis curriculum. She has taught in a variety of Jewish settings, most recently as a history instructor at the Frisch School. Her research interests include the intersection of ritual and relevance, ritual experimentation, and overcoming the binary of halakhic–non-halakhic/insider-outsider in Jewish ritual practice. As part of her participation in the Religious Worlds Seminar at the Interfaith Center of New York, Sara researched ways of integrating comparative religion into Jewish educational contexts.

J.J. and Dr. Sarah Hammerschlag encounter a phenomenal high-school principal and genius: Emmanuel Levinas. 

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Sarah Hammerschlag is the John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago. Sheis a scholar in the area of Religion and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on the position of Judaism in the post-World War II French intellectual scene, a field that puts her at the crossroads of numerous disciplines and scholarly approaches including philosophy, literary studies, and intellectual history. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018). The Figural Jew received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, given by the Association of Jewish Scholars, and was a finalist for the AAR’s Best First Book in the History of Religions in 2011. She has written essays on Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Jewish Quarterly Review and Shofar, among other places. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Postwar Paris. Her most recent book is Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (2021), co-written with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood. 

J.J. and Dr. Olga Litvak take the express from Berlin to Eastern Europe in search of the real Jewish enlightenment. 

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Olga Litvak is the Roth Professor of Modern European Jewish History at Cornell University.  The author of Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (2006) and Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (2012), she is currently working on a book about M. L. Lilienblum and the origins of Zionism in late imperial Russia.

J.J. and Dr. Aaron Koller tremble in fear of this awesome Biblical episode, but they still manage to discuss fascinating theological and historical interpretations of the story. 

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Aaron Koller is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University. Aaron has held research positions at Cambridge University and in the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, he has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a fellow at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem and the Hartman Institute in West Jerusalem. He is the author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (JPS/University of Nebraska Press, 2020), among other books, the editor of five more, and is currently working on a cultural history of the alphabet. He lives in Queens, NY with his partner, Shira Hecht-Koller, and their children.

J.J. and Dr. Steven Zipperstein capture the essence and relevance of this elusive visionary. 

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Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His second book, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (University of California Press, 1993) won the National Jewish Book Award. In 1998, it appeared in Israel in a Hebrew translation published by the Ofakim series of Am Oved. Zipperstein has published more than fifty articles as well as many review essays in a wide range of journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post Book Review, Forward, The New Republic, Dissent, Partisan Review, Jewish Review of Books, New England Review, and The Atlantic. In spring 2022, he was awarded the Stanford Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for excellence in Graduate Teaching.  In 2023, Zipperstein was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His next book “Stung by Life. Philip Roth: A Biography” will appear in October 2025 in the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press.

J.J. and Dr. Eliav Grossman bravely explore a new (old) frontier in Jewish thought. The mysterious time between the closing of the Babylonian Talmud and the rise of the Geonim. 

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Eliav Grossman is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. He studies Jews and Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and his research explores rabbinic literature as it developed from the product of a narrow class of provincial elites to the dominant cultural idiom for Jews across the eastern Mediterranean. Eliav’s dissertation, “The New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” investigates an eclectic corpus of texts that have been neglected in modern scholarship but that share a defining feature: imitation of the Mishnah, the foundational text of the classical rabbinic corpus. Eliav’s research interests extend beyond antiquity and encompass medieval liturgical poetry, early modern intellectual history, and the history of 20th century Jewish scholarship. His scholarly writings have appeared in Jewish Studies Quarterly and Aramaic Studies, and he has written and lectured for many popular audiences. He has been awarded a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship and the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (honorary). Prior to beginning his studies at Princeton, Eliav completed a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion at Columbia University, an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University, and another MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, also at Cambridge.

J.J. and Dr. Matt Goldish Introduce us to Shabbetai Tzevi and his cadre of prophets and promoters. This is episode 1 or our mini-series about Sabbateanism and its afterlife. 


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Matt Goldish is the Samuel M. and Esther Melton Chair in History at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the Sephardi diaspora after 1492, early modern Sephardic and Italian rabbinic culture, messianism, and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. He is the author of several books, including, The Sabbatean Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Jewish Questions: Responsa on Jewish Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton University Press, 2008). His newest book, having nothing to do with Jewish history, is Science and Specters at Salem (Routledge, 2025). 

