The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

J.J. and Dr. Menachem Kellner pitch Maimonides against Judah HaLevi and explore the extremes of Jewish universalism and particularism in the middle ages. Thank you to Kesenbaum and Co. for sponsoring today's episode! Click here to see the auction catalogue and place your bids on rare Judaica and Hebraica. This is the third episode in our miniseries about universalism and particularism in Judaism. Over the course of the series we will explore and complicate Jewish attitudes to these categories across the centuries. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Menachem Kellner is Wolfson Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa and was founding chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Thought at Shalem College, Jerusalem. His most recent book is We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other (Academic Studies Press, 2021). In connection with the discussion with JJ, his most relevant book is Maimonides the Universalist: The Ethical Horizons of the Mishneh Torah (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020), co-authored with David Gillis.

J.J. and Dr. Marc Hirshman dissect the schools of R. Akiva and R. Yishmael to understand the central rabbinic arguments about universalism and particularism. This is the second episode in our miniseries about universalism and particularism in Judaism. Over the course of the series we will explore and complicate Jewish attitudes to these categories across the centuries. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Marc Hirshman is Mandel Professor Emeritus at the Melton Centre for Jewish Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a visiting professor at a number of leading American universities, including Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, The Jewish Theological Seminary, and the University of Notre Dame. Additionally, he was a Starr Fellow at Harvard, a Joyce Zeger Greenberg Fellow at University of Chicago and a Strauss Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (1995) and The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture 100 C.E.–350 C.E.: Texts on Education in their Late Antique Context (2009).

J.J. and Dr. Ethan Schwartz explore the categories of religious universalism and particularism in the Bible. This is the first episode in our miniseries about universalism and particularism in Judaism. Over the course of the series we will explore and complicate Jewish attitudes to these categories across the centuries. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Ethan Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He studies the Hebrew Bible in both the ancient Near Eastern setting in which it emerged and the Second Temple setting in which it became Jewish and Christian scripture, with particular interests in the prophetic literature, the Pentateuch, the ancient Jewish context of the New Testament, and the intellectual history of academic biblical studies. He is also an active participant in Jewish-Catholic and broader Jewish-Christian dialogue.

J.J. and Dr. Michael Satlow offer an authentic account of this apocryphal book of wisdom literature. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Professor Michael L. Satlow (Ph.D. in Ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America) specializes in the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity but also writes and teaches more broadly. His most recent authored book is How the Bible Became Holy and has recently edited two volumes, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook and Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen. He has held fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright program among others. He also directs several digital projects, including Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.

J.J. and Dr. Lital Levy explore the Jewish Nahda, and the border-ignoring breadth of the Haskalah. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches literature, critical theory, and intellectual history, with specializations in Hebrew, Arabic, Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies. Her research encompasses the modern intellectual and cultural history of Arab Jews, literature and film from Israel/Palestine, the interface of Jewish literature and world literature, global Jewish literary history, and comparative non-Western literary modernities. She is the author of the award-winning book Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton UP, 2014) as well as numerous scholarly articles, and is co-editor of Unsettling Jewish Knowledge: Text, Contingency, Desire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). She is completing a book about the Arabophone Jewish writer Esther Azhari Moyal (1873–1954) and is engaged in another book project on the Global Haskalah.

J.J. and Dr. Shlomo Zuckier offer up some sweet-smelling insight into the history and future of sacrifices. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Shlomo Zuckier is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and will this coming year be the Igor Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on ancient Judaism, and he has written extensively on matters of sacrifice and atonement, including in the article on “Sacrifice” for the Routledge Companion to Jewish Philosophy. Some of his other research relates to intersections between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Late Antiquity and the early Medieval period, and to contemporary Jewish theology. Shlomo received his PhD from Yale University and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University and has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill and Notre Dame Universities.

J.J. and Dr. Tzvi Novick talk prayer, poetry, homily, and some very-old-fashioned exegesis. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Tzvi Novick is the Abrams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. His first monograph, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (2010), traces foundational structural elements in tannaitic law and ethics, while his second, Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History (2018), examines the relationship between early liturgical poetry and rabbinic exegesis. He is also the author of two introductory surveys, Introduction to the Scriptures of Israel: History and Theology (2018), and Judaism: A Guide for Christians (2025).

J.J. and Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger discuss the work and impact of the most influential Jewish Historian since Josephus. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Jeffrey C. Blutinger is the inaugural holder of the Barbara and Ray Alpert Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, an interdisciplinary major and minor established in 1999. He is the author of numerous articles on such varied topics as Holocaust education in Israel, post-Communist Holocaust memorialization, the reception of science in Hebrew-language Enlightenment newspapers, and the origins of the term “orthodox” as a denominational label among Jews. Most recently, he has published two articles: a study of Kevin MacDonald, one of the most influential anti-Jewish, white nationalist academics in contemporary America, and an examination of how Bruno Balz, a gay German lyricist persecuted by the Nazis, came to write the most popular songs of the home front during the last years of World War II. He has recently written an intellectual biography of the great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz and the book manuscript is undergoing peer review. He also has a chapter on leftwing academic antisemitism in the California State University system accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed volume.

