The College Commons Podcast

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 Rockefelle...

Author Jai Chakrabarti explores unexpected avenues to discovering family and identity in his new short story collection. Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story...

Host Josh Holo and author Dara Horn have a lively and thought-provoking discussion about her controversial new book. Dara Horn is the award-winning author of five novels and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews, and the creator and host of the podcast Adventures with Dead Jews. One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists and a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a...

Lilith Magazine Editor Susan Weidman Schneider shares a groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection spanning 40 Years. Susan Weidman Schneider, one of Lilith’s founding mothers, has been editor in chief since the magazine launched. Her writing about Jewish women’s philanthropy, the Jewish stake in abortion rights, the persistence of gender stereotyping and more have been credited with mo...

Young author Suzette Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of survival during the Holocaust. Suzette Sheft is a 16-year-old student at the Horace Mann School in New York City. She lives in Manhattan with her mother, twin brother, and two dogs. In her free time, she enjoys writing, reading, running, volunteering, and spending time with her family. She won a Scholastic Silver Key for an excerpt of R...

Dr. Rotem Rozental dives into the treasure of the Jewish National Fund’s pre-state photographic archive. Rotem Rozental, Ph. D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Progr...

Grace Overbeke uncovers the stories behind the career of legendary Jewish comedian Jean Carroll. Grace Overbeke, PhD: Grace Kessler Overbeke is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Columbia College with a focus on Comedy Writing and Performance. Previously, she served as the Perilman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Duke University. Her most recent scholarship appears in Sho...

Professor Eric Lawee uncovers the complexities and fascination of our most influential author. Eric Lawee is a full professor in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. His Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic won the 2019 Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarshi...

Prof. Gordon Dale traces the path of traditional Hasidic music. Dr. Gordon Dale, the Inaugural Dr. Jack Gottlieb, z”l, Scholar in Jewish Music Studies, currently serves as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music (DFSSM) at HUC/New York. Effective July 1, 2022, he will become the Assistant Professor of Jewish Musicology in the DFSSM. Dr. Dal...

Stories and identities collide and coalesce as Ladino-speaking Jews land in Mexico. Assoc. Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, Dr. Devi Mays studies the transnational Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and globally, with a focus on Sephardic Jews, gender, and identity. In her 2020 book “Forging Ties, Forging Passports,” she tells the stories of Sephardi migrants to Mexico...

Professor Alexander Kaye reminds us that Orthodoxy does not necessarily seek a monopoly on the power of state. Alexander Kaye is the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University, and is the author of "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research deals in the history o...

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 Ja...

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 Phi...

An early-modern myth of Jewish credit frames age-old antisemitic 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 Univ...

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....

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...

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, an...

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...

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...

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 c...

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. Schwa...

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...

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 Moo...

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 “...

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 Bl...