The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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.