edJEWcation

In 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam threw out one of its sharpest young minds. His name was Baruch Spinoza, and almost four hundred years later we’re still arguing with him. Today, we dig into his philosophy, why it scared everyone, and what it means for Jews today.

In this episode, we get into:

• Who Spinoza was: born in Amsterdam in 1632 to Portuguese conversos, orphaned young, and grinding lenses in The Hague for a living

• His big challenge: the Bible as a human book, the three angels visiting Abraham as a “baby fairy tale,” and God as the laws of nature

• The excommunication: Uriel da Costa, a name crossed out of the synagogue membership books, and a community of Inquisition refugees who really needed him to stop talking

• The Streisand effect, and whether booting him out made him more famous

• The line from Spinoza through the Enlightenment to the Reform Jewish movement

• Why most American Jews aren’t Spinozists (they still show up for the seder), and why Chayaleah thinks biblical criticism is the real slippery slope

Further Reading on Spinoza:

• Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (1999) and Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (2001). OUP

• Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (2012). Review: Jewish Review of Books, “Brother Baruch”

• Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza (2006)

• My Jewish Learning, “Spinoza”

If history has always been written by the victors, and anyone with AI can now rewrite it, how do we figure out what actually happened? And does anybody really go looking for the truth, or do we mostly go looking for proof of what we already believe?

In this episode, we get into:

• The great man theory vs. Tolstoy, and why the Rabbi thinks timing is the real reason we remember the Baal Shem Tov

• Why memorizing dates kills history, and the Harkness classroom that skips it

• Post-truth: an Elizabeth Holmes documentary built to steer you, and the ChatGPT pumpkin that only knew what ChayaLeah had told it

• The Rabbi’s honest admission about reading the other side of history (spoiler: he isn’t interested)

• Torah as a baseline for truth, Rambam’s thirteen principles, and the Talmud’s test of character: your cup, your pocket, and your anger

• The period of history each of us would visit, from Jesus to the Alter Rebbe’s court to the Montreal Canadiens of the 1960s

We started with truth and history and ended with the Pocket Rocket. That’s how this show goes.

This is our fourth and final episode of our series on the life of Ze’ev Jabotinsky

In this episode, we get into:

• The 1936 evacuation plan to move a million and a half Jews out of Eastern Europe, and why Jewish leaders called it “outrageous and criminal”

• Jabotinsky’s uneasy deal with Poland’s Foreign Minister, Józef Beck: Jabotinsky wanted Jews saved, Beck wanted them gone

• The 1939 White Paper, illegal immigration, and the Sakarya, the rescue ship led by Jabotinsky’s son Eri

• A 25-year-old Menachem Begin publicly challenging his teacher, and Avraham Stern walking out to form what became Lehi

• Jabotinsky’s final campaign in America, his death, and why David Ben-Gurion refused to bring his bones home

• The story of Shlomo Ben-Yosef, and the legacy that outlived all of Jabotinsky’s lost battles

Three years ago, if you’d told us we’d spend October 7 interviewing Lucas Gage, we’d have laughed. So would he.

Lucas is a former Marine who did two tours in Iraq, then spent 14 years in the antisemitic “JQ” movement, building an audience of 336,000 on X, going viral with “Boom Boom Tel Aviv,” and calling Jews demons. This year he walked away, wrote about why, and started showing up at kosher restaurants in Lakewood. We wanted to know how a smart guy gets that deep, and more importantly, how he got out.

In this episode, we get into:

• How a 9/11 “truther” video after Iraq became a gateway to every conspiracy on the menu, with the Jews as the “final boss”

• Why conspiracy thinking is a web, not a single belief, and why you have to take it down one strand at a time

• What Lucas actually believed about the Holocaust, and how “revisionism” sells itself as a free speech fight

• The crypto scam, the Charlie Kirk assassination theories, and the moment he watched a conspiracy get built in real time

• Why a calm “so what makes you believe that?” from Jake Turx worked where name-and-shame never did

• Russian and Iranian influence operations, bot farms, and why antisemitism treats Jews like all-powerful gods

It’s one of the most important discussions should should be having right now, but it’s also funny and hopeful. People can go to very dark places and still come back.

This is a good place to start with Lucas's writings - What Pulled Me Out of Antisemitism

This episode starts off with a murder on a Tel Aviv beach, how that murder would fundamentally change the future of the Zionist movement, Jabotinsky’s role within it.

In this episode, we get into:

• Why Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall” and how it set him at odds with the Zionist establishment

• Development of various aspects of his philosophy from Betar to Hadar to Monism

• The “fascist” smear and the problems Abba Ahimeir made for the Revisionists

• His banning from ever returning to Eretz Israel

• The Revisionists storming out of the 1931 Zionist conference at Basel

• Why are so many of the movements willing to accept the claim that Jabotinsky’s people are responsible for the murder of Chaim Arlosoroff.

