The College Commons Podcast

As a poet and translator, Dr. Back, discusses how her own poetic sensibility enables her to inhabit and translate the work of Israeli poet, Tuvia Ruebner.

Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, a translator of Hebrew poetry, a scholar and an educator. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a PEN Translation grant, a Dora Maar Brown Foundation Fellowship, and a Hadassah-Brandeis Research grant. In addition to five volumes of her own poetry (English) and a study of the poetics of the American poet Susan Howe (1999), Back has published important collections of Israeli poetry in translation. Her collection In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (Hebrew Union College Press and University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) won the triennial Risa Domb/Porjes Prize in 2016, and was a finalist for both the National Translation Award in Poetry and the Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry in 2015.

Her new translation collection On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg is forthcoming from Hebrew Union College Press and the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring 2017. Her other acclaimed translation works include Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (2006), With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (2009) and Night, Morning: Selected Poems of Hamutal Bar-Yosef (2008).

Back lives in the Galilee, where her great-great-great grandfather settled in the 1830s; she teaches at Oranim College, in the foothills of the Carmel Mountains. Her classes include students from Jewish, Muslim and Christian backgrounds; thus, the classroom becomes a laboratory for inter-ethnic and religious dialogue through literature among people dwelling in a political, religious, and ethnic conflict zone.

Photo courtesy of David H. Aaron.

In a probing exploration, Matan Koch, disability expert, leads us through a thoughtful discussion on how we language disability and the inadvertent benefits of privilege. 

Matan A. Koch is a speaker, educator, and consultant, sharing ideas and strategies to promote the universal inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society, using strategies that benefit everyone. His lifelong history of disability advocacy began at age four with a presentation to several hundred young people, continued with a term as the president of Yale University's student disabilities community, and reached its most recent high point with his appointment by President Barack Obama to the National Council on Disability, for a term which concluded in 2014.

Dr. Neil Levin discusses the history and the musical creativity and life of American Jewry.

Artistic Director and Editor-in-Chief of the Milken Archive for Jewish Music since 1993, Neil W Levin has devoted his professional and academic life to the scholarly study of the music of Jewish experience from historical, musicological, ethnological, Judaic, and cross-cultural perspectives. While he has lectured, written, and taught courses on a diverse array of Jewish and Judaically related musical subjects spanning a broad spectrum of traditions, his particular areas of focus embrace comparative considerations of eastern and western spheres of Ashkenazi Jewry in terms of their sacred, secular art, theatrical, and folk music; and the musical creativity and life of American Jewry.

As a professor of Jewish music on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York since 1982, he has taught graduate courses on the history, development, graduate courses on the history, development, and repertoire of synagogue music, cantorial art, Yiddish and Hebrew folksong, the music of modern Israel, and music of American Jewish experience. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities in the field of Jewish music in general, and he is in much demand as a lecturer and presenter at university seminars and academic conferences throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. As of November 2017, he is the Visiting Professor in Residence in music at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, HIAS vice president for Community Engagement, provides an overview of the immigration crisis and HIAS' role in helping the stranger.

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, Vice President for Community Engagement, is mobilizing the Jewish community to advance HIAS’ work with refugees in the United States and around the world.

Prior to coming to HIAS, Jennie played a catalytic role in building the Jewish social justice movement and the field of Jewish service as the director of the Jewish Life and Values Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She developed innovative initiatives such as the Selah Leadership Training Program and the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable. Under Jennie’s leadership, the Jewish Life and Values Program also worked to amplify a progressive religious voice in America, advance American engagement in the Middle East peace process, and cultivate the environmental movement and women as agents of change in Israel.

Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, takes us on a thoughtful tour of Jewish journalism, identity and culture.

Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she founded in 2009. Before that, she spent five years as culture editor of the Forward, where she supervised coverage of books, films, dance, music, art, and ideas. She also started a line of Forward-branded books with W.W. Norton and edited its maiden publication, "A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward." A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Alana has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Slate, and others.

