Professor Samuel Kessler, holder of the Ake and Kristina Bonnier Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion at Gustavus, talks about his background and paths to his BA in History, PhD in Religious Studies, and the Bonnier Chair, the origins and logic of the latter, learning and teaching about “lived religion,” varieties of Judaism and being Jewish at Gustavus, falling for Berlin while studying there as an undergraduate, his book nearing completion about the nineteenth-century Chief Rabbi of Vienna and public intellectual Adolf Jellinek, and the American Jewish author Philip Roth.