PODCAST · religion
edJEWcation
by edJEWcation
Your weekly dose of Jewish wit and wisdom. Each week Rabbi Abba Perelmuter, Chayaleah Sufrin, and Jay Covitz explore Jewish history, culture, and writings. Whether you're a relapsed Jew or an old pro there is something for us all to learn.
Episodes
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Leaving Antisemitism Behind with Lucas Gage
Three years ago, if you’d told us we’d spend October 7 interviewing Lucas Gage, we’d have laughed. So would he. Lucas is a former Marine who did two tours in Iraq, then spent 14 years in the antisemitic “JQ” movement, building an audience of 336,000 on X, going viral with “Boom Boom Tel Aviv,”…
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Murder in Tel Aviv: The Life of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 3
This episode starts off with a murder on a Tel Aviv beach, how that murder would fundamentally change the future of the Zionist movement, Jabotinsky’s role within it. In this episode, we get into: Why Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall” and how it set him at odds with the Zionist establishment...
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King Solomon's Book of Proverbs
Hashem offers a 12-year-old king anything he wants. Wealth, power, conquest, all on the table. Solomon asks for wisdom, and nearly three thousand years later we’re still reading what he did with it. This week we discuss the Book of Proverbs, Solomon’s advice to his kids, and find that a lot of it...
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15 Years for Defending Jews: Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 2
Picking up where we left him last time…Jabotinsky is in a refugee camp in Egypt with 12,000 Jewish refugees, who had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks. He surveys the camp, the Jews within it and comes out with one conclusion: pity won’t build a nation, soldiers will. What follows are the...
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What Do Diaspora Jews Owe Israel
In this episode we discuss Compulsory service vs. a Second Temple style tax to Jerusalem, and why the Law of Return covers even Noam Chomsky Israelis flying home to vote, and the rabbis who spend Yom Kippur bashing Israel The Rabbi’s rules for when to confront someone and when to keep your mouth...
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"Why Don't You All Go to Hell?" The Life of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 1
Ze’ev Jabotinsky could have been a great Russian novelist. Everyone, including the Russian novelists, said so. Instead, a spring evening in Odessa in 1903 set him on the hardest road available to a Jew in the Russian Empire, and he never got off it. This week Jay goes solo for the first episode…
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Sour Milk, Shots of Gin, and Dual Loyalty
The Rabbi’s Ten Days of Repentance began with a bowl of cornflakes topped with rancid milk, which somehow leads to him doing shots of Gin on Simchas Torah…with an MIT fraternity. Once we helped him process the milk tragedy, we get into our real discussion. We talk about: Is it American-Jew or...
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Our Sins of Omission and Commission
In honor of Yom Kippur, we talk about two kinds of sins we commit. Sins of omissionand sins of commission. Sins of omission are the things we should have done and didn’t, and almost nobody puts those on their list of things to repent for because, well, we may not have known we committed them.…
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No Apologies: Antisemitism and Rosh Hashanah
Jay has been doing some reading, and he opens this week with an essay he refuses to attribute until the Rabbi guesses. From there the Rabbi gets on a roll about Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, and Hasan Piker (he calls him something else), and why the four in ten Jewish college students pulling back...
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Jonah Ghosted God. It Did Not Go Well.
Jonah gets swallowed by a fish, and that is the part everybody remembers, but the real story is what happens after: Nineveh repents, Hashem forgives, and Jonah sits down under a plant and sulks about it. In this episode, we get into: The kikayon, the plant that grows over Jonah and dies…
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Listener Questions: Elul, Damages, and Israel
Some weeks we pick the topics. This week you picked them for us. The Rabbi opens by informing both of us that the frivolity is over, because Elul has arrived and we have thirty days to get our act together before Rosh Hashanah. Also, he would like an apology for being cut out of last week’s…
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Planning a Chabad Wedding
It is just CL and I this week, because we wanted to give her a chance to speak this week (sorry, Rabbi). Her oldest son got engaged a few weeks ago, there has already been an engagement party in Crown Heights and a second one on the West Coast, and the wedding is coming fast. So we thought people...
