April 2, 2023

PODCAST: The Eleventh Plague

A highlight of this week’s Passover observances is the recounting of the biblical Ten Plagues. In an interesting new book, Dr. Jeremy Brown considers the Eleventh Plague, a kind of catch-all phrase he uses to explore how Jews as a people and Judaism as a religious tradition have encountered and responded to plagues, disease, and pandemics from the Bible right up to our own days of COVID-19. 
March 21, 2023

PODCAST: The Hidden Order of Intimacy

TRADITION’s Winter 2021 issue featured Avivah Zornberg’s essay, “On Love, Holiness, and the Other,” which explored the “command to aspire” as an ethical imperative. That essay has now appeared as part of a larger chapter in her most recent book, “The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus” (Schocken). As we commence our annual reading of Leviticus the TRADITION Podcast spoke with Zornberg about her new book, the intellectual “atmosphere” she breathes in order to produce works of Torah scholarship that bring together such wide-ranging voices, and the troubling state of the study of the humanities in the world today and within Jewish learning in particular. 
February 12, 2023

PODCAST: R. Hildesheimer and Women’s Education

Prof. Marc B. Shapiro’s recent essay “From the Pages of TRADITION: R. Esriel Hildesheimer on Torah Study for Women” (TRADITION, Summer 2022), is the subject today's TRADITION Podcast. Shapiro joined Jeffrey Saks to discuss R. Hildesheimer’s legacy and that of 19th-century German Orthodoxy; the history of women’s Torah study; trends in Jewish education; and the intersections of Jewish history and thought.
January 22, 2023

PODCAST: Moral Luck

Michael J. Harris joins the TRADITION Podcast to discuss his recently published essay, “Resultant Moral Luck and Jewish Tradition,” asking if we should judge people by their intentions, for good or for ill, or by the results of those intentions? He discusses the many significant sources within rabbinic literature that can be brought to bear on this important topic in Moral Philosophy.