The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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/podcastsLital 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/podcastsShlomo 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/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).