• The London Agreement and the creation of a the Zionist organization

Pull up a chair, and bring your thickest skin. The fourth and final episode is coming.

Hashem offers a 12-year-old king anything he wants. Wealth, power, conquest, all on the table. Solomon asks for wisdom, and nearly three thousand years later we’re still reading what he did with it.

This week we discuss the Book of Proverbs, Solomon’s advice to his kids, and find that a lot of it reads like a group text to modern America.

But first, a mazel tov: ChayaLeah’s other show, Ask a Jew, got picked up by Ark Media and is now Chosen People Problems. Yes, CCCP. We had jokes.

In this episode, we get into:

• Solomon’s three wisdom books and the old argument over which came first: Song of Songs, Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes

• “The beginning of wisdom is to acquire wisdom,” and why the Rabbi says a real scholar needs a good tuchis

• Discipline, corporal punishment, and why kids don’t need their parents to be their friends

• Aristotle in the classroom vs. Aristotle outside it, and how Jabotinsky’s Hadar connects

• Why God made mosquitoes and sloths: “Go to the ant, you sluggard”

• Why Jay’s favorite proverb is Proverbs 15

  
  

Thirty-one chapters, one a day, and you’ve finished the book in a month. Start with this episode.

Picking up where we left him last time…Jabotinsky is in a refugee camp in Egypt with 12,000 Jewish refugees, who had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks.

He surveys the camp, the Jews within it and comes out with one conclusion: pity won’t build a nation, soldiers will.

What follows are the three of the loneliest years of his life, followed spending time in a British prison for the crime of defending Jews against Arab violence.

In this episode, we get into:

• The Jewish Legion, and why nearly every Zionist leader thought Jabotinsky was a mad man

• How Joseph Trumpeldor became one of his lone allies early in his fight

• His failed effort to recruit Jews from London’s East End to fight for their homeland.

• The Balfour Declaration and his crossing the Jordan as part of the Legion

• His defense of the Jews in Jerusalem during the Nebi Musa riots in his sentence by a British court of 15 years of hard labor

Grab a seat, and bring your stubborn streak. Part three is coming.

In this episode we discuss

• Compulsory service vs. a Second Temple style tax to Jerusalem, and why the Law of Return covers even Noam Chomsky

• Israelis flying home to vote, and the rabbis who spend Yom Kippur bashing Israel

• The Rabbi’s rules for when to confront someone and when to keep your mouth closed (hint: it’s called wisdom)

• A grandmother’s edible sukkah, magicians and moon bounces in shul, and why American Judaism is in triage

• Hillel vs. Shammai on thin Jewish identity, plus why Hebrew school is a concession

• A sneak peek at Jay’s four-part series on Ze’ev Jabotinsky, including the only words he ever exchanged with Herzl

  
  

  Our episode on Judaism and abortion

Ze’ev Jabotinsky could have been a great Russian novelist. Everyone, including the Russian novelists, said so. Instead, a spring evening in Odessa in 1903 set him on the hardest road available to a Jew in the Russian Empire, and he never got off it.

This week Jay goes solo for the first episode in a four part series about Jabotinsky’s life.

In first episode of the series, we get into:

• What growing up in Odessa would mean for what Jabotinsky became

• How the Kishinev pogrom influenced his perspective on where Zionism was and where it needs to go

• Why he ran out of patience for the leaders of Zionism.

• His perspective on the importance of Bialik’s poem “In the City of Slaughter”

• The only four words that he and Herzl ever exchanged

• Constantinople, the Young Turks, and why he decided to side with the Allies in World War I

The Rabbi’s Ten Days of Repentance began with a bowl of cornflakes topped with rancid milk, which somehow leads to him doing shots of Gin on Simchas Torah…with an MIT fraternity.

Once we helped him process the milk tragedy, we get into our real discussion.

We talk about:

• Is it American-Jew or Jewish-American? And what two thousand years of never quite belonging has to do with it.

• Why Jewish emancipation made antisemitism worse, and why America is the one country besides Israel where being Jewish has nothing to do with your rights

• On the accusation of dual loyalty: Why pointing the accusation at Jews is BS because everybody has more than one loyalty.

• Haredim, the Amish, and the woman on the train who yelled at the wrong guy in a black hat

• Three sayings put on trial: everything happens for a reason, God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, and suffering makes you stronger.

Pour yourself something that isn’t gin, hasn’t gone sour, and join us.