Professor Alexander Kaye reminds us that Orthodoxy does not necessarily seek a monopoly on the power of state. Alexander Kaye is the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University, and is the author of "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research deals in the history of Jewish thought, with a special focus on political thought, the history of law and theories of Jewi...
Nov 22, 2022•38 min
Blurb: Washington insider Ira Shapiro takes the Senate to task – and asks us to fix it. Ira Shapiro’s forty-five-year Washington career has focused on American politics and international trade. Shapiro served twelve years in senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, working for a series of distinguished senators: Jacob Javits, Gaylord Nelson, Abraham Ribicoff, Thomas Eagleton, Robert Byrd, and Jay Rockefeller. He served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the Clinton administr...
Nov 08, 2022•24 min
Professor Annabel Herzog dives into a unique Jewish philosopher's approach to ethics and politics. Annabel Herzog is a Professor of Political Theory at the School of Political Science, and Director of the M.A. Program in Cultural Studies, at the University of Haifa. Her work has focussed on 20th-century philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida; on Philosophy and Literature; on Contemporary Jewish Philosophy; on Memory and Trauma, on Ethics and Polit...
Oct 25, 2022•31 min
An early-modern myth of Jewish credit frames age-old antisemitic tropes. Francesca Trivellato is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She is the author, most recently, of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Jacques Barzun Book Prize in Cultural History and the 2021 J...
Oct 11, 2022•23 min
How the Jewish community can become truly diverse and inclusive in the 21st Century. Warren Hoffman is the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest academic Jewish studies membership organization in the world. He has spent his career working in Jewish communal agencies, including JCCs and Federations, to bring change, innovation, and new ideas to legacy organizations. He holds a PhD in American literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hoffman is the ...
Sep 27, 2022•30 min
Dr. Jason Lustig uncovers epic struggles over archives, the repositories of our stories and identity. Dr. Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His first book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), traces the twentieth-century struggle over who might “own” Jewish history, especially after the Nazi looting of Jewish archives. Dr. Lust...
Sep 13, 2022•27 min
Author Helene Wecker and the immigrant experience told through the lives of mythical monsters. Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, the VCU Cabell Award for First Novel, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and was nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. Its sequel, The Hidden Palace, was published in June 2021, and received a National Jewish Book Award and a Golden Poppy Award. A Midwest native, she holds a B.A....
Aug 30, 2022•28 min
CCAR Chief Executive Rabbi Hara Person defends abortion rights, in the wake of Dobbs. Rabbi Hara Person is the Chief Executive of Central Conference of American Rabbis. She is the first woman Chief Executive in the history of the CCAR. As Chief Executive, Rabbi Person oversees lifelong rabbinic learning, professional development and career services, CCAR Press -- liturgy, sacred texts, educational materials, apps, and other content for Reform clergy, congregations and Jewish organizations -- and...
Aug 16, 2022•24 min
The central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. The House of Fragile Things, National Jewish Book Award Winner of the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award (History) In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately re...
Aug 02, 2022•32 min
Fascinating case studies on weighing competing Jewish values in difficult, real-world situations. 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook Judaism offers us unique—and often divergent—insights into contemporary moral quandaries. How can we use social media without hurting others? Should people become parents through cloning? Should doctors help us die? The first ethics book to address social media and technology eth...
Jul 19, 2022•30 min
Legal scholar Micah Schwartzman uncovers and explains key issues of freedom of religion and speech in a post-Roe America. Micah Schwartzman is the director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy and the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law. A scholar who focuses on law and religion, jurisprudence, political philosophy and constitutional law, Schwartzman joined the UVA Law faculty in 2007. Schwartzman received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his doctorate in politics from the Univ...
Jul 12, 2022•39 min
Author Nancy Churnin discusses the power of having a pen, paper, and something to say. Dear Mr. Dickens, 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner for children's picture book. In Eliza Davis's day, Charles Dickens was the most celebrated living writer in England. But some of his books reflected a prejudice that was all too common at the time: prejudice against Jewish people. Eliza was Jewish, and her heart hurt to see a Jewish character in Oliver Twist portrayed as ugly and selfish. She wanted to s...
Jul 05, 2022•29 min
Author Weina Randel discusses The Last Rose of Shanghai: A love story transcending class, race, religion, and even war. National Jewish Book Award Finalist, The Last Rose of Shanghai In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, two people from different cultures are drawn together by fate and the freedom of music... Weina Dai Randel is the award-winning author of three novels, The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Moon in the Palace, and The Empress of Bright Moon, a historical duology about Wu Zetian, China’s only ...
Jun 20, 2022•22 min
Reverse-engineering his imagined past, Israeli author Yaniv Iczkovits follows his characters across the Pale of Settlement. The Slaughterman’s Daughter, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As...
Jun 07, 2022•30 min
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen reimagines a meeting between two giants of 20th century Judaism as debate about the Jewish destiny. 2021 National Jewish Book Award and 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to revie...
May 24, 2022•32 min
Author Lori Banov Kaufmann transports us to an unlikely love story set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. National Jewish Book Award Winner, Rebel Daughter A young woman survives the unthinkable in this stunning and emotionally satisfying tale of family, love, and resilience, set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Lori grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and a masters from Harvard. She’d always wanted to write and in...
