The Podcast of Jewish Ideas Torah in Motion

J.J. and Dr. Eric Lawee comment on Rashi's astounding career, and refuse to gloss over his contentious journey to join the Jewish canon. 
 
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Eric Lawee is a professor in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. His Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic (2019; paperback 2021), published by Oxford University Press, won the 2019 Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship of the Jewish Book Council and was finalist for a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. He holds the Rabbi Asher Weiser Chair for Medieval Biblical Commentary Research and has just completed a six-year term as director of Bar-Ilan's Institute for Jewish Bible Interpretation.

J.J. and Dr. Menachem Fisch decided that this is the time for studying the philosophy of the book of Qohelet, and they don't study it in vain.
 
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Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University and Co-Director of the Frankfurt-Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Dynamics. He has published widely on the history of 19th century British science and mathematics, on rationality and agency, and the philosophy of Talmudic legal reasoning. His recent work explores the limits of normative self-criticism, transformative dialogue, rabbinic
literature’s dispute of religiosity, the rationality of scientific framework transitions, Jewish
resources for a pluralist political liberalism, the theo-political roots of Israel's retreat from
political Zionism, and reflexive emotions.

J.J. and Dr. Maren Niehoff comment on Philo's ideas and attempt to weave him back into the fabric of Jewish history. 

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Before joining the Dept. of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Maren R. Niehoff was a Junior Fellow at Harvard and received her doctorate and MA from Oxford University. Her BA studies were split between Berlin and Jerusalem. Today she is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Among her numerous publications are Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (Yale 2018; Polonsky Prize 2019) and Homeric Scholarship and Biblical Exegesis in Alexandria (Cambridge 2011; Polonsky Prize 2011).  Currently, she completes a translation and commentary of the Philonic treatise On the Freedom of Every Righteous Person (Brill). Her research interests include the New Testament and rabbinic literature in the Land of Israel.

J.J. and Dr. Neil Rogachevsky skip down the winding (theoretical) road towards Israeli independence, and tell the story of the drafting of Ben Gurion's declaration of independence. 

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Neil Rogachevsky is assistant professor and associate director at the Straus Center of Yeshiva University, where he teaches Israel studies and political thought. His commentary and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Atlantic, Mosaic, Commentary, Jewish Review of Books, American Affairs, Ha’aretz and other publications. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

J.J. and Dr. Jonathan Garb march down the various paths of the Ram"chal's thought, and straighten out some of mysteries of his life, thought, and reception.

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Jonathan Garb is the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2014, he received the Israel Academy of Sciences and
Humanities’ Gershom Scholem Prize for Kabbalah Research. His latest book is: Does God Doubt? R.
Gershon Henoch Leiner’s Thought in Its Contexts (Brill, 2024).

J.J. and Dr. Jeremy Brown circulate some of the Jewish responses to Copernicus.


Jeremy Brown is the author of New Heavens and a New Earth; The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (Oxford University Press 2013) and Influenza; The Hundred Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History (Simon and Schuster 2018). He is an emergency physician and Director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health. Jeremy is the author of over forty peer-reviewed papers and four books, including two textbooks of emergency medicine published by Oxford University Press. He and his wife, Erica live in Silver Spring, Maryland. They have four children, three more by marriage and two beautiful grandchildren.