J.J. and Dr. Sarah Pessin overflow with curiosity about the poetic philosophy of the Medieval Jewish Neoplatonists. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Sarah Pessin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. She holds an Interfaith Chair, and works in areas of phenomenology, existentialism, Neoplatonism, interfaith civics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social justice. She has won a teaching award from the graduate student council of the DU-Iliff Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, has served as a Fellow with the American Council on Education, and is the new Director of Spiritual Life for DU's Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence. She has previously served as the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and as the Faculty Senate President.

J.J. and Dr. Adam Ferziger crisscross the Atlantic to better understand the influence of American Orthodoxy on Israel, and vice versa. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Adam S. Ferziger holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. He is coconvener of the Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism, University of Oxford. Ferziger is a scholar of Jewish religious culture in the U.S. and Israel. His research focuses on the history of Jewish religious responses to modern and contemporary life.He is the author or editor of eight books including: Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Wayne State University Press, 2015), which received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. His new monograph, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (NYU Press, 2025), will be available from July 2025.Ferziger received his B.A., M.A., and rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University, and, after moving to Israel in 1987, his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan.

J.J. and Dr. Alon Shalev discuss the iconoclastic ideas and character of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Alon Shalev is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he explores profound questions about meaning in life within the context of Jewish thought and philosophy. With a doctorate in Jewish Thought from the Hebrew University, Alon’s research integrates diverse traditions of ethics and political philosophy, addressing the intersection of personal and societal values. His work seeks to uncover ways these frameworks can help guide individuals and communities toward meaningful existence and just governance. His recent book, "Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner's Theology of Meaning" was published by Brill. Alon lives in Tzur Hadassah, is married, and has three children.

J.J. and Dr. David Novak hike through the forest of Natural Law, and stop to examine some (Jewish) trees therein. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts David Novak is a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law. He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and is Professor Emeritus and J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus at the University of Toronto. David Novak is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. David Novak is to date the author of nineteen books. His book Covenantal Rights (Princeton University Press) won the American Academy of Religion Award for “best book in constructive religious thought in 2000.” He has edited four books and authored over three hundred articles and reviews in numerous scholarly and intellectual journals. He is one of the four co-authors of Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity.

J.J. and Dr. Talya Fishman whip themselves up into a frenzy over the thought and influence of the pietists of the Medieval Rhineland. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by exploring them within their broader historical, geographic and religious contexts, both Islamic and Christian. Along with many articles – some on Hasidei Ashkenaz, Fishman is the author of Shaking the Pillars of Exile: "Voice of a Fool"'s Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture, (Stanford University Press, 1997), and Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition Medieval Jewish Cultures (2011), Winner of 2011 Nahum M. Sarna Award for Scholarship of the National Jewish Book Council. She co-edited Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews, (Littman Library, Oxford, 2018) with Ephraim Kanarfogel. In the soon-to-be published What is Talmud, edited by Jay Harris and Christine Hayes and (Harvard University Press), her article, “Medieval Jewish Subcultures Receive the Talmudic Text: The Impact of Regional Trends and Antecedent Oral Cultures”, further develops the thesis that certain differences in the halakhic cultures of Ashkenaz, Sefarad and Provence are linked to perduring assumptions about composition and authority that were specific to discrete geographic regions in antiquity. Professor Fishman’s current research project concerns the place of materiality in medieval Jewish thought and experience.

J.J. and Dr. Elliot Wolfson are just two beings talking about being, time, and Jewish mysticism in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including most recently The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other (2018); Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (2019); Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (2021); The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (2023); Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (2025); Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible: Unveiling Veils of Infinitivity (2026).

J.J. and Dr. Marina Zilbergerts study the birth of modern Hebrew for its own sake. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Dr. Marina Zilbergerts is a scholar of Jewish literature and thought. From 2016 to 2023, she served as the Lipton Assistant Professor of Jewish Literature and Thought at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Comparative Literature. You can read about her book, The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature (Indiana University Press, 2022), in the Jewish Review of Books, AJS Review, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and The Jewish Press.

J.J. and Dr. Rachel Elior make sharp distinctions between mysticism, Hasidism, and Sabbateanism. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts Rachel Elior is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish Thought at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has written nine books on various periods of Jewish mystical creativity, including The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (Littman, 2006) and Israel Ba'al Shem Tov and his contemporaries : Kabbalists, Sabbatians, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim (Carmel, 2014).

J.J. and Dr. Abigail Gillman interpret the ideas and impact of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts 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.

J.J. and Dr. Paul Franks systematically consider Franz Rosenzweig in all his existential and idealistic glory. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts 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. Samuel Brody assess the original ideas and monumental influence of this 20th century thinker and leader. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts 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 Gila Fine analyze the literary character of Talmudic women and uncover a counter history of Bruriah. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights! Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice. We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts 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.