Episodes

  • 71. Heinrich Graetz | Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger
    Aug 18 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/podcasts


    Jeffrey 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 11 mins
  • 70. Jewish Neoplatonism | Dr. Sarah Pessin
    Jul 31 2025
    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/podcasts


    Sarah 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 10 mins
  • 69. American-Israeli Thought | Dr. Adam Ferziger
    Jul 22 2025
    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 Ferziger

    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/podcasts

    Adam 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 19 mins
  • 68. Yitzchak Hutner | Dr. Alon Shalev
    Jun 27 2025
    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/podcasts

    Alon 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 25 mins
  • 67. Natural Law and Judaism | Dr. David Novak
    Jun 19 2025
    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/podcasts

    David 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 2 mins
  • 66. Hasidei Ashkenaz | Dr. Talya Fishman
    Jun 8 2025
    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/podcasts

    Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual and
    Cultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages
    and Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by
    exploring them within their broader historical, geographic and religious contexts, both Islamic
    and 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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 17 mins
  • 65. Heidegger and Kabbalah | Dr. Elliot Wolfson
    May 29 2025
    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/podcasts

    Elliot 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).
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr
  • 64. Modern Hebrew and The Yeshiva | Dr. Marina Zilbergerts
    May 15 2025
    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/podcasts


    Dr. 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.
    Show More Show Less
    59 mins