Jewish and Twelve-Step Traditions at the Crossroads of Addiction

Description: A Jewish ethical tradition called Mussar and a uniquely Jewish approach to twelve-step recovery.

Hannah L. is the author of Mussar in Recovery: A Jewish Spiritual Path to Serenity and Joy, which is the topic of today’s conversation. Mussar in Recovery offers an approach to recovery from addiction based in a complementary approach between the 12-step program and Mussar, a Jewish program of ethical development and self-improvement through the balancing of personal character traits.

Rabbi Harvey Winokur, collaborator on Mussar in Recovery, is the founding, and since 2018, emeritus rabbi, of Temple Kehillat Chaim located in Roswell, Georgia. Rabbi Winokur is a Jewish spiritual director and facilitator of Mussar.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Adam Ferziger: A Patchwork of Jews

Opinions and approaches inhabit the entire spectrum of Jewish thought and practice, but how do they speak to each other?

Biography: Adam S. Ferziger is an historian of religion, and he holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He researches Jewish intellectual, social, and spiritual responses to modern and contemporary life. His book Beyond Sectarianism, won a National Jewish Book Award and his newest work, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism, was published in July by NYU Press. 

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Arnold Eisen: Dimensional and Complex Judaism

More than a religion, resisting extremes, but also hard to pin down, Judaism and Judaism’s God inspire Arnold Eisen’s spiritual search.

Biography: Arnold M. Eisen, a foremost authority on American Judaism, is professor of Jewish Thought and chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He previously served on the faculties of Stanford, Tel Aviv, and Columbia universities. He has contributed regularly to print and online media, including the Wall Street Journal, The Jewish Week, Huffington Post, and Tablet, on topics of Jewish education, philosophy, and values. He is a prolific scholar and author, most recently, of Seeking the Hiding God: A Personal Theological Essay.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series

Rabbi Dalia Marx: The Prayerbook As a Living Text

Rabbi Dalia Marx editor of the new Israeli Reform prayerbook muses on the siddur as both reflection and shaper of community.

Biography: Rabbi Professor Dalia Marx is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at the Hebrew Union College, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar. She is also the co-editor of the new Israeli Reform Siddur called “Tefillat ha-Adam” together with Alona Lisitsa. She is a public intellectual in Israel, appearing regularly on Israeli media, and she co-hosts with Rabbi Dan Prat a sister podcast of this one in Hebrew, also on HUC Connect, titled “Kanfei Ruach”.

For Rabbi Ed Feinstein meaning-making is story-telling, and the rabbi’s business.

Biography: Rabbi Ed Feinstein came to Valley Beth Shalom in 1993 at the invitation of the renowned Rabbi Harold Schulweis z"l, and succeeded Rabbi Schulweis as the congregation’s senior rabbi in 2005. He now serves on the faculty of the Ziegler Rabbinical School of the American Jewish University, the Wexner Heritage Program, the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and lectures widely across the United States. He is the author of several books, and he enjoys a well-earned reputation as wonderfully engaging lecturer and storyteller, and one of this generation’s great sermonizers.

A second generation of Holocaust survivors re-examine their lives through the lens of their parents.

Aron Hirt-Manheimer (he/him) is the Union for Reform Judaism's former editor-at-large, the former editor of Reform Judaism magazine (1976-2014) and founding editor of Davka magazine (1970-1976), a West Coast Jewish quarterly. His books include Jagendorf’s Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust (HarperCollins, 1991) and Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (HarperCollins, 1998) with Arthur Hertzberg. (Photo credit: Rose Eichenbaum)

Description: Spiritual and political dynamics that motivate and shape the pulpit of Rabbi Rachel Timoner.

Biography: Rabbi Rachel Timoner is grateful and proud to serve as Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is honored to stand with families at the moments of greatest joy and deepest sorrow in their lives, and she is delighted to be part of a flowering of creativity, community, learning, spirituality, and action at CBE.

Her initiatives in recent years include a weekly class designed to get to the heart and meaning of the prayer experience, a rabbinic conversation on antisemitism, a study series on systemic racism in America, a weekly class about peoplehood and nationalism, a sukkah about the refugee experience, a dialogue and study series on Israel, a revival of CBE’s youth group, a partnership with Antioch Baptist Church to address racism and antisemitism in Brooklyn, and a Dismantling Racism Team which was part of the successful campaigns to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility and to win bail reform in the State of New York. She helped to launch RAC-NY and Reform California, two statewide efforts to bring Reform Jewish values to bear on core issues of our times, such as immigration, affordable housing, and racial profiling. In November 2016, Rabbi Timoner, in cooperation with City Councilmember Brad Lander, co-founded #GetOrganizedBK in CBE’s sanctuary, so that over the next two years, ten thousand Brooklyn neighbors came together to resist autocracy and protect human rights. In May 2022, she gathered 55 women rabbis of all denominations to meet with the mayor to change the face of Jewish leadership in New York. On any given Shabbat, you’ll find Rabbi Timoner speaking about our purpose as Jews and human beings, the moral challenges of our times, the ways we need each other, and awakening to the spiritual aspect of our lives.

From 2009 to 2015, Rabbi Timoner served as Associate Rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, where she was a teacher of Torah and helped to develop the Shabbat Morning Minyan, Community of Elders, Spirituality Workshop, and Community Organizing Leadership Team that took on public transportation and economic justice.

Previously, Rabbi Timoner raised funds to rebuild the San Francisco Women’s Building; worked to mitigate the harm of welfare reform in California; and founded two leadership programs and a peer hotline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

She is a graduate of Yale University, received s’micha from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and was a Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellow and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Rabbi Timoner serves on the board of the New York Jewish Agenda, the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the New York Board of Rabbis, the UJA-Federation of New York, Plaza Community Chapel, and the International Council of the New Israel Fund. She is a T’ruah chavera and is a graduate of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s Clergy Leadership Program and the Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. She is the author of Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism.

When it comes to pigs, however, maybe you are what you don’t eat… Maybe…

Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book, Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (New York University Press, 2024), won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. According to The Wall Street Journal, “’Forbidden’ is an engaging and surprisingly cheerful study of that odd couple of the religious imagination, the Jew and the pig.” In addition, he is the author of Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2020); The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as the co-editor of four volumes: Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food (New York University Press, 2019); Animals and the Law in Antiquity (Brown Judaic Studies, 2021); With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021); and Religious Competition in the Third Century C.E.: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). He is currently working on a the history of kosher controversies.

Description: Hannah Pollin-Galay reveals the Yiddish of destruction, and its capacity to bring life and meaning.

Biography: Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.

Description: Complicated contours and tortuous fissures emerge as a picture of the American Jewish experience in Tablets Shattered.

Biography: Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. He is a columnist for Haaretz.

His essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024), won a National Jewish Book Award.

He is currently a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University, where his research sits at the nexus of modern intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Holocaust memory. His dissertation project examines the politics of antisemitism and the crisis of the liberal order.