All Episodes

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)

Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs To Know by David Harris

Laughter and Leadership: A Conversation with Tikva Blaukopf Schein, Ph.D.

Elias V. Messinas, "Synagogues of Greece: A Study of Synagogues in Macedonia and Thrace" (Bloch Publishing, 2011)

Steven Pinker, "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life" (Scribner, 2025)

Robert J. Coplan, "The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Michael Kimmel, "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2026)

Oren Harman, "Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History" (Basic Books, 2025)

Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?" (Taylor & Francis, 2025

William Ury, "Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict" (Harper Business, 2024)

Michal Govrin et. al, "But There Was Love―Shaping the Memory of the Shoah" (de Gruyter, 2025)

Maya Arad, "The Hebrew Teacher" (New Vessel Press, 2024)

Shaul Kelner, "A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized To Free Soviet Jews" (NYU Press, 2025)

Danya Ruttenberg, "On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World" (Beacon Press, 2022)

Mary-Frances O’Connor, The Grieving Body: How the stress of Loss Can be an Opportunity for Healing (Harper One, 2025)

Nicole Nehrig, "With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, "The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism" (Jewish Publication Society. 2024)

David S. Wall, "Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age" (Polity, 2024)

Rebecca Lemov, "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" (Norton, 2025)

Cary Nelson, "Mindless: What Happened to Universities?" (Jewish Quarterly 259, 2025)

Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Elaine Pagels, "Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus" (Doubleday, 2025)

Sandra Matz, "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior" (HBRP, 2025)

David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)

Jerome Gellman, "The Problem of God in Jewish Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Keith J. Hayward, "Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood" (Constable & Robinson, 2025)

James Davison Hunter, "Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis" (Yale UP, 2024)

On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)

Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Eric Cline, "After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

On the Book of Psalms: Exploring the Prayers of Ancient Israel by Nachum Sarna

Matthew Levitt, "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" (Yale UP, 2008)

Anthony Bale, "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes" (Norton, 2024)

Writing on the Wall: A Conversation with William Kolbrener

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

Judaism is About Love: A Discussion with Shai Held

Seth J. Frantzman, "The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza" (Wicked Son, 2024)

Marilynne Robinson, "Reading Genesis" (FSG, 2024)

Yaacob Dweck, "Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Jay Garfinkel, "Kohelet's Cocktail: Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness" (Illuminated Press, 2024)

Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici, "Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn from One Another" (U California Press, 2024)

Eyal Regev, "The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred" (Yale UP, 2019)

Judith Lewis Herman, "Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice" (Basic Books, 2023)

Thomas Sparr, "German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighbourhood in the Holy City" (Haus Publishers, 2021)

Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Seth D. Kaplan, "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)

Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)

Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek”): A Conversation with Ronen Koehler

Kenneth Miller, "Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep" (Hachette Books, 2023)

Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023)

Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

John Horgan, "Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right" ( Columbia UP, 2023)

What Can We Learn From A Pottery Shard? Uncovering the Ancient Past Through Biblical Archeology with Professor Aren Maeir

Con Coughlin, "Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny" (Picador, 2023)

John Perlin, "The Forest Journey: The Story of Trees and Civilization" (Patagonia, 2023)

Dan Senor and Saul Singer, "The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

The Enlightened Donor: How to Give Charity Wisely

Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Itamar Rabinovich, "Middle Eastern Maze: Israel, the Arabs and the Region" (Brookings Institution Press, 2023)

Andrew J. Hoffman, "The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Gadi Sagiv, "Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Tara Isabella Burton, "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

The Art of Translation: A Discussion with Anne Birkenhauer Molad

Housing Insecurity and Homelessness: A Nonprofit Approach

Daniel Gordis, "Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?" (Ecco Press, 2023)

Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)

Daniel Roth, "Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)

Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

David I. Kertzer, "The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler" (Random House, 2022)

Russ Roberts, "Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us" (Portfolio, 2022)

Adrian Bejan, "Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" (World Scientific, 2022)

Arthur Keefer, "Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Susannah Heschel, "The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany" (Princeton UP, 2010)

Hagai Boas, "The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From?" (Routledge, 2022)

Mary-Frances O'Connor, "The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss" (HarperOne, 2022)

Amy Gajda, "Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy" (Viking, 2022)