May 10, 2022•17 min
Author Jai Chakrabarti muses on the power of art, friendship, and love to bridge the human experience. A Play for the End of the World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alo...
Apr 26, 2022•24 min
Author and philanthropist Mark Gerson uncovers surprising delights and insights from the deceptively familiar text. The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life, finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Mark Gerson is an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as well as the author of books on intellectual history and education. His articles and essays on subjects ranging from Frank Sinatra to the biblical Jonah have been publi...
Apr 12, 2022•26 min
Guidance and provocations for finding meaning in ‘unprecedented’ times. Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Reflections, winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. This collection of essays uses Torah – broadly understood to include any canonical Jewish text or tradition – to illuminate, explore, bemoan, or grapple with our current moment of plague. Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler is the Dean of Students and the Director of Spirit...
Mar 29, 2022•24 min
Studying Jewish tradition as an expression of the Jewish purpose. Rabbi Helen Plotkin is co-founder of the Beit Midrash at Swarthmore College, where she taught courses in Biblical Hebrew and classical Hebrew texts for 20 years. She is founder and director of Mekom Torah (pronounced McComb Toe-RAH), offering deep Jewish study opportunities for adults and teens that transcend the boundaries of the various Jewish movements. Mekom Torah is committed to a radically ancient vision of Judaism as a cult...
Mar 15, 2022•27 min
Major themes of Jewish life, reviewed, rethunk... remixed. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. Professor Kwall earned her JD from the University of Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Brown University. She also has a Master's Degree in Jewish Studies. Kwall is an internationally renowned scholar and lecturer and has published over 30 articles on a wide variety of topics including Jewish law and cul...
Mar 01, 2022•32 min
Dig into the Jewish literary landscape with the Jewish Book Council’s intriguing and rich annual literary journal. Becca Kantor is the editorial director of Jewish Book Council and its annual print literary journal, Paper Brigade. She received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Becca was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to spend a year in Estonia writing and studying the country's Jewish hist...
Feb 15, 2022•25 min
Judaism's views on sex, sensuality, and intimacy within marriage. Noam is now emeritus at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where since 1978 he has been a senior research fellow and educator. He earned a graduate degree in general philosophy at Columbia University and the Hebrew University, while studying Bible and Rabbinics at JTSA and the Hartman Beit Midrash. His popular publications and worldwide lecturing have promoted Homemade Judaism - empowering families to create their own plura...
Feb 01, 2022•37 min
Civil litigation as a powerful tool against white supremacy. Amy Spitalnick is the Executive Director of Integrity First for America, the civil rights nonprofit that spearheaded the successful landmark lawsuit against the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and hate groups responsible for the Charlottesville violence. Amy has extensive experience in government, politics, and advocacy, including as Communications Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the New York Attorney General and Communications Ad...
Jan 19, 2022•22 min
Advancing social justice through Torah. Rabbi Barry H. Block serves Congregation B'nai Israel in Little Rock, Arkansas. A Houston native and graduate of Amherst College, Rabbi Block was ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1991, and he received his DD, honoris causa, in 2016. A member of the CCAR Board of Trustees, currently serving as vice president of organizational relationships, Block is the editor of The Mussar Torah Commentary (CCAR Press, 2020), a f...
Jan 05, 2022•31 min
Feminism, intertextuality and 3000 years of making sense of God. Rabbi Kari Tuling received rabbinic ordination in 2004 and earned her PhD in Jewish Thought in 2013, both from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She has served congregations in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, and Ohio, and has taught Jewish Studies courses at the University of Cincinnati and the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. She currently serves as the rabbi of Congregation Kol Haveri...
Dec 21, 2021•20 min
Tension and compatibility in the long story of our Jewish and American identities. Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna is University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, where he directs the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He also chairs the Academic Advisory and Editorial Board of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and serves as Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History...
Dec 07, 2021•37 min
Controversy, confusion and confidence in God’s goodness, from antiquity to present. After being graduated from New York University with a B.A. in philosophy and Phi Beta Kappa, Rabbi Wayne Allen, Ph.D. attended the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he earned a Masters degree in Rabbinics and went on to receive rabbinic ordination. He served as a congregational rabbi for 35 years, taking on postings in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The Jewish Theological Seminary conferred a...
Nov 22, 2021•31 min
Understanding bible translations as a key to Jewish history. Leonard J. Greenspoon holds the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University, where he is also Professor of Theology and of Classical & Near Eastern Studies. Greenspoon is the editor of the 32-volume (and counting) Studies in Jewish Civilization series. He has also written five other books, in addition to his most recent one on Jewish Bible translations. Additionally, he has served on translati...
Nov 09, 2021•29 min
Psychedelics as a key to exploring Jewish mystical experiences. Rabbi Zac Kamenetz is a community leader and aspiring psychedelic-assisted therapist based in Berkeley,CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. A sought-after educator and qualified MBSR instructor, Zac’s work has been centered on seeking answers to life’s essential questions within the Jewish tradition and embodied spiritual...
Oct 26, 2021•30 min
