The College Commons Podcast

HUC-JIR

The College Commons Podcast, passionate perspectives from Judaism's leading thinkers, is produced by Hebrew Union College, America's first Jewish institution of higher learning.

  1. Rabbi Rachel Timoner: God Trumps Politics

    5D AGO

    Rabbi Rachel Timoner: God Trumps Politics

    Description: Spiritual and political dynamics that motivate and shape the pulpit of Rabbi Rachel Timoner. Biography: Rabbi Rachel Timoner is grateful and proud to serve as Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She is honored to stand with families at the moments of greatest joy and deepest sorrow in their lives, and she is delighted to be part of a flowering of creativity, community, learning, spirituality, and action at CBE. Her initiatives in recent years include a weekly class designed to get to the heart and meaning of the prayer experience, a rabbinic conversation on antisemitism, a study series on systemic racism in America, a weekly class about peoplehood and nationalism, a sukkah about the refugee experience, a dialogue and study series on Israel, a revival of CBE’s youth group, a partnership with Antioch Baptist Church to address racism and antisemitism in Brooklyn, and a Dismantling Racism Team which was part of the successful campaigns to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility and to win bail reform in the State of New York. She helped to launch RAC-NY and Reform California, two statewide efforts to bring Reform Jewish values to bear on core issues of our times, such as immigration, affordable housing, and racial profiling. In November 2016, Rabbi Timoner, in cooperation with City Councilmember Brad Lander, co-founded #GetOrganizedBK in CBE’s sanctuary, so that over the next two years, ten thousand Brooklyn neighbors came together to resist autocracy and protect human rights. In May 2022, she gathered 55 women rabbis of all denominations to meet with the mayor to change the face of Jewish leadership in New York. On any given Shabbat, you’ll find Rabbi Timoner speaking about our purpose as Jews and human beings, the moral challenges of our times, the ways we need each other, and awakening to the spiritual aspect of our lives. From 2009 to 2015, Rabbi Timoner served as Associate Rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, where she was a teacher of Torah and helped to develop the Shabbat Morning Minyan, Community of Elders, Spirituality Workshop, and Community Organizing Leadership Team that took on public transportation and economic justice. Previously, Rabbi Timoner raised funds to rebuild the San Francisco Women’s Building; worked to mitigate the harm of welfare reform in California; and founded two leadership programs and a peer hotline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. She is a graduate of Yale University, received s’micha from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and was a Rockefeller Next Generation Leadership Fellow and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Rabbi Timoner serves on the board of the New York Jewish Agenda, the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the New York Board of Rabbis, the UJA-Federation of New York, Plaza Community Chapel, and the International Council of the New Israel Fund. She is a T’ruah chavera and is a graduate of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s Clergy Leadership Program and the Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. She is the author of Breath of Life: God as Spirit in Judaism.

    21 min
  2. Jordan D. Rosenblum: You Are What You Eat

    OCT 28

    Jordan D. Rosenblum: You Are What You Eat

    When it comes to pigs, however, maybe you are what you don’t eat… Maybe… Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book, Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (New York University Press, 2024), won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. According to The Wall Street Journal, “’Forbidden’ is an engaging and surprisingly cheerful study of that odd couple of the religious imagination, the Jew and the pig.” In addition, he is the author of Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2020); The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as the co-editor of four volumes: Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food (New York University Press, 2019); Animals and the Law in Antiquity (Brown Judaic Studies, 2021); With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press, 2021); and Religious Competition in the Third Century C.E.: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014). He is currently working on a the history of kosher controversies.

    32 min
  3. Hannah Pollin-Galay: Yiddish, Vibrant among the Ashes

    OCT 14

    Hannah Pollin-Galay: Yiddish, Vibrant among the Ashes

    Description: Hannah Pollin-Galay reveals the Yiddish of destruction, and its capacity to bring life and meaning. Biography: Hannah Pollin-Galay is a scholar of East European Jewish culture, with a focus on the Holocaust. Drawing on both historical and literary methods, her work explores themes such as cultural production under catastrophic conditions, space, gender, interethnic relations and language identity. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (Yale University Press, 2018), challenges the assumption of a universal vocabulary for describing and healing human pain. Her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) explores the metamorphosis of speech in ghettos and camps and won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, in memory of Ernest W. Michel. She is currently working on a new project investigating Jewish perceptions of nonhuman nature during the Holocaust. Pollin-Galay teaches and mentors broadly on Holocaust history and memory, Yiddish culture in all periods, the environmental humanities, oral history and methods of integrating literature and history. Before coming to UMass, Pollin-Galay taught at Tel Aviv University, where she served as head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture.