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The Book of Deuteronomy: Moses' Last Words
Moses has five weeks left. He starts talking on the first of Shevat, he dies on the seventh of Adar, and in between he delivers the longest, most repetitive, most urgent speech in the Torah. The traditional name for it is Mishneh Torah, the repetition of the Torah, and many commentators say this…
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Parenting Adult Children: Boundaries & Grace
Nobody warns you that the hardest parenting years might come after your kids are grown. We opened with a story Jay picked up in a Delta Lounge, a man quietly putting on tefillin who turned out to be a Soviet Jew that did not learn he was Jewish until his family reached America. That pulled us…
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Lament This: The Book of Lamentations
Tisha B’Av is coming, and before we sit on the floor with the lights low, we’re doing our homework. This week we open the Book of Lamentations, the scroll Jeremiah wrote as Jerusalem fell (or was about to fall, depending on which commentators you ask). It’s a book with a wild backstory: a king…
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Matot-Masei: Vows, Tribes & Cities of Refuge
The Rabbi opens with a request: can we please put a moratorium on the word “anti-Semitism” until next July 4th? (Spoiler: no, but we try.) Then we celebrate some family news and dive into Matot-Masei, the double portion that closes out the book of Numbers. The Rabbi calls it one of the juiciest...
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Yahrzeit, Kaddish & the 17th of Tammuz
Some episodes start light. This one starts with a candle. We begin with Jay’s yahrzeit for his mom, twelve years gone and still deeply missed, and the Rabbi walks us through what the anniversary of a death really means in Jewish tradition. From there we widen out to a fast day heavy with history...
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Hillel & Shammai: Judaism's Dynamic Duo
What makes two rabbis who disagreed about almost everything the most celebrated pair in Jewish history? This week we sit down with Hillel and Shammai, the original dynamic duo, and the answer turns out to be the way they argued, not what they argued about. In this episode, we get into: The lost…
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The Twelve Prophets, Part 3: Micah to Malachi
We made it to the finish line. After two earlier episodes, we wrap up the Twelve Prophets and tie a bow on them all. Along the way we get into why these texts barely show up in yeshiva, a much-debated Midrash about Adam and the animals, and whether religion or just plain ideology has driven the...
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The Minor Prophets, Part 2: Hosea to Micah
We picked up where we left off with the Twelve Prophets (Trei Asar), and Hosea throws us straight into one of the strangest stories in all of the Tanakh. Gd is furious that the Jewish people are chasing idols, so He gives Hosea an unusual assignment: go marry a woman of ill repute, have kids with...
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Shavuos: The Forgotten Holiday
Let’s be honest: when someone you’re not a fan of gets bad news, there’s a tiny, guilty dopamine hit. We open this episode by confessing that impulse out loud and digging into what Pirkei Avot (and King Solomon) have to say about rejoicing at your enemy’s fall. Spoiler: it’s a whole thing. In…
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A Jewish Bookshelf
The rabbi’s out this week, so we’re are doing what any self-respecting book nerds would do: geeking out about reading. In this episode, we get into: Jay breaks down his “30 pages a day” habit (spoiler: it adds up to 10,000 pages a year) ChayaLeah confesses her Shakespeare regrets Jay’s system for...
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The Twelve Prophets of Judaism, Part 1
What does it actually take to be a prophet? Spoiler: it’s not just hearing voices and shouting in the marketplace (though there’s some of that). In this kickoff to our new series on the Trei Asar, the Twelve Prophets of the Tanakh, we set the stage before diving into the individual books. Think…
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Dear Rabbi: Jewish Marriage Advice
King Solomon had a thousand wives, wrote a book of proverbs, and still felt the need to write a whole passionate love poem about a shepherd boy and a maiden. Coincidence? We think not. In this follow-up to our Valentine’s Day episode, we go deeper into what Judaism actually teaches about love,...
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Dear Rabbi: Caring For Aging Parents
We’re kicking off a brand new segment called “Dear Rabbi,” where we bring real-life issues to the Rabbi and actually get into it with honest, often hilarious, sometimes painful conversations about the stuff people are quietly struggling with. First up: how to care for elderly parents without…
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Plagues, Purpose & Passover Planning
We kicked off this month's Zoom talking about the Rebbe's birthday and why his legacy still hits so hard, from growing Chabad's global mission to his no-nonsense philosophy on turning obstacles into opportunities. Then we got into full Passover mode: ChayaLeah is prepping a community Seder for…
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The Seder is a 3,500 Year Old Hack
On this chag episode, we tackle a section of the Haggadah that almost everyone breezes past: Jacob's fateful decision to "temporarily" settle in Egypt, only to buy land, put down roots, and stay for 17 years. From that ancient real estate deal, the conversation spirals into the big questions…
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Up From Slavery: A Jewish Take
In this edJEWcation Book Club episode, Jay brings the crew one of his all-time favorite books: Up From Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington. Born into slavery in 1856 and emancipated at nine, Washington went on to found the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and reshape what education...
