J.J. and Dr. Yaacob Dweck Introduce us to the critic-in-chief of the Sabbatean movement in the 17th century: Rabbi Jacob Sasportas. This is episode 2 or our mini-series about Sabbateanism and its afterlife. 

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Yaacob Dweck is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (2011) and Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (2019) both published by Princeton University Press.

J.J. and Dr. Matt Goldish Introduce us to Shabbetai Tzevi and his cadre of prophets and promoters. This is episode 1 or our mini-series about Sabbateanism and its afterlife. 


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Matt Goldish is the Samuel M. and Esther Melton Chair in History at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the Sephardi diaspora after 1492, early modern Sephardic and Italian rabbinic culture, messianism, and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. He is the author of several books, including, The Sabbatean Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Jewish Questions: Responsa on Jewish Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton University Press, 2008). His newest book, having nothing to do with Jewish history, is Science and Specters at Salem (Routledge, 2025).

J.J. and Dr. Eliav Grossman bravely explore a new (old) frontier in Jewish thought. The mysterious time between the closing of the Babylonian Talmud and the rise of the Geonim. 

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Eliav Grossman is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. He studies Jews and Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and his research explores rabbinic literature as it developed from the product of a narrow class of provincial elites to the dominant cultural idiom for Jews across the eastern Mediterranean. Eliav’s dissertation, “The New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” investigates an eclectic corpus of texts that have been neglected in modern scholarship but that share a defining feature: imitation of the Mishnah, the foundational text of the classical rabbinic corpus. Eliav’s research interests extend beyond antiquity and encompass medieval liturgical poetry, early modern intellectual history, and the history of 20th century Jewish scholarship. His scholarly writings have appeared in Jewish Studies Quarterly and Aramaic Studies, and he has written and lectured for many popular audiences. He has been awarded a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship and the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (honorary). Prior to beginning his studies at Princeton, Eliav completed a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion at Columbia University, an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University, and another MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, also at Cambridge.

J.J. and Dr. Steven Zipperstein capture the essence and relevance of this elusive visionary. 

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Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His second book, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (University of California Press, 1993) won the National Jewish Book Award. In 1998, it appeared in Israel in a Hebrew translation published by the Ofakim series of Am Oved. Zipperstein has published more than fifty articles as well as many review essays in a wide range of journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post Book Review, Forward, The New Republic, Dissent, Partisan Review, Jewish Review of Books, New England Review, and The Atlantic. In spring 2022, he was awarded the Stanford Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for excellence in Graduate Teaching.  In 2023, Zipperstein was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His next book “Stung by Life. Philip Roth: A Biography” will appear in October 2025 in the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press.

J.J. and Dr. Aaron Koller tremble in fear of this awesome Biblical episode, but they still manage to discuss fascinating theological and historical interpretations of the story. 

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Aaron Koller is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University. Aaron has held research positions at Cambridge University and in the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, he has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a fellow at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem and the Hartman Institute in West Jerusalem. He is the author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (JPS/University of Nebraska Press, 2020), among other books, the editor of five more, and is currently working on a cultural history of the alphabet. He lives in Queens, NY with his partner, Shira Hecht-Koller, and their children.

J.J. and Dr. Olga Litvak take the express from Berlin to Eastern Europe in search of the real Jewish enlightenment. 

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Olga Litvak is the Roth Professor of Modern European Jewish History at Cornell University.  The author of Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (2006) and Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (2012), she is currently working on a book about M. L. Lilienblum and the origins of Zionism in late imperial Russia.

J.J. and Dr. Sarah Hammerschlag encounter a phenomenal high-school principal and genius: Emmanuel Levinas. 

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Sarah Hammerschlag is the John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago. Sheis a scholar in the area of Religion and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on the position of Judaism in the post-World War II French intellectual scene, a field that puts her at the crossroads of numerous disciplines and scholarly approaches including philosophy, literary studies, and intellectual history. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018). The Figural Jew received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, given by the Association of Jewish Scholars, and was a finalist for the AAR’s Best First Book in the History of Religions in 2011. She has written essays on Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Jewish Quarterly Review and Shofar, among other places. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Postwar Paris. Her most recent book is Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (2021), co-written with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood.

J.J. and Dr. Sara Labaton dive into the mysteries of Ibn Ezra’s revolutionary commentary on the Bible. This is episode 2 of our series on the ideas of Abraham Ibn Ezra. 

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Dr. Sara Labaton is Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She was a member of the inaugural cohort of North American David Hartman Center Fellows. Sara received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Columbia University and a doctorate in Medieval Jewish Thought from the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between the esoteric and peshat hermeneutics in the commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra, particularly with regard to ibn Ezra’s understanding of biblical cultic rituals. Sara was a founding faculty member of Yeshivat Hadar, where she developed a Bible and Exegesis curriculum. She has taught in a variety of Jewish settings, most recently as a history instructor at the Frisch School. Her research interests include the intersection of ritual and relevance, ritual experimentation, and overcoming the binary of halakhic–non-halakhic/insider-outsider in Jewish ritual practice. As part of her participation in the Religious Worlds Seminar at the Interfaith Center of New York, Sara researched ways of integrating comparative religion into Jewish educational contexts.

J.J. and Dr. Sara Labaton dive into the mysteries of Ibn Ezra’s revolutionary commentary on the Bible. This is episode 2 of our series on the ideas of Abraham Ibn Ezra. 

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For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcasts

Dr. Sara Labaton is Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She was a member of the inaugural cohort of North American David Hartman Center Fellows. Sara received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Columbia University and a doctorate in Medieval Jewish Thought from the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between the esoteric and peshat hermeneutics in the commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra, particularly with regard to ibn Ezra’s understanding of biblical cultic rituals. Sara was a founding faculty member of Yeshivat Hadar, where she developed a Bible and Exegesis curriculum. She has taught in a variety of Jewish settings, most recently as a history instructor at the Frisch School. Her research interests include the intersection of ritual and relevance, ritual experimentation, and overcoming the binary of halakhic–non-halakhic/insider-outsider in Jewish ritual practice. As part of her participation in the Religious Worlds Seminar at the Interfaith Center of New York, Sara researched ways of integrating comparative religion into Jewish educational contexts.

J.J. and Dr. Tzvi Langermann enumerate many of the Ibn Ezra's most fascinating philosophical ideas. This is episode 1 of our series on the ideas of Abraham Ibn Ezra. 

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Y. Tzvi Langermann, is Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Bar Ilan University, He has published extensively on medieval science and philosophy, especially basing his research on unpublished manuscript materials. His most recent book is Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2024).