Congressional observer Ira Shapiro revisits his past critiques of Congress.

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 most recent book on the U.S. Senate, 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 administration and its prospects under President Biden.

A New View of a Newly Productive Congress

Author Oren Schneider was raised by his grandfather, Alex, who survived Buchenwald and built a life in Israel, against all the odds.

Oren Schneider was born in Israel, a third generation to holocaust survivors and seventh generation to farmers from the Galilee.  He is an entrepreneur and business owner who enjoys music, cooking, travel, people and especially the combination of all four. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

From Buchenwald to Brooklyn: A Story of Sabotage and Survival

Author Hen Mazzig dives into the varieties and challenges of Jewishness diversity, while also capturing our shared experience, identity and story.

Hen Mazzig is an award winning Israeli author, a writer, and a speaker who has inspired thousands around the world with his story for over a decade. 

He was named as one of the Algemeiner’s top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life in 2018 and 2021, Top 50 online pro-Israel Influencers, and Top 50 LGBTQ+ Influencers. In 2022 the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis chose Hen to be its' Portrait in Courage award laureate. 

Hen's first bestselling book, "The Wrong Kind of Jew" was released in 2022.

The Wrong Kind of Jew?

Roslyn Bernstein’s novel follows a young woman’s voyage of discovery in 1961 Israel.

Roslyn Bernstein is the author of several books, including Boardwalk Stories, a collection of 14 fictional tales set from 1950 to 1970, and Engaging Art: Essays and Interviews from Around the Globe, a collection of 60 of her online avant-garde art pieces. She is also the co-author of Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo, written jointly with the architect Shael Shapiro. Her most recent novel is The Girl Who Counted Numbers. Since the 1980s, she has been reporting from around the globe for such print and online publications as the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Medium, Huffington Post, and Guernica, focusing primarily on cultural reporting, contemporary art, and in-depth interviews with artists and curators.

Currently, Professor Emerita in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY), she taught journalism and creative writing classes from 1974-2016. A devoted teacher, she served as an advisor to Ticker, the college newspaper and established Dollars and $ense, the Baruch College business magazine. During her time at Baruch, she served as the director of the Journalism Program and was the Founding Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program, a residency that has brought over 30 distinguished poets, playwrights, critics, and journalists to campus to teach intensive classes for gifted students. Prof. Bernstein is a recipient of the College’s Distinguished Awards for Teaching and Service.

Before coming to Baruch, she worked at Esquire and attended graduate school. She holds a Masters and Ph.D in English Literature from New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Discovering Israel in the Shadow of the Eichmann Trial

Tracing medieval women’s Biblical culture and how it differed from… the Bible.

Bib­li­cal Women and Jew­ish Dai­ly Life in the Mid­dle Ages, winner of the 2022 JBC Award for Women’s Studies.

Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten holds the Prof. Yitzhak Becker Chair for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She teaches in the Department of Jewish History and the Department of History. She is a social historian who specializes in the history of the Jews in medieval Germany and Northern France. Baumgarten has published three monographs, a dozen edited volumes, and many articles. She has held fellowships from the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as EHESS in Paris. She is an awardee of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award (2016) for outstanding Israeli researchers and of a European Research Council’s Consolidator’s Grant (2016-2022).

Elisheva Baumgarten: Mind the Gap

Host Joshua Holo speaks with HUC-JIR educator, Rabbi Talia Avnon-Benveniste about her experiences on the ground in Jerusalem during the Israel-Hamas War.

Rabbi Avnon-Benveniste is Director of the Israel Rabbinical Program at HUC-JIR’s Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem. She was ordained after completing the Israel Rabbinical Program in 2009, and returned to HUC-JIR following her time as Director of the International School for Peoplehood Studies at Beit-Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish People, where she instilled an active connection to the Jewish people among Jews throughout the world and led public discourse on Jewish Peoplehood and identity in the 21st-century. She led a series of programs that supported Beit-Hatefutsoth’s cultural, community, and educational activities in Israel and around the world. 

Prior to her work with Beit-Hatefutsoth, Rabbi Avnon-Benveniste served as Head of the Education Department of Beit Daniel, the Center for Progressive Judaism in Tel Aviv, where she worked to promote a national, social, liberal, Jewish agenda, among state schools and in educational, cultural, and community frameworks, alongside fellow rabbis. Rabbi Avnon-Benveniste speaks in a variety of forums and events and is an expert on major issues in the new Jewish world.

HUC Connect: Inside Israel with Rabbi Talia Avnon-Benveniste

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon talks to Richard Menkis and Pierre Anctil about their book, the 2023 volume of the Champlain Society, In a ‘Land of Hope’: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, 1627-1923, published by University of Toronto Press in 2023.

The first of two volumes, In a Land of Hope presents a uniquely complete overview of Canadian Jewish history up to 1923, from primary perspectives and over 150 significant historical sources. This collection includes documentation from diverse archives in many languages, accounting for the evolution of Canadian Jewry over three centuries, from the arrival of the first Jewish migrants to New France in the early 17th century to the period shortly after World War I. Featuring politicians and members of the working class, the volume prioritizes diverse voices and expresses the multiple realities of the Canadian Jewish experience over time. The history of the Jewish diaspora in Canada is an integral part of the broader progression of Canadian society and its multicultural identity.

Richard Menkis is an associate professor of Medieval and Modern Jewish History at the University of British Columbia, where he specializes in the history of Jewish experiences in Canada. 

Pierre Anctil is a full professor at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches contemporary Canadian history with a particular interest in the history of immigration in Québec and in Canada, and Jewish culture in Montreal.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

In a ‘Land of Hope’: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, 1627-1923

Couple Haim and Claire Rechnitzer compose and recompose Hebrew poetry in English.

