Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  “When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty; then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish communities celebrate the new year and, as part of this celebration, read chapter 22 of Genesis. This contains the famous story in which God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  In the period between 1936-1938, now known to historians as the Great Terror, Joseph Stalin oversaw the murder of over 700,000 Soviet subjects. Some of them were political rivals. Some of them held heterodox views. Some of them were […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  The celebrated novelist Dara Horn’s 2021 book People Love Dead Jews has an arresting title, one designed to make the reader feel uncomfortable. That’s because Horn makes an argument that tries to change the way people think about the […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.  Perhaps more than any other major religious tradition, Judaism is mediated through words. God first communicated to Abraham through intelligible speech. Moses brought down from Mount Sinai tablets inscribed with words codifying the structure of Jewish moral order. The […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Patriotism—or one form of it at least—is an acknowledgment of the obligations that flow from recognizing all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down. And if one wanted to inculcate that form […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  This year, Koren Publishers released a new edition of the Book of Esther. It contains the complete, unabridged Hebrew text of Esther, the same text found in any other volume of the Hebrew Bible. But the rest of it […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Some of today’s most important ideas were first born in little magazines—magazines, that is to say, like Mosaic. How does that happen? And what is the role of a magazine editor, and does that role differ if the magazine […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Since its first issue twelve years ago, the Jewish Review of Books, a beautifully-designed quarterly that was founded and supported by Tikvah, has produced 49 issues of high-level Jewish discourse. Much of that success can […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Why do some American children do better in school than others? Social scientists tend to look to family structure, race, class, and gender in an effort to find factors that correlate to better or worse […]