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, discusses the immigration ban, states' rights issues, and the emoluments suit against the President.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science.

Prior to assuming this position in 2008, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and before that was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School from 1983-2004, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School.

He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court, published by Viking in 2014, and two books to be published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He writes a weekly column for the Orange County Register, monthly columns for the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court. In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.

Chemerinsky holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.

In this first Bully Pulpit podcast produced for a live audience, Rabbi Marmur discusses Heschel's legacy and the possibility for community leadership.

Rabbi Dr. Michael Marmur is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Previously, he served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. In recent years he has taught courses in Theology, Homiletics, and Pluralistic Jewish Education.Born and raised in England, Rabbi Marmur completed a BA Degree in Modern History at the University of Oxford before moving to Israel in 1984.

Join Dr. Mann for a wide-ranging discussion on the influence of Jewish craftsmen in the Medieval period to how Jewish art engages with contemporary art.

Professor Vivian Mann is Professor Emerita of Jewish Art and Visual Culture at The Jewish Theological Seminary. For many years Dr. Mann was Morris and Eva Feld Chair of Judaica at The Jewish Museum, where she created numerous exhibitions and their catalogs, among them Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy; Convivencia: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain; and, most recently, Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land. In 2010, Prof. Mann curated the exhibition Uneasy Communion: Jews, Christians and Altarpieces in Medieval Spain at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA).

Rabbi Ellenson examines the tensions of Jews as they moved from seclusion in the pre-modern Jewish world to assimilation and the evolution of Reform Judaism.

Rabbi David Ellenson, Ph.D., is Chancellor Emeritus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies (Brandeis University), as well as Visiting Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. He served as President of HUC-JIR from 2001-2013.

Ellenson is a prolific scholar of modern Jewish thought and history with a particular expertise in the emergence and development of Orthodox Judaism in 19th c. Europe. He has also written on Orthodox legal rulings on conversion in modernity, religion and state in Israel, contemporary Jewish movements, Jewish ethics, and emerging trends in Jewish life in North America. His writings include seven solo-authored or edited books and hundreds of articles and reviews, including peer-reviewed pieces and writings for the general public in many media outlets.

Among his books are Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah and the Boundaries of Jewish Identity (University Press of America, 1989), Between Tradition and Culture: The Dialectics of Jewish Religion and Identity in the Modern World (Scholars Press, 1994), After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (HUC Press, 2004 and National Jewish Book Award winner), and Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa, co-authored with Daniel Gordis (Stanford University Press, 2012, National Jewish Book Award finalist). The Jewish Publication Society has published a collection of his essays in its “Scholar of Distinction” series with the title Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity (2014).

Ellenson was ordained by HUC-JIR in 1977 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. He holds MA degrees from HUC-JIR and the University of Virginia, as well as the M.Phil. degree from Columbia. He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary.

Rabbi Gottlieb discusses contemporary technologies for the transformation and extension of pathways for Jewish learning.

Rabbi Owen Gottlieb, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the founder and lead researcher of the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the RIT MAGIC Center, the Institute’s state of the art research laboratory and game studio. In 2010, Rabbi Gottlieb founded ConverJent: Jewish Games for Learning. Gottlieb’s mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York was nominated for Most Innovative Game by the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival in 2013. Current projects include a strategy card-to-mobile game to teach medieval religious legal codes, beginning with Maimonides Mishneh Torah. The digital prototype of the game is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rabbi Gottlieb and William Braniff (University of Maryland) also recently presented on Video Games and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) at the Games + Higher Education + National Impact conference in Washington D.C. Rabbi Gottlieb’s interdisciplinary work spans cultural anthropology, games for learning, media and game studies, history and religious education, and the learning sciences. He holds an A.B. From Dartmouth College, M.As from USC School of Cinematic Arts, and HUC-JIR (where he was ordained in 2010), and a Ph.D. in Education and Jewish Studies from NYU. Rabbi Gottlieb is a member of the CCAR, the International Game Developers Association, and the Writers Guild of America, West.