Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: Jews in Early Modern Dutch Society Chapter 2: Rembrandt’s Encounter with the Jews Chapter 3: Rembrandt’s Painting of Moses Receiving the Luchot Chapter 4: Tolkien and the Jews Chapter 5: The Dialectical Nature of the Jewish People […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  Chapter 1: The Brexit Vote, the Meaning of Nationalism, and the Biblical Roots of the Nation-State Chapter 2: The Seduction of Empire: The Nation-State’s Rival Chapter 3: Evaluating Protestant Nationalism Chapter 4: Nationalism vs. Liberalism Chapter 5: Neo-Nationalism, Neo-Catholicism, […]

It is widely known that a substantial number of men from the yeshiva community in Israel study Torah full-time, relying on broad support from the state to supplement their wives’ income in order to sustain their families. Perhaps less well known is that this phenomenon is not a traditional way of Jewish life, but one […]

Why does the Torah prohibit eating certain types of animals? Several explanations have been posited: From Maimonides’s suggestion that the prohibitions are rooted in a concern for health, to Samson Raphael Hirsch’s explanation concerning the connection of one’s body to one’s soul. In this 2006 Azure article, Meir Soloveichik argues these explanations misunderstand the true […]

The politics of ancient Israel were theocratic, federal, and republican, Daniel J. Elazar argues in this 1973 Tradition article. Deriving his understanding of the political teaching of the Hebrew Bible by analyzing the its account of Israelite history and the judgment it casts upon alternative political institutions, Elazar takes the reader through the four constitutional […]

In the “struggle for universal human dignity and equality,” the Jewish legal tradition instructs and complements the modern tradition of rights. Yale law professor Robert M. Cover argues in this 1988 article for the Journal of Law and Religion that, in contrast to modern conceptions of rights, which are primarily concerned with the protection of […]

Does Bible Criticism leave room for faith? Noted Bible scholar Jon Levenson points out in this 1993 First Things article that the purely secular, critical approach to the Bible of many academics suffers from the same faults as does the fundamentalist religious approach: both ultimately rely on their own uncriticized values and assumptions. Pluralism and […]

What is the Jewish understanding of economic justice? Many Jews assume it is one in which property rights are limited for the purpose of redistributing wealth and lessening the economic gap between rich and poor. Indeed, Jewish thinkers have been some of the chief proponents of socialism since its inception, and socialist economic policy was […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher.  In this podcast, Eric Cohen talks with Jay Lefkowitz about his provocative 2014 essay, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy: A Personal Account”. The essay caused a stir by describing a subset of American Modern Orthodox Judaism whose participation in […]

Understanding the human condition, the essential qualities that make us who we are, shapes how we think about our purpose as men and women created in the image of God.  Searching for distinctive characteristics that separate the human animal from all others, philosophers have proposed that man is an acquisitive animal, a social animal, a […]