Rabbi Dr. Haim O. Rechnitzer is a Professor of Jewish Thought at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a poet. He earned his doctorate from the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his rabbinical ordination from HUC-JIR (Jerusalem) in 2003. Rabbi Dr. Rechnitzer’s research is dedicated to themes of political theology, theological trends in Hebrew poetry, Israeli theology, and Jewish education. Recent books include: Pictures / Reproductions (Jerusalem: Carme & Yediot Aharonot, 2022) and Ars-Prophetica: Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Israeli Poets Avraham Ḥalfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi (Cincinnati, HUC Press, 2023). He has published articles on the subject of political theology, philosophy of education, theology of Piyyut (religious hymns), and Hebrew poetry. Prior to joining the faculty of the College-Institute, Rabbi Dr. Rechnitzer taught in Israel and was on the faculty of the Franklin and Marshall College, Department of Religious Studies.

Claire Rechnitzer is a freelance content writer, part-time library services associate and a passionate Alexander Technique teacher. She is thrilled to be helping her husband Haim introduce his poetry to an English reading audience.

The Poetry of Poetry in Translation

Host Joshua Holo speaks with HUC-JIR educator, Jeremy Leigh about his experiences on the ground in Jerusalem during the Israel-Hamas War.

Jeremy Leigh teaches Israel Studies and Modern Jewish History at HUC-JIR’s Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem. He is the coordinator of the Richard J. Scheuer Israel Seminar for the Year-In-Israel Program, as well as director of the HUC-JIR-JDC Fellowship for Global Jewish Responsibility. He leads the Year-In-Israel Program’s program in Lithuania and coordinates the annual professional development program in the Former Soviet Union. 

Prior to coming to HUC-JIR, Leigh taught Ethnography of Israeli Society through Cinema at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University. In addition to teaching at various academic institutions in Jerusalem, he is the director of Jewish Journeys, a long standing initiative to develop and advance the field of global Jewish travel.

Leigh studied at University College of London and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has written extensively about the field of Jewish educational travel, including his last book, Jewish Journeys: Reflections on Jewish Travel (Haus, London 2006).

Leigh was born in London, England and moved to Israel in 1992.

HUC Connect: Inside Israel with Jeremy Leigh

Reform Judaism’s pioneering decision to mandate study in Jerusalem.

“My Heart Is in the East, though I Be in the Very West”

John Inazu dissects disagreement to find opportunities for social trust, faith and democratic flourishing.

John Inazu: Transforming Disagreement: from Threat to Exercise of Democracy

Dr. Paul Zeitz explores solutions to our greatest challenges, from our inner selves to the world around us.

Paul Zeitz: Optimism as the Vehicle for Change

Rabbi Yonatan Neril frames the ecological crisis in spiritual terms.

Rabbi Yonatan Neril: We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands

Richard Ho celebrates the Chinese and Jewish New Years – in the same family under the same lunar cycle.

Richard Ho: We All Have the Same Moon

Julia Watts-Belser reveals disability as an engine for human creativity and spiritual depth - for everyone.

Julia Watts-Belser: Around Us and In Us

Jeremy Brown’s Eleventh Plague captures Jewish responses to pandemics from across the millennia.

Jeremy Brown, MD: Pestilence, Plague and Perseverance

Author Mari Lowe explores adolescence through the lens of the Orthodox experience – both unique and common to all.

Mari Lowe: Growing up is tough business

Poet Menachem Rosensaft transforms the Psalms into a search for God who permitted the Holocaust.

Menachem Rosensaft: Burning Psalms

'The Life of Herod The Great – like Hurston herself – is a masterpiece, a miracle, and a marvel. In other words, treasure for the whole world' Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage 

 'A bracing, livening audio experience…Underwood and Miles read with great gusto and conviction, mirroring Hurston's ability to weave folklore and mythology into story, and to animate figures both familiar to us and utterly unknown' Financial Times

🕊️

In the 1950s Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel reconsidering the life of one of the most well-known biblical figures, Herod the Great. That novel was never published in Hurston's lifetime. Now for the first time, it is brought to glorious life with commentary from scholar Deborah G. Plant.

Far from his villainous portrayal in the New Testament, Hurston casts Herod as a forerunner of Christ, a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea. An intimate of both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, the Judean king lived in a time of war and imperial expansion that was rife with political assassinations and bribery, as the old world gave way to the new.

By bringing this complex, compelling and oft misunderstood leader into shining focus, The Life of Herod the Great invites the reader to reassess history and the world as they know it. What was in Herod’s time is and will be again. Zora Neale Hurston’s never-before-published novel is a lantern of understanding that might be held up to the present or the future, and nothing short of a masterpiece.

A never-before-published novel from beloved author Zora Neale Hurston, revealing the historical Herod the Great – not the demon the Bible makes him out to be but a religious and philosophical man who lived a life of adventure.

🕊️

Praise for Zora Neale Hurston:

'Zora Neale was a knockout in her life' MAYA ANGELOU

'Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental

The Life of Herod the Great, By Zora Neale Hurston, Read by Blair Underwood and Robin Miles

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.

Publishers of award-winning fiction and non-fiction audiobooks for adults and children. Listen to exclusive clips from our books and free audioook extracts here on Soundcloud.

Immerse yourself in Canada’s history! Witness to Yesterday episodes take listeners on a journey to document a time in Canada’s past and explore the people behind it, its significance, and its relevance to today. If you like our work, please consider supporting it: https://bit.ly/support_WTY. To learn more about the Society and Canada’s history, subscribe to our newsletter at https://bit.ly/news_WTY.

New tracks tagged #Jewish Culture