Sustainable Agriculture in the Global South: A Religious Response to the Global Food Crisis

Suicide Prevention: Grassroots Intervention for High-Risk Groups

Corinne E. Blackmer, "Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism" (Wayne State UP, 2022)

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, "Minority Of One: The Unchaining of an Arab Mind" (2020)

Addressing Hunger, Food Insecurity--Local Solutions to a Global Problem

Culturally Competent Health Care, Equality in Health Care: The Case of Muslims and Jews in the UK

Keith W. Campbell, "The New Science of Narcissism: Understanding One of the Greatest Psychological Challenges of Our Time" (Sounds True, 2020)

Robin Dunbar, "How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Jerry Z. Muller, "Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Erich Schwartzel, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy" (Penguin, 2022)

Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court, "The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity" (Cambridge Scholars, 2021)

Ramadan Violence: A Conversation with Ambassador Dore Gold

Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)

Andrew Lawler, "Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City" (Doubleday, 2021)

Peter Mandaville, "Islam and Politics" (Routledge, 2020)

Erica Brown, "Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile" (Maggid, 2020)

In Science We Trust?: An insider Conversation with Health Policy Reporter, Fran Kritz

R. David Lankes, "The New Librarianship Field Guide" (MIT Press, 2016)

Gideon Sapir and Daniel Statman, "State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical-Legal Inquiry" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Jonathan Schanzer, "Gaza Conflict 2021" (Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2021)

Seth David Radwell, "American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation" (Greenleaf, 2021)

Julian E. Zelizer, "Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement" (Yale UP, 2021)

Ümit Kurt, "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Edward Slingerland, "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" (Hachette, 2021)

Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

Emmanuel Navon, "The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)

Hillary Kaell, "Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Danny Adeno Abebe, "From Africa To Zion" (Miskal, 2021)

Riaz Dean, "Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century-Central Asia, India and Tibet" (Casemate, 2019)

Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Assaf Shelleg, "Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Margaret MacMillan, "War: How Conflict Shaped Us" (Random House, 2020)

Pete Davis, "Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)

Lydia Denworth, "Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Randolph M. Nesse, "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry" (Dutton, 2019)

Cary Nelson, "Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities" (AEN, 2021)

Scott Berkun, "How Design Makes the World" (2020)

Melvin Konner, "Believers: Faith in Human Nature" (Norton, 2019)

Eva Illouz, "The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Jason Manning, "Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

Paul Vallely, "Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg" (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020)

J. Jay Garfinkel, "Heirlooms : Memory and Cherished Objects" (One Family Foundation, 2020)

N. Darshan-Leitner and S. M. Katz, "Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters" (Hachette, 2017)

David Nasaw, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War" (Penguin, 2020)

Michael J. Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" (FSG, 2020)

Adina Hoffman, "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City" (FSG, 2017)

S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018)

Mike Shanahan, "Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History" (Unbound, 2016)

Sumit Guha, "History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000" (U Washington Press, 2019)

Betty Rojtman, "The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)

Joseph E. David, "Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race" (Hot Books, 2020)

Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020)

Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Rafael Medoff, "The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust" (JPS, 2019)

Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace" (All Point Books, 2020)

Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation" (Yale UP, 2018)

Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Stephan Talty, "The Good Assassin" (HMH, 2020)

Pehr Granqvist, "Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View" (Guilford Press, 2020)

Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)

Yael Tamir, "Why Nationalism?" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Richard G. Tedeschi, "Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research and Applications" (Routledge, 2018)

Adrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015)

Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019)

Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Benjamin Balint, "Jerusalem: City of the Book" (Yale UP, 2019)

Jerome Gellman, "The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today: 1950-2018" (Routledge, 2018)

Julia Neuberger, "Antisemitism: What It Is, What It Isn’t, Why It Matters" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)

Lyn Julius, "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)

Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, "Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation In Midst Of Conflict" (Wasatia Press, 2016)

Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018)

Rachel Werczberger, "Jews in The Age Of Authenticity: Jewish Spiritual Renewal In Israel" (Peter Lang, 2016)

Seth J. Frantzman, "After Isis: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East" (Gefen, 2019)

Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Lynn Kaye, "Time In The Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

David Resnick, "Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Naftali Rothenberg, "Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)