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73. Offerings and Sacrifices | Dr. Shlomo Zuckier
J.J. and Dr. Shlomo Zuckier offer up some sweet-smelling insight into the history and future of sacrifices. 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 [email protected] For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsShlomo Zuckier is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and will this coming year be the Igor Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on ancient Judaism, and he has written extensively on matters of sacrifice and atonement, including in the article on “Sacrifice” for the Routledge Companion to Jewish Philosophy. Some of his other research relates to intersections between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Late Antiquity and the early Medieval period, and to contemporary Jewish theology. Shlomo received his PhD from Yale University and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University and has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill and Notre Dame Universities.
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72. Piyyut and Midrash | Dr. Tzvi Novick
J.J. and Dr. Tzvi Novick talk prayer, poetry, homily, and some very-old-fashioned exegesis. 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 [email protected] For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsTzvi Novick is the Abrams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. His first monograph, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (2010), traces foundational structural elements in tannaitic law and ethics, while his second, Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History (2018), examines the relationship between early liturgical poetry and rabbinic exegesis. He is also the author of two introductory surveys, Introduction to the Scriptures of Israel: History and Theology (2018), and Judaism: A Guide for Christians (2025).
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71. Heinrich Graetz | Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger
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 [email protected] For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsJeffrey 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.
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70. Jewish Neoplatonism | Dr. Sarah Pessin
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 [email protected] For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsSarah 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.
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69. American-Israeli Thought | Dr. Adam Ferziger
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 FerzigerFollow 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 [email protected] For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsAdam 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.
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