Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Oceans of ink have been spilled seeking to answer this question, first posed by the early Church father Tertullian. How do the two intellectual pillars of Western […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  The English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton famously described the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church.” Americans, even now, are a uniquely religious people, and it is impossible truly to […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  This past July, something unusual happened in Alaska. The Israeli military launched its most technologically sophisticated defensive missiles through the atmosphere, into space. The July testing of the Arrow 3 represents the consummation of […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  According to Jewish tradition, the holiday of Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—marks the “birth” of man on the sixth day of creation. But what else was created along with him? According the sages of […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  In the American Jewish imagination, the story of Israel’s founding is a story of East European pioneers, socialist kibbutzim, and a Jewish state rising from the ashes of the Holocaust. And all of these […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  If you follow Israeli politics, then you know that within the past year, the Jewish state has experienced two deadlocked elections. What explains this political stalemate? According to Micah Goodman, one of Israel’s leading […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  Throughout our podcast series with eminent Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer, we have spoken about a Judaism of “peak moments.” This is the kind of Judaism most American Jews practice; connecting to their faith at […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  With the exception of shabbat, there is probably no practice that distinguishes pious Jews more than the observance of kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws. Whether at a business meeting or an everyday social gathering, Jews […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  On July 18, 1994, a car-bomb struck the headquarters of AMIA—the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, the largest Jewish community center and social-service agency in Buenos Aires—killing 85 people and wounding 300 more. It was […]

Press play below to listen to the podcast, you can also find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.  For much of the 20th century, the major denominations—Conservative, Reform, Orthodox—loomed large over institutional Jewish life in America. But in 2019, the Jewish scene looks different; the movements hold less purchase on Jewish life […]