College Commons

  • Author: Vários
  • Narrator: Vários
  • Publisher: Podcast
  • Duration: 105:55:58
  • More information

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Synopsis

The College Commons Bully Pulpit Podcast, Torah with a Point of View, is produced by Hebrew Union College, America's first Jewish institution of higher learning.

Episodes

  • Senate 2022: The Game Is On & the Stakes Are High

    08/11/2022 Duration: 23min

    Blurb: Washington insider Ira Shapiro takes the Senate to task – and asks us to fix it. Ira Shapiro’s forty-five-year Washington career has focused on American politics and international trade. Shapiro served twelve years in senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, working for a series of distinguished senators: Jacob Javits, Gaylord Nelson, Abraham Ribicoff, Thomas Eagleton, Robert Byrd, and Jay Rockefeller. He served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the Clinton administration, first as general counsel and then chief negotiator with Japan and Canada, with the rank of ambassador. In his two previous highly regarded books on the U.S. Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicled the institution from its apogee in the 1970s through its decline in the decades since. Now, in his new book -- The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America (Rowman & Littlefield; May 17, 2022), Shapiro turns his gaze to how the Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administrat

  • Radical Jewish Ethics Meets the Real World

    25/10/2022 Duration: 31min

    Professor Annabel Herzog dives into a unique Jewish philosopher's approach to ethics and politics. Annabel Herzog is a Professor of Political Theory at the School of Political Science, and Director of the M.A. Program in Cultural Studies, at the University of Haifa. Her work has focussed on 20th-century philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida; on Philosophy and Literature; on Contemporary Jewish Philosophy; on Memory and Trauma, on Ethics and Politics. Her book: Levinas's Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2000 won of the 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought.

  • A Tale of Travelers’ Checks, High Finance, and Anti-Semitism

    11/10/2022 Duration: 22min

    An early-modern myth of Jewish credit frames age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Francesca Trivellato is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She is the author, most recently, of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Jacques Barzun Book Prize in Cultural History and the 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in medieval and early modern Jewish History and Culture.

  • Warm and Welcoming? Institutionalized Biases and Barriers to Inclusion

    27/09/2022 Duration: 29min

    How the Jewish community can become truly diverse and inclusive in the 21st Century. Warren Hoffman is the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest academic Jewish studies membership organization in the world. He has spent his career working in Jewish communal agencies, including JCCs and Federations, to bring change, innovation, and new ideas to legacy organizations. He holds a PhD in American literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hoffman is the author of two books: The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture and The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. Miriam Steinberg-Egeth has been a leader in the Philadelphia Jewish community since 2006, providing interdenominational and intergenerational opportunities for Jews of all backgrounds to connect with communal experiences that work for them. Her roles have included director of the Center City Kehillah, administrator for the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia, and director of Hillel of G

  • Not Your Grandparents’ Archives (Well, Actually, They Are)

    13/09/2022 Duration: 27min

    Dr. Jason Lustig uncovers epic struggles over archives, the repositories of our stories and identity. Dr. Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His first book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), traces the twentieth-century struggle over who might “own” Jewish history, especially after the Nazi looting of Jewish archives. Dr. Lustig is also the host and creator of the Jewish History Matters Podcast, which is online at JewishHistory.FM. He received his Ph.D. at the UCLA Department of History, and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute.

  • Immigrant “Aliens” – Literally

    30/08/2022 Duration: 28min

    Author Helene Wecker and the immigrant experience told through the lives of mythical monsters. Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, the VCU Cabell Award for First Novel, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and was nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. Its sequel, The Hidden Palace, was published in June 2021, and received a National Jewish Book Award and a Golden Poppy Award. A Midwest native, she holds a B.A. in English from Carleton College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as Paper Brigade, Joyland, and Catamaran, as well as the fantasy anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.

