

The Podcast of Jewish Ideas
Torah in Motion
A space for exploring the great ideas at the heart of the Jewish tradition.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 3, 2023 • 1h 17min
9. Early Modern Judaism | Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg try to figure out what exactly we mean when we say "the Early Modern Period", also legal codes, and the scientific revolution.Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg is Assistant Professor of Jewish History. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and the Humanities from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.Tamara is a historian of the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Jewry. Her research deals with the transmission of Jewish religious knowledge in early modern Europe, especially Jewish law,or "halakha" in early modern Ashkenaz (the German lands, Northern Italy, Central and Eastern Europe). For her doctoral thesis, Tamara studied how these communities passed on their halakhic knowledge in the sixteenth century at a time of profound change at a communal, technological, and intellectual level. Communities were dismantled and rebuilt in new locations, the printing press was transforming the realities of text, and systematized organizational schemes became the standard order for Jewish legal writings. These three shifts completely changed how this culture passed on its traditions. Tamara analyzed these changes, employing rabbinic responsa (answers about concrete questions of Jewish law) to examine their significance. She is currently working on a monograph that treats this transformation (Remaking Rabbinic Culture) and another dealing with early modern rabbinic responsa as an alternative genre to legal codifications (Law and Disorder).Tamara has written numerous articles on early modern Jewry, including on topics such as rabbinic responsa and epidemics, scholarly archives and practices of organizing knowledge among rabbis, print and its impact on the conception of knowledge and religious law, and Renaissance art in rabbinic responsa. Her articles have appeared in the Journal for the History of Ideas, AJS Review, Critical Inquiry, Tablet, and other publications. Tamara's research interests include questions of religious law, legal authority, codification, knowledge organization, scholarly culture, intellectual practices, the material history of books, print history, and the intersection of technology and information. Prior to joining NYU, Tamara was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows, a Starr Fellow at Harvard's Center for Judaic Studies, and a Berkowitz Fellow at NYU Law.

Jul 20, 2023 • 1h 15min
8. The Guide to the Perplexed | Dr. Lenn Goodman
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Lenn Goodman discuss Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, and the challenges of a brand new translation. Also: What Strauss, Pines, and the UChicago school of interpretation got wrong.For more fantastic Jewish content follow Torah in Motion on instagram or visit torahinmotion.orgLenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He was honored with the Baumgardt Prize of the American Philosophical Association, and with a volume in Brill Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. He is a rare humanities winner of the Sutherland Prize, Vanderbilt University’s highest research award. Goodman’s book-length contributions in Jewish philosophy include The Holy One of Israel (2019), Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (2017), Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, his Gifford Lectures (2008), Judaism, Human Rights & Human Values (1998), God of Abraham (1996, which won the Gratz Centennial Prize), Judaism, Human Rights & Human Values (1998), and On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (2008). Goodman has also written extensively on Islamic philosophy, including work on Razi, Farabi, Avicenna, Ghazali, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Khaldun. His books in general philosophy include In Defense of Truth, Coming to Mind: The Soul and its Body (co-authored with D. Greg Caramenico), Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere, and Creation and Evolution. Goodman has lectured widely, in Oxford, Jerusalem, Taiwan, Morocco, and in many venues in the United States and Canada. His new translation/commentary of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed (co-authored with Phillip Lieberman), and a companion volume of his own titled A Guide to Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, will be published by Stanford University Press early in 2024. He is now at work on a new book titled God and Truth.

Jul 6, 2023 • 1h 11min
7. Second Temple Sectarianism | Dr. Malka Simkovich
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Simkovich dig into the differences between the Pharisees and the Saducees, and air some more second temple laundry. Dr. Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and the director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She is the author of The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (2016), and Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism (2018), which received the 2019 AJL Judaica Reference Honor Award. Simkovich’s articles have been published in the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal for the Study of Judaism, as well as on online forums such as The Lehrhaus and the Times of Israel. She is involved in numerous local and international interreligious dialogue projects which help to increase understanding between Christians and Jews.

Jun 22, 2023 • 50min
6. Herzl's Ideas | Dr. Derek Penslar
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Derek Penslar get into the evolution of Zionism, and the ideas (or lack of ideas) of Theodore Herzl. You can find more fantastic Jewish content like this at torahinmotion.orgDerek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History. He takes a comparative and transnational approach to Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism. Penslar’s books include Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (2006), The Origins of the State of Israel: A Documentary History (with Eran Kaplan, 2011), Jews and the Military: A History (2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020/German ed. 2022), Zionism: An Emotional State (2023) and Unacknolwedged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism (co-edited with Stefan Vogt and Arieh Saposnik, 2023). He is currently writing an international history of the 1948 Palestine War. Penslar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. At Harvard, Penslar is a resident faculty member at The Center for European Studies and as of July will be the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

