The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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/podcastsTzvi 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/podcastsJeffrey 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/podcastsSarah 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. Buy the book: Agents of Change by Dr. Adam FerzigerFollow 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/podcastsAdam 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/podcastsAlon 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/podcastsDavid 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/podcastsTalya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual andCultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languagesand Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture byexploring them within their broader historical, geographic and religious contexts, both Islamicand 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/podcastsElliot 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/podcastsDr. 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/podcastsRachel 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/podcastsAbigail 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/podcastsPaul 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/podcastsSamuel 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/podcastsNoam 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. 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. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates about messiahs, true and false. 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/podcastsNoam 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. Pawel Maciejko conspire to bring you an episode about a small but mighty sub-sect of Sabbateanism. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates about messiahs, true and false. 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/podcastsPawel 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. 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. Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates about messiahs, true and false. 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/podcastsMaoz 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. 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. Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod and Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates about messiahs, true and false. 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/podcastsYaacob 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. 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. Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod and Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates about messiahs, true and false. Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice!We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org or just DM us. For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsMatt 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. 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. Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod and Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social to discover new arenas for Jewish discourse. Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice!We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsEliav 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.