The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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.

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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.

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J.J. and Dr. Talya Fishman whip themselves up into a frenzy over the thought and influence of the pietists of the Medieval Rhineland. 

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Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual and
Cultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages
and Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by
exploring them within their broader historical, geographic and religious contexts, both Islamic
and Christian. Along with many articles – some on Hasidei Ashkenaz, Fishman is the author of Shaking the Pillars of Exile: "Voice of a Fool"'s Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture, (Stanford University Press, 1997), and Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition Medieval Jewish Cultures (2011), Winner of 2011 Nahum M. Sarna Award for Scholarship of the National Jewish Book Council. She co-edited Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews, (Littman Library, Oxford, 2018) with Ephraim Kanarfogel. In the soon-to-be published What is Talmud, edited by Jay Harris and Christine Hayes and (Harvard University Press), her article, “Medieval Jewish Subcultures Receive the Talmudic Text: The Impact of Regional Trends and Antecedent Oral Cultures”, further develops the thesis that certain differences in the halakhic cultures of Ashkenaz, Sefarad and Provence are linked to perduring assumptions about composition and authority that were specific to discrete geographic regions in antiquity. Professor Fishman’s current research project concerns the place of materiality in medieval Jewish thought and experience.

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J.J. and Dr. Elliot Wolfson are just two beings talking about being, time, and Jewish mysticism in the thought of Martin Heidegger. 

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Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including most recently The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other (2018); Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (2019); Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality (2021); The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (2023); Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (2025); Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible: Unveiling Veils of Infinitivity (2026).

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J.J. and Dr. Marina Zilbergerts study the birth of modern Hebrew for its own sake. 

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Dr. Marina Zilbergerts is a scholar of Jewish literature and thought. From 2016 to 2023, she served as the Lipton Assistant Professor of Jewish Literature and Thought at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Comparative Literature. You can read about her book, The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature (Indiana University Press, 2022), in the Jewish Review of Books, AJS Review, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and The Jewish Press.

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J.J. and Dr. Rachel Elior make sharp distinctions between mysticism, Hasidism, and Sabbateanism. 

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Rachel Elior is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish Thought at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has written nine books on various periods of Jewish mystical creativity, including The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (Littman, 2006) and Israel Ba'al Shem Tov and his contemporaries : Kabbalists, Sabbatians, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim (Carmel, 2014). 


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J.J. and Dr. Abigail Gillman interpret the ideas and impact of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation. 

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Abigail Gillman is a Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures.  She teaches courses on modern German literature; Hebrew literature; Israeli Cinema; and Religion and Literature (cross-listed as XL and RN). She teaches and lectures in the Core Curriculum, and has also taught in the CAS Writing Program. She recently published A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This book takes as its starting point the remarkable number of re-translations of the Hebrew Bible produced in Germany—translations into German and Yiddish—from the Haskalah through the twentieth century.  The book demonstrates that bible translation in Jewish society was (and still is) used to promote diverse educational, cultural, and linguistic goals. She is currently writing about the parable/mashal across Jewish Literature, and about “monstrous motherhood” in recent Israeli (and Jewish) film and memoirs.

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J.J. and Dr. Paul Franks systematically consider Franz Rosenzweig in all his existential and idealistic glory. 

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Paul Franks is Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, Professor of German Languages and Literatures, Professor of Religious Studies, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University.  Before coming to Yale in 2011, he was the first occupant of the Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  
He was educated at Gateshead Talmudical College, at Balliol College Oxford, and at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1993.  He has also taught at Michigan, Indiana, and Notre Dame, and has been visiting professor at Chicago, Leuven, and Hebrew University. In addition to numerous articles on German Idealism and Jewish philosophy, Paul is the translator and annotator (with Michael L. Morgan) of Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Hackett, 2000), and he is the author of All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Harvard, 2005).  He is currently writing a book on the central concepts of post-Kantian Idealism in light of their kabbalistic roots, and with Michael L. Morgan  he is writing a history of Jewish philosophy from the 1490s to the 1990s.

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J.J. and Dr. Samuel Brody assess the original ideas and monumental influence of this 20th century thinker and leader. 

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Samuel Hayim Brody is Associate Profesor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Martin Buber's Theopolitics (IUP, 2018), which received the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. He is also the co-editor, with Julie E. Cooper, of The King is in the Field: Essays in Modern Jewish Political Thought (Penn, 2023).

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J.J. and Gila Fine analyze the literary character of Talmudic women and uncover a counter history of Bruriah. 

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Noam Zadoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: from Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis, 2017) and many other scholarly works that deal with a wide array of subjects in recent Jewish History. 

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