    34 min
  4. Joshua Leifer: The Jigsaw Puzzle of American Judaism and its Future

    OCT 13

    Joshua Leifer: The Jigsaw Puzzle of American Judaism and its Future

    Description: Complicated contours and tortuous fissures emerge as a picture of the American Jewish experience in Tablets Shattered. Biography: Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. He is a columnist for Haaretz. His essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024), won a National Jewish Book Award. He is currently a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University, where his research sits at the nexus of modern intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Holocaust memory. His dissertation project examines the politics of antisemitism and the crisis of the liberal order.

    35 min
  5. Ayelet Tsabari: “If music be the food of love, play on”

    SEP 22

    Ayelet Tsabari: “If music be the food of love, play on”

    Love of family, culture, and home, set to the music of Yemenite Jews in Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel. Ayelet Tsabari is the author of Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024. Her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, the story collection The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She’s the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing.

    24 min
  6. Howard Langer: A Lost World in a New World

    SEP 2

    Howard Langer: A Lost World in a New World

    Novelist Howard Langer transplants a fictional Hasidic Dynasty to the heart of segregated America, to discover a truly New World. Biography: Howard Langer was born in New York and brought up on the west side of Manhattan. His father served on the U.S.S. Missouri and was present at the Japanese surrender in 1945. His mother taught reading in Spanish Harlem for over thirty years. Howard attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A.in English from the University of Toronto, where he studied Shakespeare with the great scholar-poet Sheldon Zitner, who first published his remarkable books of poetry at age 75, decades after Howard graduated. Howard won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate. He ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable and his most notable case involved a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that had abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly. The case restored to the victims all that had been taken by the telemarketers. His pro bono work has been recognized by the Philadelphia Bar Association and Community Legal Services among others. His text on Antitrust law, The Competition Law of the United States, is currently in its fourth edition. He has published a number of short non-fiction pieces in recent years. Publications. He began writing The Last Dekreptizer in 2021 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunder’s presentation, Howard began writing the next morning what eventually morphed into the novel. Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.

    20 min
  7. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg: Judaism’s Teaching for Repairing the Universe

    AUG 19

    Rabbi Yitz Greenberg: Judaism’s Teaching for Repairing the Universe

    Rabbi Yitz Greenberg takes us on a majestic odyssey of religious purpose and Covenant. Biography: Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg serves as the President of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life (JJGI) and as Senior Scholar in Residence at Hadar. Rabbi Greenberg was ordained by Beth Joseph Rabbinical Seminary of Brooklyn, New York and has a PhD in history from Harvard University. He has had a long and notable career in the service of the Jewish people. He served in the rabbinate, notably at the Riverdale Jewish Center in the 1960s. He served as professor and chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies of City College of the City University of New York in the 1970s. Together with Elie Wiesel, he founded CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership and served as its president until 1997.CLAL offered pluralistic Jewish learning for Jewish communal leadership and programs of intra-faith dialogue for rabbis of every denominational background. From 1997 to 2008, he served as founding president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation which created such programs as birthright Israel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. Rabbi Greenberg was one of the activist/founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in the movement to liberate Russian Jewry. He was a pioneer in the development of Holocaust education and commemoration. When Elie Wiesel served as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Rabbi Greenberg served as its (Executive) Director. The Commission recommended and drew the blueprint for the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall in Washington. He served as the Museum’s chairman from 2000-2002. He is a leading Jewish thinker and has written extensively on post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought, Jewish-Christian relations, pluralism, and the ethics of Jewish power. In his book, Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, Professor Steven T. Katz wrote: “No Jewish thinker has had a greater impact on the American Jewish Community in the last two decades than Irving (Yitz) Greenberg.” In his new book, The Triumph of Life (forthcoming), he argues that the Holocaust and the Jewish assumption of power in creating the state of Israel are the beginning of a new era in Jewish history. Together, these two events usher in a third stage of Jewish religion.

    31 min
  8. Danielle Sharkan: Culture Is a Crossroads

    AUG 5

    Danielle Sharkan: Culture Is a Crossroads

    Author Danielle Sharkan finds cultural identity in multicultural community, in her picture book Sharing Shalom. Biography: Danielle grew up in the sub­urbs of Chica­go and has since had the priv­i­lege of liv­ing in Cana­da, Israel, and Argenti­na. As an edu­ca­tor and a proud moth­er of two won­der­ful chil­dren, she is deeply com­mit­ted to both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al growth. Danielle is pas­sion­ate about nature, yoga, and all things Israel — espe­cial­ly its vibrant culi­nary cul­ture. She cur­rent­ly resides in Boul­der, Col­orado, where she enjoys spend­ing time with her fam­i­ly, explor­ing the out­doors, and embrac­ing the beau­ty of life in the Rockies.

    12 min
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4.8
out of 5
25 Ratings

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The College Commons Podcast, passionate perspectives from Judaism's leading thinkers, is produced by Hebrew Union College, America's first Jewish institution of higher learning.

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