  • After Roe: A Jewish Response

    16/08/2022 Duration: 24min

    CCAR Chief Executive Rabbi Hara Person defends abortion rights, in the wake of Dobbs. Rabbi Hara Person is the Chief Executive of Central Conference of American Rabbis. She is the first woman Chief Executive in the history of the CCAR. As Chief Executive, Rabbi Person oversees lifelong rabbinic learning, professional development and career services, CCAR Press -- liturgy, sacred texts, educational materials, apps, and other content for Reform clergy, congregations and Jewish organizations -- and critical resources and thought leadership for the 2,200 rabbis who serve more than 2 million Reform Jews throughout North America, Israel, and the world. She was ordained in 1998 from HUC-JIR, after graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College (1986) and receiving an MA in Fine Arts from New York University/International Center of Photography (1992). Rabbi Person served as Educator at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue from 1990-1996, and was the Adjunct Rabbi there from 1998-2019. She also serve

  • James McAuley: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

    02/08/2022 Duration: 31min

    The central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. The House of Fragile Things, Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award Winner of the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award (History) In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art colle

  • Neal Scheindlin: Untying Ethical Knots in Judaism

    19/07/2022 Duration: 30min

    Fascinating case studies on weighing competing Jewish values in difficult, real-world situations. 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Practice, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook Judaism offers us unique—and often divergent—insights into contemporary moral quandaries. How can we use social media without hurting others? Should people become parents through cloning? Should doctors help us die? The first ethics book to address social media and technology ethics through a Jewish lens, along with teaching the additional skills of analyzing classical Jewish texts, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook guides teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making. Both sophisticated and accessible, the book tackles challenges in parent-child relationships, personal and academic integrity, social media, sexual intimacy, conception, abortion, and end of life. Case studies, largely drawn from real life, concretize the dilem

  • Religious Freedom in America is Changing Fast, and It Matters

    12/07/2022 Duration: 39min

    Legal scholar Micah Schwartzman uncovers and explains key issues of freedom of religion and speech in a post-Roe America. Micah Schwartzman is the director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy and the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law. A scholar who focuses on law and religion, jurisprudence, political philosophy and constitutional law, Schwartzman joined the UVA Law faculty in 2007. Schwartzman received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. During law school, he served as articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review and received several awards, including the Margaret G. Hyde Award. After graduating, Schwartzman clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Schwartzman’s work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Supr

  • Dear Mr. Dickens: A Real-Life Heroine Fights Anti-Semitism

    05/07/2022 Duration: 29min

    Author Nancy Churnin discusses the power of having a pen, paper, and something to say. Dear Mr. Dickens, 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner for children's picture book. In Eliza Davis's day, Charles Dickens was the most celebrated living writer in England. But some of his books reflected a prejudice that was all too common at the time: prejudice against Jewish people. Eliza was Jewish, and her heart hurt to see a Jewish character in Oliver Twist portrayed as ugly and selfish. She wanted to speak out about how unfair that was, even if it meant speaking out against the great man himself. So she wrote a letter to Charles Dickens. What happened next is history. Nancy Churnin is the author of Dear Mr. Dickens, the 2021 National Jewish Book Award children's picture book winner and 2022 Sydney Taylor Honor winner; A Queen to the Rescue, the Story of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah, a 2022 Sydney Taylor Notable and many more picture books about people who persevered to achieve their dreams and make the wo

  • A Jewish Musician Walks into a Shanghai Nightclub…

    20/06/2022 Duration: 21min

    Author Weina Randel discusses The Last Rose of Shanghai: A love story transcending class, race, religion, and even war. National Jewish Book Award Finalist, The Last Rose of Shanghai In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, two people from different cultures are drawn together by fate and the freedom of music... Weina Dai Randel is the award-winning author of three novels, The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Moon in the Palace, and The Empress of Bright Moon, a historical duology about Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor. Weina is the winner of the RWA RITA Award, a finalist of the National Jewish Book Awards, the Goodreads Choice Award semifinalist, and the RT Book Reviewers Choice nominee. Her novels have been translated into seven languages and sold worldwide. Born in China, Weina came to the United States at twenty-four, when she began to speak, write and dream in English. She holds an MA in English from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. She has worked as the subject-matter expert for Southern New Hampsh

  • Our Imagined Jewish Story: A Jewish Odyssey in Czarist Russia

    07/06/2022 Duration: 30min

    Reverse-engineering his imagined past, Israeli author Yaniv Iczkovits follows his characters across the Pale of Settlement. The Slaughterman’s Daughter, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession—she’s now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five—Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down Zvi-Meir and bring him home, with the help of the

  • The Netanyahus: An Allegory of the Jewish Experience

    24/05/2022 Duration: 32min

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen reimagines a meeting between two giants of 20th century Judaism as debate about the Jewish destiny. 2021 National Jewish Book Award and 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic Ci

