The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

J.J. and Dr. Aaron Segal freely choose to wade through the murky medieval and contemporary debates over the existence of free will. Follow us on Twitter (X) @JewishIdeas_Pod to get into public arguments about Crescas and Spinoza. 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/podcastsAaron Segal is Associate Professor of Philosophy and John and Golda Cohen Chair in Jewish Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His publications include Do We Have a Soul? A Debate (Routledge, with Eric Olson), the edited volumes, Jewish Philosophy Past and Present (Routledge), Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age (Oxford), and Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: A Critical Guide (Cambridge), and numerous articles in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and Jewish philosophy.  His website is https://aaronsegal.huji.ac.il/

J.J. and Dr. Jacob Howland round up a storm of fascinating comparisons between Talmudic and Platonic methods of 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/podcastsJacob Howland is Provost and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin. He is the author of five books on Plato, Kierkegaard, and the Talmud. His articles have appeared in The New Criterion, Commentary, Newsweek, the Claremont Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, City Journal, Mosaic, Tablet, the New York Post, UnHerd, Quillette, Forbes, and The Nation, among other venues.

J.J. and Dr. David Myers scientifically examine the thought and legacy of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. 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/podcastsDavid N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Sady and Ludwig KahnChair in Jewish History at UCLA, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center forHistory and Policy. He also directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author or editor ofmore than fifteen books in the field of Jewish history, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, AmericanShtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), whichwas awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies.

J.J. and Dr. Shai Secunda set Talmudic discourse ablaze. They put the Talmud in its Zoroastrian and Sasanian context, and have bloody good discussion about how Judaism interacted with its socio-religious environment in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Don't forget to rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice!Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsDr. Secunda is a religious studies scholar who has taught at universities in Israel and the United States, including the Hebrew University and Yale University, where he was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow. He previously served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and lecturer in the university’s comparative religion and Hebrew literature departments. His academic interests range from rabbinic and Middle Persian literature to classical Jewish history, the Babylonian Talmud in its Sasanian context, Zoroastrianism, and critical approaches to the study of religion, including gender and religion.Professor Secunda is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context (forthcoming with Oxford University Press); and editor of Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman (with Steven Fine, 2012) and Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity (with Uri Gabbay, 2014). He has also contributed book chapters to the Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism, and Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies and the International Society of Iranian Studies. Professor Secunda has taught at Bard since 2016.

J.J. and Dr. Joanna Weinberg make their way back to sunny 15th century Italy and the surrounding centuries to visit some of the more interesting Jewish characters of the Italian Renaissance. They weave their way through cross-cultural influences and intra-cultural tensions during this remarkable era of rebirth. Don't forget to rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice!Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsJoanna Weinberg is Professor Emerita in Early Modern Jewish History and Rabbinics at the University of Oxford where she taught rabbinic literature and medieval and Jewish literature and history. She has translated and edited the works of the major Jewish Renaissance scholar Azariah de’ Rossi. More recently, she collaborated with Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) on the Hebrew studies of the great Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon (Harvard University Press, 2011) Together with Anthony Grafton  she has recently completed a book on the major German Reformed Hebraist Johann Buxtorf and his paradoxical approaches to Jews and Jewish literature. With Michael Fishbane she edited  and contributed to Midrash Unbound. Transformations and Innovations (Littman Library, 2013). With Scott Mandelbrote she edited and contributed to Jewish Books and Their Readers; Aspects of Jewish and Christian Intellectual Life in early modern Europe , Leiden: Brill, 2016. Together with Piet van Boxel and Kirsten Macfarlane  she had edited the volume The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe  Oxford University Press in the Oxford-Warburg Studies at the end of May 2022.

J.J. and Dr. Martin Goodman go antiquing! They discuss the most important Jewish historian of the Roman period–Josephus Flavius. What did he write? Who was he writing for? And what ideological framework motivated his histories? Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsMartin Goodman is Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has written extensively on Jewish and Roman history. His books include Rome and Jerusalem (2007), A History of Judaism (2017), Josephus's The Jewish War: a Biography (2019), and, most recently, Herod the Great: Jewish King in a Roman World (2024).

J.J. and Dr. Susannah Heschel survey the fascinating life and brilliant ideas of Abraham Geiger. This guy was flagrantly influential. A practicing rabbi, a leader in the Wissenschaft das Judentums movement and a founder of Islamic studies in Europe, he was on the intellectual vanguard of the 19th century Reform movement, so strap in for a great conversation. Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsSusannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and chair of the Jewish Studies Program and a faculty member of the Religion Department. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press), and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und Deutsch-Jüdische Selbstbestimmung (Mathes und Seitz). She has a forthcoming book, co-written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press. Heschel has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Frankfurt and Cape Town as well as Princeton, and she is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and a yearlong Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2011-12 she held a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and during the winter term of 2024 she held a research fellowship at the Maimonides Institute at the University of Hamburg. She has received many honors, including the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. Currently she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. She is an elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion and the American Academy for Jewish Research.

J.J. and Dr. Daniel Schwartz examine the convoluted legacy and enduring relevance of Spinoza.Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the second episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsDaniel B. Schwartz is a professor of modern Jewish European and American intellectual and cultural history at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is the author of two monographs: The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton, 2012), which was a co-winner of the 2012 Salo W. Baron Prize awarded annually by the American Academy for Jewish Research to the best first book in Jewish studies and a 2012 National Jewish Book Award Finalist; and Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard, 2019), which was recently translated into Italian. He has also edited a documentary reader entitled Spinoza's Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy (Brandeis, 2019) that is part of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. He is currently writing an intellectual, cultural, urban, and Jewish history of the Upper West Side of Manhattan from the 1940s to the 1980s.

J.J. and Dr. Yitzhak Melamed untangle Spinoza's famed Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and assess the religiosity of its author, a supposed atheist. Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the second episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsYitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He holds an MA in philosophy and the history of science and logic from Tel Aviv University, and a PhD in philosophy from Yale University (2005). He has been awarded the Fulbright, Mellon, and American Academy for Jewish Research Fellowships, as well as the ACLS Burkhardt (2011), NEH (2010), and Humboldt (2011) fellowships for his book on Spinoza and German Idealism. He is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013) which offers a new and systematic interpretation of the core of Spinoza's metaphysics. He edited Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2010; coeditor: Michael Rosenthal), and Spinoza and German Idealism (Cambridge University Press, 2012; coeditor: Eckart Förster).

Dr. Rebecca Goldstein and J.J. communicate the story of Spinoza's herem and outline the radicalism of his Ethics. Our first mini-series!! Welcome to the first episode of our three-parter covering friend of the pod, Benedict "Barukh" Spinoza.Please send any complaints or compliments to podcasts@torahinmotion.orgFor more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsRebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. She then returned to her alma mater as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, where she taught the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. She has also been a Professor or Fellow at Rutgers, Columbia, Trinity College, Yale, NYU, Dartmouth, the Radcliffe Institute, the Santa Fe Institute, and the New College of the Humanities in London.Goldstein is the author of six works of fiction, the latest of which was Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, as well as three books of non-fiction: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity; and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism. Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and Freethought Heroine 2011 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In that year she also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, entitled "The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature," which was published by University of Utah Press.In September, 2015, Goldstein was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. The citation reads: "For bringing philosophy into conversation with culture. In scholarship, Dr. Goldstein has elucidated the ideas of Spinoza and Gödel, while in fiction, she deploys wit and drama to help us understand the great human conflict between thought and feeling.