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Canaan, Palestine, Judea... What Are We Even Calling This Place?
When the British Museum quietly updated some of its ancient Near East exhibit labels from "Palestine" to "Canaan," the internet exploded. But what does the history actually say? Israel tour guide, Jewish educator, and Substack writer Alex Stein joins Jay and ChayaLeah to break it all down, from…
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Can You Uber on Shabbos...and other Responas
What happens when a wealthy man buys up all the synagogue seats and blocks the aisles? Or when a rabbi tries to convince the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a trained engineer, that an ocean liner basically "runs itself" on Shabbos? In part 2 of their Responsa deep dive, the edJEWcation crew explores how…
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70 Years, One Unforgettable Journey...the Rabbi turns 70
In this special birthday episode, ChayaLeah and Jay sit down with the man of the hour, the Rabbi, as he turns 70. Born in Montreal on March 4th, 1956 (the 22nd of Adar on the Jewish calendar), the Rabbi reflects on a life he never could have predicted: from growing up in a non-Chabad home and...
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Tanya White on What Purim Really Means
What if the holiday that looks the most like a carnival is actually hiding the most profound questions in Judaism? Professor Tanya White, Bar-Ilan University professor, host of the Books and Beyond podcast, and one of the most engaging Jewish educators alive, joins Jay and ChayaLeah to unpack the...
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Was Theodore Herzl the George Washington of Zionism?
Was Theodor Herzl a secular visionary or a spiritual seeker? A hero or a heretic? On the 130th anniversary of his landmark manifesto Der Judenstaat, Professor Gil Troy, presidential historian, Zionist scholar, and editor of The Zionist Ideas, sits down with Jay and ChayaLeah for a conversation…
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How Jewish Dating Rules Will Change Your Life
Do you know we have a Facebook Page now? Well we do and you can find it here- edJEWcation Facebook Page On to the show… In honor of Valentine's Day, the edJEWcation crew tackles the big questions: What does Judaism really say about love and marriage? How do Jewish dating traditions actually work?...
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When Your Friend Goes Full Tucker Carlson: Loyalty vs. Principles in Jewish Life
Make sure to subscribe to our substack to keep up to date on the latest edJEWcation episodes and events Subscribe to the edJEWcation Podcast ----- The Tucker Carlson situation has everyone asking the same question: when a friend goes off the deep end morally, do you stay loyal or cut them loose?…
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From Moses to Auschwitz: Rabbinic Responsas
What do you do when Jewish law meets real life, and real life is messy, terrifying, or morally impossible? In this episode, we dive into rabbinic responsa: the centuries-old Jewish tradition of posing urgent, practical, and often heartbreaking questions to Rabbis. From ancient debates about…
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The Rabbi Answers Listeners Questions
This episode is a recording of our second edJEWcation Zoom. Instead of a formal topic or text, we opened up the (virtual) doors and invited our listeners into a live edJEWcation Beit Midrash. What followed was an honest, unscripted conversation about being Jewish right now: how it feels, how we...
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The True Believer: Fanatics, TikTok, and the Need to Belong
Remember to subscribe to edJEWcation for all our latest updates here In the fourth installment of the edJEWcation book club, we discuss The True Believer by Eric Hoffer Written in 1951 by a longshoreman with an unsettling grasp of human psychology, The True Believer asks a simple question with...