  • Rebel Daughter: Fierce Enemies Falling in Love

    10/05/2022 Duration: 17min

    Author Lori Banov Kaufmann transports us to an unlikely love story set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. National Jewish Book Award Winner, Rebel Daughter A young woman survives the unthinkable in this stunning and emotionally satisfying tale of family, love, and resilience, set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Lori grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and a masters from Harvard. She’d always wanted to write and in fact wrote The Ice Cream Lover’s Guide to Boston with her husband when they were both in grad school. While this important addition to the literary canon never made it to the bestseller lists, it did get the authors a lot of free ice cream! The intervening years were filled with making Aliyah and working as a strategy consultant for high-tech companies. Her expertise was helping military companies commercialize their technology for civilian applications. Upon retiring from consulting, Lori went back to her early

  • A Play for the End of the World: Love Stories Circling the Globe

    26/04/2022 Duration: 23min

    Author Jai Chakrabarti muses on the power of art, friendship, and love to bridge the human experience. A Play for the End of the World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his friend’s ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor’s guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

  • The Telling: Re-Reading the Passover Haggadah for Year-Long Wisdom

    12/04/2022 Duration: 25min

    Author and philanthropist Mark Gerson uncovers surprising delights and insights from the deceptively familiar text. The Telling: How Judaism’s Essen­tial Book Reveals the Meaning of Life, finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Mark Gerson is an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as well as the author of books on intellectual history and education. His articles and essays on subjects ranging from Frank Sinatra to the biblical Jonah have been published in The New Republic, Commentary, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He hosts the popular podcast “The Rabbi’s Husband” and recently wrote “The Telling: How Judaism’s Essen­tial Book Reveals the Meaning of Life, which came out from St. Martins Press in 2021. Mark is married to Rabbi Erica Gerson.

  • Torah in the Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Responses

    29/03/2022 Duration: 24min

    Guidance and provocations for finding meaning in ‘unprecedented’ times. Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Reflections, winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. This collection of essays uses Torah – broadly understood to include any canonical Jewish text or tradition – to illuminate, explore, bemoan, or grapple with our current moment of plague. Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler is the Dean of Students and the Director of Spiritual Development at Yeshivat Maharat rabbinical school, where she teaches Hasidism and Pastoral Torah. She is also a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Erin earned both her PhD and MA from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and her BA from Harvard University. She was ordained by Yeshivat Maharat. Erin previously served as Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic magazine, and her writing has appeared there, as wel

  • Rabbi Helen Plotkin: Learning Jewish/Being Jewish

    14/03/2022 Duration: 27min

    Studying Jewish tradition as an expression of the Jewish purpose. Rabbi Helen Plotkin is co-founder of the Beit Midrash at Swarthmore College, where she taught courses in Biblical Hebrew and classical Hebrew texts for 20 years. She is founder and director of Mekom Torah (pronounced McComb Toe-RAH), offering deep Jewish study opportunities for adults and teens that transcend the boundaries of the various Jewish movements. Mekom Torah is committed to a radically ancient vision of Judaism as a culture of learning in which study is not a preparation for Jewish life, it is Jewish life. Rabbi Plotkin also teaches in the Beit Midrash at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Rabbi Plotkin holds a BA from Swarthmore College in Philosophy and Linguistics, an MA from the University of Michigan in Ancient Chinese Language and Thought, and rabbinical ordination from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is editor and annotator of the recent book, In This Hour: Heschel's Writings in Nazi Germany and London Exile, and

  • Roberta Kwall: Remix Judaism

    01/03/2022 Duration: 31min

    Major themes of Jewish life, reviewed, rethunk... remixed. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. Professor Kwall earned her JD from the University of Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Brown University. She also has a Master's Degree in Jewish Studies. Kwall is an internationally renowned scholar and lecturer and has published over 30 articles on a wide variety of topics including Jewish law and culture, authorship rights, and intellectual property. She is the author of several law casebooks that are used nationally as well as two monographs: “The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition” (Oxford U. Press, 2015) and “The Soul of Creativity” (Stanford U. Press, 2010). Currently she is working on a book for a popular audience about transmitting Jewish tradition in a diverse world. Kwall also has written numerous Opeds, articles, and book reviews on topics of relevance to the Jewish community

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