Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBen Ackerman, "Open When You Are: A Mystical Novel" (2016)
Episode 277
Gabel's eatery is always open, feeding hungry hearts, bodies, and souls. When Strad, a young man at odds with life, wanders in, an uncanny encounter …
3 years, 9 months ago
Emily Michelson, "Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 18
Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, t…
3 years, 9 months ago
On Jewish Sexual Ethics
Season 1 Episode 166
Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on …
3 years, 9 months ago
Philip Hollander, "From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature" (Indiana UP, 2019)
Episode 44
In From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature (Indiana UP, 2019), Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals …
3 years, 9 months ago
Yael Halevi-Wise, "The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua" (Penn State UP, 2020)
Episode 42
Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and t…
3 years, 9 months ago
Stu Halpern, "Esther in America" (Maggid, 2020)
Episode 312
The Book of Esther has inspired and impacted the American project since its very inception. Rabbis and ethicists, abolitionists and artists, preacher…
3 years, 9 months ago
Matthew Mark Silver, "The History of Galilee, 47 BCE to 1260 CE: From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades" (Lexington Books, 2021)
Episode 311
Galilee, the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its…
3 years, 9 months ago
On Sholem Aleichem’s "The Tevye Stories"
Episode 10
The original production of Fiddler on the Roof won nine Tony awards, held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical, and was adapted into a…
3 years, 9 months ago
Alexander Green, "Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History" (SUNY Press, 2019)
Episode 309
The philosopher and biblical commentator Joseph Ibn Kaspi (1280–1345) was a provocative Jewish thinker of the medieval era whose works have generally…
3 years, 9 months ago
Ari D. Kahn, "The Crowns on the Letters: Essays on the Aggada and the Lives of the Sages" (OU Press, 2020)
Episode 308
Rabbi Ari Kahn’s The Crowns on the Letters: Essays on the Aggada and the Lives of the Sages (OU Press, 2020) represents a major achievement in the st…
3 years, 9 months ago