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Fast Jews: The 10th of Tevet, Jewish Fasting & Spiritual Accountability
If you haven’t already, remember to subscribe by clicking the link below: Subscribe here --------------------------------------------------- Why do Jews fast, and what is fasting actually supposed to do? In this episode of edJEWcation, we dive into the 10th of Tevet, one of the lesser-known…
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Kings II: Biblical Underdogs, Prophets, Antisemitism, and Jewish History
Friendly reminder to subscribe to edJEWcation on Substack so you can be included in all the happenings about the podcast and join our next monthly Zoom call. Just click here In this episode of edJEWcation, we unpack Kings II, one of the wildest books in the Hebrew Bible, through the lens of…
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A Very edJEWcation Chanukkah Zoom
As promised, we hosted our first edJEWcation Zoom call on the 3rd night of Chanukkah this week, and a great time was had by all. We got the light the menorah with the Rabbi, had some great questions, and got to do some deep Jewish philosophizing. We opened the first Zoom to all our listeners, and...
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Solomon, Slot Machines, and the Still Small Voice: First Kings, Part 2
What are you doing on December 16th at 8PM (aside from lighting your second Menorah candle)? Well, now you have plans…join us for our first listener Zoom call. We’d love to chat with you. What do Vegas slot machines, King Solomon’s thousand wives, and Elijah’s world-class trash-talking have in...
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Hanukkah: The Maccabees, the Greeks, and One Very Tall FBI Agent
In this pre-pre-PRE-Hanukkah special (because we refuse to let Christmas music win), the crew breaks down the real Hanukkah story: the oil, the civil war, the Hellenists, the hammer, and the heroic home court advantage, while also inventing a brand-new Hanukkah tradition involving sword fights…
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Mazal Tov! You Get to Hang Out with Us Now!
We’re running on zero sleep, too much Friendsgiving, and a very inflated sense of our own importance, so naturally, it’s time for… a HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT. This week, Jay and ChayaLeah unveil edJEWcation’s brand-new Substack subscription levels which include monthly Zoom hangs, one-on-one sessions…
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The Great Thanksgiving Detour: Chabad Conventions, Near-Death Debates & Your Aunt’s Political Rants
🚨 ALERT! Have you ever wanted to Zoom with the three of us? Or maybe even have some one-on-one time? Well, the world is now your oyster because we’ve officially launched several subscription tiers, with our first Zoom taking place sometime after Thanksgiving! These will just be the starting…
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Palestine 1936: An interview with Oren Kessler
ALERT - Have you ever wanted to Zoom with the three of us? Or maybe even have one-on-one time? The world is now your oyster, as we have officially launched several subscription tiers, with our first Zoom taking place sometime after Thanksgiving. These will just be starting points, as we have a...
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How King Solomon Split The Baby: Book of Kings 1, Part 1
🚨 ALERT! Have you ever wanted to Zoom with the three of us? Or maybe even have some one-on-one time? Well, the world is now your oyster because we’ve officially launched several subscription tiers, with our first Zoom taking place sometime after Thanksgiving! These will just be the starting…
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Pogroms, Trauma, and the Echoes of October 7
This week, Jay and ChayaLeah sit down with Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger of the University of Michigan — historian, author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe, and director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute — for a hauntingly relevant conversation about the pogroms that swept through Ukraine…
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From Dostoevsky to the Sukkah
This week on edJEWcation, we go full wandering-Jew with an episode that starts in the December Project (a book about preparing for death) and somehow winds its way through Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Hasidic storytelling, Masada, Jonathan Sacks, the Nakba, Judge Caprio, and why your neighbor’s sukkah…
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From Tehran to Torah: An unlikely path to Judaism
This week on edJEWcation, we sit down with William Mehrvarz, whose story takes us from the streets of Tehran to the Shabbat tables of New York. Born into a devout Shia Muslim family in Iran, William’s path veered when a camp roommate handed him a Bible written in Farsi. What followed was years of...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Your weekly dose of Jewish wit and wisdom. Each week Rabbi Abba Perelmuter, Chayaleah Sufrin, and Jay Covitz explore Jewish history, culture, and writings. Whether you're a relapsed Jew or an old pro there is something for us all to learn.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does edJEWcation have?
edJEWcation currently has 130 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is edJEWcation about?
Your weekly dose of Jewish wit and wisdom. Each week Rabbi Abba Perelmuter, Chayaleah Sufrin, and Jay Covitz explore Jewish history, culture, and writings. Whether you're a relapsed Jew or an old pro there is something for us all to learn.
How often does edJEWcation release new episodes?
edJEWcation publishes regularly with 130 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to edJEWcation?
You can listen to edJEWcation on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts edJEWcation?
edJEWcation is created and hosted by edJEWcation.
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