The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

J.J. and Dr. Jeremy Brown circulate some of the Jewish responses to Copernicus.Jeremy Brown is the author of New Heavens and a New Earth; The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (Oxford University Press 2013) and Influenza; The Hundred Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History (Simon and Schuster 2018). He is an emergency physician and Director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health. Jeremy is the author of over forty peer-reviewed papers and four books, including two textbooks of emergency medicine published by Oxford University Press. He and his wife, Erica live in Silver Spring, Maryland. They have four children, three more by marriage and two beautiful grandchildren.

J.J. and Dr. Christoph Schulte contract a serious case of mystical curiousity, and diminish the mysteries around the idea of Tzimtzum. Prof. Dr. Christoph Schulte is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at theUniversity of Potsdam since 2001 and for many years head of the Department of Jewish andReligious Studies. He studied Philosophy, Jewish Studies, Theology and Journalism in Heidelberg,Berlin and Jerusalem, did his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin 1987 and was a fellow and VisitingProfessor in Jerusalem (1989-91), Montreal (1991), Paris (1992-93), Chicago (1995), Aix-en-Provence (1997-98), Philadelphia (2009/10), Zurich (2014), Basel (2016), Haifa (2017/2023), andHamburg (2020). He received the Gleim-Preis (Halberstadt 2003) and the Inklusionspreis (Potsdam2022). His most recent book publications are Von Moses bis Moses: Der jüdische Mendelssohn(Hannover 2020), Mendelssohn-Studien (Hannover 2023) and Zimzum: God and the Origin ofthe World (Philadelphia 2023).

J.J. and Dr. Sam Lebens prove God?! (Or at least, they discuss the history of some Jewish arguments for God.)Samuel Lebens is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa. He works in a wide array of philosophical fields including metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of fiction, and most centrally, the philosophy of religion. His recent books include, The Principles of Judaism (Oxford University Press), A Guide for the Jewish Undecided (Maggid Books), Philosophy of Religion: The Basics (Routledge) and (with Tatjana von Solodkoff) Thinking about Stories: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Fiction (Routledge). His website is www.samlebens.com

J.J. and Dr. Leora Batnitzky look for hidden truths in Strauss' thought. Dr. Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish studies and professor of religion at Princeton University. She is the author of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation and Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton).

J.J. and Dr. Daniel Matt become wiser and gain understanding while discussing the Kabbalistic ideas of The Zohar . Daniel Matt is a prominent scholar of Kabbalah and the Zohar. He has been featured in Time and Newsweek and on National Public Radio. His books include The Essential Kabbalah (translated into eight languages), Zohar: Annotated and Explained, and God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality (revised edition, 2016). In 2022, his biography of Elijah the Prophet (Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation) was published by Yale University Press in their series Jewish Lives. This book was awarded the inaugural Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Book Prize, established by Yeshiva University. Some years ago, Daniel completed an 18-year project of translating and annotating the Zohar. In 2016, Stanford University Press published his ninth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, concluding the Zohar’s main commentary on the Torah. For this work, Daniel has been honored with a National Jewish Book Award and a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Koret award hailed his translation as “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.” Daniel received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and for twenty years served as professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel lives in Berkeley with his wife Hana. He currently teaches Zohar online. For information about these ongoing Zohar courses, see his website: danielcmatt.com

J.J. and Dr. Tamar Rudavsky trace the responses to Maimonides among Medieval Jewish Philosophers. T.M. Rudavsky is Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. She specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy and has edited three volumes: Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Perspectives(1984), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (1995); along with Steven Nadler, she is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (Jan, 2009). Her volume Time Matters: Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy appeared in 2000, her recent book on Maimonides appeared in the “Great Minds” series with Blackwell-Wiley Press in 2010; and her most recent work Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Science, Rationalism, and Religion appeared in July 2018. The author as well of numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, her major research continues to focus on issues connected to philosophical cosmology in medieval Jewish and scholastic thought.

J.J. and Dr. Michah Gottlieb shed light on the origins of the Haskalah in Berlin, and examine Mendelssohn's role in it. Michah Gottlieb is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at NYU. An expert on the German Haskalah and its reverberations, he has authored several books and dozens of articles. His books include *Faith and: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought* (Oxford University Press, 2011) and most recently *The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise* (Oxford 2021, paperback 2023), which won the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize from the American Historical Association. His current research project focuses on Maskilic Musar literature.

J.J. and Dr. Noah Feldman attempt uncover what Maimonides was really trying to do in his halakhic and philosophical works. Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chairman of the Society ofFellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and IsraeliLaw, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particularemphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law andreligion, and the history of legal ideas. Feldman is the author of 10 books, including his latest forthcoming title, Bad Jew: A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (Farrar Straus and Giroux, Spring 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Naomi Seidman wonder why Jews want to claim Freud so badly, and if that claim has merit. Dr. Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her publications include Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference (Chicago, 2006), The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford, 2016), and Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Littman, 2019), which won a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. She is presently working on a study of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish translation.

J.J. and Dr. Simon Goldhill try to nail down exactly what Midrash really is and try to place the classical Rabbis in their historical context.Simon Goldhill is a Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College. His latest book is Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Previously, Professor Goldhill was Director of CRASSH from 2011-2018. CRASSH is dedicated to interdisciplinary research, with 16 faculty research groups, Humanitas Visiting Professors, and longer term interdisciplinary research projects.