Jun 1, 2023 • 1h 17min
5. The Bible as Literature | Dr. Robert Alter
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Alter explore the literary approach to the Bible, Dr. Alter's magnificent translation, and the impact of both of these works on the study of Bible in the university and the yeshiva. Also typescenes and how Dr. Alter met his wife at a modern-day well. Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and EmeritusProfessor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is amember of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, theAmerican Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of theLibrary of Congress, and is past president of the Association ofLiterary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a GuggenheimFellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for theHumanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies inJerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He haswritten widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century tothe present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. Histwenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes onbiblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations ofGenesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, Nabokov, and the self-reflexivetradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into tendifferent languages. Among his publications over the past thirtyyears are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka,Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Imagined Cities (2005), Pen ofIron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Art ofBible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021).His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentarywas published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In September 2023 hisbiography of Amos Oz will appear.In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los AngelesTimes for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 theCharles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from theAmerican Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature.He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, theHebrew University of Jerusalem, and three other institutions.

May 18, 2023 • 1h 6min
4. Rabbis and Karaites | Dr. Miriam Goldstein
In this episode J.J. and Dr. Miriam Goldstein dig into the ideas the animated the Rabbis (and Karaites) of the early Islamic period. For more thoughtfull Jewish content like this, visit torahinmotion.org.If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review the podcast in your app of choice. Miriam Goldstein is a professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A specialist in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts, she focuses on interreligious relations in the medieval Arabic-speaking world as well as Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis. She is author of A Judeo-Arabic Parody of the Life of Jesus: The Toledot Yeshu Helene Narrative (Tübingen, in press) and Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (Tübingen, 2011) and is editor of Authorship in Mediaeval Arabic and Persian Literatures (Jerusalem, 2019) andBeyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (Philadelphia, 2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature. Her current major project is a critical edition and translation of the Judeo-Arabic commentaries of the Baghdadi Karaite scholar Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani, currently focusing on the books of Genesis and Exodus.

May 4, 2023 • 1h 2min
3. Dogma and Heresy | Dr. Marc Shapiro
On this episode JJ and Dr. Shapiro get into the limits of Orthodox theology, as well as The Limits of Orthodox Theology. Marc B. Shapiro holds the Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton. A graduate of Brandeis (BA) and Harvard (PhD), he is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews and is a popular scholar in residence at synagogues around the world. He has written Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy and The Limits of Orthodox Theology, both of which were National Jewish Book Award Finalists. Other books of his include Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters, and Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History. In 2019 he published Iggerot Malkhei Rabbanan which contains more than thirty years of correspondence with some of the world's most outstanding Torah scholars. He regularly publishes widely read scholarly articles on the Seforim Blog and is currently writing a book on the thought of Rav Kook. Dr. Shapiro leads a number of the Torah in Motion Jewish history trips.

Apr 19, 2023 • 1h 9min
2. Theodicy and Job | Dr. Jon D. Levenson
In this episode Dr. Jon Levenson and JJ get into questions about good, evil, and the Book of Job._____________Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies, began teaching at Harvard in 1988, having previously taught at the University of Chicago and at Wellesley College. His work concentrates on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, including its reinterpretations in the "rewritten Bible" of Second Temple Judaism and rabbinic midrash. In addition, one of his courses deals with the use of medieval Jewish commentaries for purposes of modern biblical exegesis, and another focuses on central works of Jewish theology in the twentieth century. Levenson has a strong interest in the philosophical and theological issues involved in biblical studies, especially the relationship of premodern modes of interpretation to modern historical criticism. Much of his work centers on the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, both in antiquity and in modernity, and he has long been active in Jewish-Christian dialogue. His book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (Yale University Press, 2006) won a National Jewish Book Award and the Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award in the category of Best Book Relating to the Hebrew Bible published in 2005 or 2006. Choice, a publication of the American Library Association, listed Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2012) as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. His latest book is The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016). In all his work, Levenson's emphasis falls on the close reading of texts for purposes of literary and theological understanding.

Mar 22, 2023 • 1h 6min
1. Hasidut | Dr. Ariel Mayse
Dr. Ariel Mayse, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, discusses the major ideas of early Hasidism, including the social dimensions, charismatic leadership, and the transformative power of intention. He explores the Hasidic attitude towards mitzvahs and the differences between the Hasidic and Kabbalistic perspectives. The chapter also delves into distinctions and tensions within the Hasidic community, as well as the critique of Hasidin beliefs and the culture of laryannic theology in Eastern Europe. The podcast also touches on the debate between scholars on the analysis of recidivism in understanding this social movement.

Mar 13, 2023 • 7min
0. Prologue
Welcome to The Podcast of Jewish Ideas!!In this episode JJ introduces himself, the podcast, and what we hope to do together in the coming episodes, we do hope you enjoy.