J.J. and Dr. Yaacob Dweck Introduce us to the critic-in-chief of the Sabbatean movement in the 17th century: Rabbi Jacob Sasportas. This is episode 2 or our mini-series about Sabbateanism and its afterlife. 

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Yaacob Dweck is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (2011) and Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (2019) both published by Princeton University Press.

J.J. and Dr. Maoz Kahana are at Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek's biggest fight night. This Rabbinic brawl over Sabbateanism in the 18th century bruised Jewish leaders all over Europe. 

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Maoz Kahana (PhD) is an associate Professor  in the Jewish History Department, Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on deciphering and elucidating rabbinical literature and Jewish law and legal cultures within the social and intellectual contexts of the early modern and modern European history as well as its minority Jewish culture.  His research and teaching integrates intellectual and social history; legal and cultural methods. Characteristic themes of his work are print and book history, the scientific revolution, magic, law, and the divine; Rabbi's allure to Sabbatian literature, Chassidic Halakhic writings, Jewish legal cultures and European romanticism,  the emergence of European coffeehouses, and others. His book: Halakhic Writing in a Changing World, from the ‘Noda B’yhuda’ to the ‘Hatam Sofer’, 1730-1839, based on his doctoral :dissertation, was published in the Zalman Shazar Publication House, Jerusalem (2015). A second book: “A Heartless Chicken and other Wonders: Religion and Science in Early Modern Rabbinic Culture”, was published (2021) in Bialik Institute Publishing House, Jerusalem. His newest 

J.J. and Dr. Pawel Maciejko conspire to bring you an episode about a small but mighty sub-sect of Sabbateanism. 

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Pawel Maciejko is an associate professor of history and Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Chair in Classical Jewish Religion, Thought, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. Between 2005 and 2016 he taught at the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first book, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816, was awarded the Salo Baron Prize by the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies. He also published a critical edition of Jonathan Eibeschütz’s tract And I Came This Day unto the Fountain.

J.J. and Dr. Noam Zadoff methodically demistify Gershom Scholem's iconoclastic but influential views about Sabbateanism and its causal connection to just about every contemporary element of Jewish life. 

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Noam Zadoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: from Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis, 2017) and many other scholarly works that deal with a wide array of subjects in recent Jewish History. 

J.J. and Gila Fine analyze the literary character of Talmudic women and uncover a counter history of Bruriah. 

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Noam Zadoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: from Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis, 2017) and many other scholarly works that deal with a wide array of subjects in recent Jewish History. 

J.J. and Dr. Samuel Brody assess the original ideas and monumental influence of this 20th century thinker and leader. 

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Samuel Hayim Brody is Associate Profesor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Martin Buber's Theopolitics (IUP, 2018), which received the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. He is also the co-editor, with Julie E. Cooper, of The King is in the Field: Essays in Modern Jewish Political Thought (Penn, 2023).

J.J. and Dr. Paul Franks systematically consider Franz Rosenzweig in all his existential and idealistic glory. 

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Paul Franks is Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, Professor of German Languages and Literatures, Professor of Religious Studies, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University.  Before coming to Yale in 2011, he was the first occupant of the Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  
He was educated at Gateshead Talmudical College, at Balliol College Oxford, and at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1993.  He has also taught at Michigan, Indiana, and Notre Dame, and has been visiting professor at Chicago, Leuven, and Hebrew University. In addition to numerous articles on German Idealism and Jewish philosophy, Paul is the translator and annotator (with Michael L. Morgan) of Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Hackett, 2000), and he is the author of All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Harvard, 2005).  He is currently writing a book on the central concepts of post-Kantian Idealism in light of their kabbalistic roots, and with Michael L. Morgan  he is writing a history of Jewish philosophy from the 1490s to the 1990s.

J.J. and Dr. Abigail Gillman interpret the ideas and impact of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation. 

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Abigail Gillman is a Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures.  She teaches courses on modern German literature; Hebrew literature; Israeli Cinema; and Religion and Literature (cross-listed as XL and RN). She teaches and lectures in the Core Curriculum, and has also taught in the CAS Writing Program. She recently published A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This book takes as its starting point the remarkable number of re-translations of the Hebrew Bible produced in Germany—translations into German and Yiddish—from the Haskalah through the twentieth century.  The book demonstrates that bible translation in Jewish society was (and still is) used to promote diverse educational, cultural, and linguistic goals. She is currently writing about the parable/mashal across Jewish Literature, and about “monstrous motherhood” in recent Israeli (and Jewish) film and memoirs.