J.J. and Dr. Ethan Schwartz explore the categories of religious universalism and particularism in the Bible.

This is the first episode in our miniseries about universalism and particularism in Judaism. Over the course of the series we will explore and complicate Jewish attitudes to these categories across the centuries. 

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Ethan Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He studies the Hebrew Bible in both the ancient Near Eastern setting in which it emerged and the Second Temple setting in which it became Jewish and Christian scripture, with particular interests in the prophetic literature, the Pentateuch, the ancient Jewish context of the New Testament, and the intellectual history of academic biblical studies. He is also an active participant in Jewish-Catholic and broader Jewish-Christian dialogue.

J.J. and Dr. Michael Satlow offer an authentic account of this apocryphal book of wisdom literature. 

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Professor Michael L. Satlow (Ph.D. in Ancient Judaism from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America) specializes in the history of Jews and Judaism in antiquity but also writes and teaches more broadly. His most recent authored book is How the Bible Became Holy and has recently edited two volumes, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook and Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen.  He has held fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright program among others.  He also directs several digital projects, including Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine.

J.J. and Dr. Lital Levy explore the Jewish Nahda, and the border-ignoring breadth of the Haskalah. 

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Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches literature, critical theory, and intellectual history, with specializations in Hebrew, Arabic, Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies. Her research encompasses the modern intellectual and cultural history of Arab Jews, literature and film from Israel/Palestine, the interface of Jewish literature and world literature, global Jewish literary history, and comparative non-Western literary modernities. She is the author of the award-winning book Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton UP, 2014) as well as numerous scholarly articles, and is co-editor of Unsettling Jewish Knowledge: Text, Contingency, Desire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). She is completing a book about the Arabophone Jewish writer Esther Azhari Moyal (1873–1954) and is engaged in another book project on the Global Haskalah.

J.J. and Dr. Shlomo Zuckier offer up some sweet-smelling insight into the history and future of sacrifices. 

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Shlomo Zuckier is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and will this coming year be the Igor Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on ancient Judaism, and he has written extensively on matters of sacrifice and atonement, including in the article on “Sacrifice” for the Routledge Companion to Jewish Philosophy. Some of his other research relates to intersections between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Late Antiquity and the early Medieval period, and to contemporary Jewish theology. Shlomo received his PhD from Yale University and rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University and has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill and Notre Dame Universities.

J.J. and Dr. Tzvi Novick talk prayer, poetry, homily, and some very-old-fashioned exegesis. 

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Tzvi Novick is the Abrams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.  His first monograph, What is Good, and What God Demands: Normative Structures in Tannaitic Literature (2010), traces foundational structural elements in tannaitic law and ethics, while his second, Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History (2018), examines the relationship between early liturgical poetry and rabbinic exegesis.  He is also the author of two introductory surveys, Introduction to the Scriptures of Israel: History and Theology (2018), and Judaism: A Guide for Christians (2025).

J.J. and Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger discuss the work and impact of the most influential Jewish Historian since Josephus. 


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Jeffrey C. Blutinger is the inaugural holder of the Barbara and Ray Alpert Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, an interdisciplinary major and minor established in 1999. He is the author of numerous articles on such varied topics as Holocaust education in Israel, post-Communist Holocaust memorialization, the reception of science in Hebrew-language Enlightenment newspapers, and the origins of the term “orthodox” as a denominational label among Jews.  Most recently, he has published two articles: a study of Kevin MacDonald, one of the most influential anti-Jewish, white nationalist academics in contemporary America, and an examination of how Bruno Balz, a gay German lyricist persecuted by the Nazis, came to write the most popular songs of the home front during the last years of World War II. He has recently written an intellectual biography of the great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz and the book manuscript is undergoing peer review.  He also has a chapter on leftwing academic antisemitism in the California State University system accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed volume.

J.J. and Dr. Sarah Pessin overflow with curiosity about the poetic philosophy of the Medieval Jewish Neoplatonists. 


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Sarah Pessin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. She holds an Interfaith Chair, and works in areas of phenomenology, existentialism, Neoplatonism, interfaith civics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social justice. She has won a teaching award from the graduate student council of the DU-Iliff Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, has served as a Fellow with the American Council on Education, and is the new Director of Spiritual Life for DU's Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence. She has previously served as the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and as the Faculty Senate President.

J.J. and Dr. Adam Ferziger crisscross the Atlantic to better understand the influence of American Orthodoxy on Israel, and vice versa. 

Buy the book: Agents of Change by Dr. Adam Ferziger

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Adam S. Ferziger holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. He is coconvener of the Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism, University of Oxford. Ferziger is a scholar of Jewish religious culture in the U.S. and Israel. His research focuses on the history of Jewish religious responses to modern and contemporary life.He is the author or editor of eight books including: Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Wayne State University Press, 2015), which received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. His new monograph, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (NYU Press, 2025), will be available from July 2025.Ferziger received his B.A., M.A., and rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University, and, after moving to Israel in 1987, his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan.

J.J. and Dr. Alon Shalev discuss the iconoclastic ideas and character of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner. 

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Alon Shalev is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he explores profound questions about meaning in life within the context of Jewish thought and philosophy. With a doctorate in Jewish Thought from the Hebrew University, Alon’s research integrates diverse traditions of ethics and political philosophy, addressing the intersection of personal and societal values. His work seeks to uncover ways these frameworks can help guide individuals and communities toward meaningful existence and just governance. His recent book, "Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner's Theology of Meaning" was published by Brill. Alon lives in Tzur Hadassah, is married, and has three children.

J.J. and Dr. David Novak hike through the forest of Natural Law, and stop to examine some (Jewish) trees therein. 

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David Novak is a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law. He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and is Professor Emeritus and J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus at the University of Toronto. David Novak is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. David Novak is to date the author of nineteen books. His book Covenantal Rights (Princeton University Press) won the American Academy of Religion Award for “best book in constructive religious thought in 2000.” He has edited four books and authored over three hundred articles and reviews in numerous scholarly and intellectual journals. He is one of the four co-authors of Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity.