The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

J.J. and Dr. Martin Lockshin discuss the (not so) plain and simple ideas of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir of Troyes, a leading Tosafist and grandson to Rashi. 

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Rabbi Dr. Martin Lockshin is University Professor Emeritus at York University and lives in Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and his rabbinic ordination in Israel while studying in Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav Kook. Professor Marty Lockshin ’s primary area of scholarly expertise and writing is the history of Jewish biblical interpretation, particularly the interplay between tradition and innovation. Most of his research has been centred on those medieval biblical commentators who valued tradition intellectually, who lived traditional lives and who still innovated unabashedly in their understanding of the Bible. The largest part of his scholarship has been about Samuel ben Meir (12th century Northern France), a traditionalist Bible commentator with an uncanny knack for offering new understandings of biblical texts—his conclusions are often strikingly similar to the “discoveries” of biblical critics seven or eight hundred years later. Marty has published a 4-volume English annotated translation of Rashbam’s major work and also a 2-volume annotated Hebrew edition. His interest in biblical interpretation has led him to study Jewish-Christian relations, since Jews and Christians over the ages had both competitive and (at times) cooperative approaches to the study of their sacred Scripture.

J.J. and Dr. Vivian Liska border on the sublime in their discussion of the life and thought of this German-Jewish thinker. 

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Vivian Liska is a Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. Liska’s recent books include Giorgio Agamben’s Empty Messianism (2008), in German, translated into Hebrew (Resling 2010), When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008) and Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011). A Hebrew translation of this book is in the making with Hakibbutz Hameuchad. In 2012, she was awarded the Cross of Honor for Sciences and the Arts from the Republic of Austria. She is the (co-)editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association in 2008; Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide (2007); Theodor Herzl between Europe and Zion (2007); What does the Veil Know? (2009); The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (2015); and Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin), co-editor of the Yearbook of the Society for European-Jewish Literature, and arcadia. International Journal of Literary Studies. Her most recent book German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife (Indiana University Press) was published in 2017.

J.J. and Dr. Carson Bay crack open this recondite work of Jewish history and myth-making . 

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Carson Bay is a scholar of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity whose interests and expertise span across languages and literatures of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe. Before joining UATX in 2025 he was a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a post-doctoral fellow within the international project Co-Produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. He was previously a post-doc at the University Bern, Switzerland, where he was part of the Swiss National Science Foundation research project Lege Josephum! Ways of Reading Josephus in the Latin Middle Ages. After a B.S. in Biblical Studies at Moody Bible Institute – Spokane and an M.A. in Theology & Religious Studies a John Carroll University, he completed an M.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in Religions of Western Antiquity at Florida State University, during which time he spent a year as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum of the University of Münster, Germany. Grounded in the writings and methods of Classics and Biblical Studies, his research and teaching target broad questions of how texts, language, and concepts interact with individuals, society, and culture, historically and today. He specializes in the Greek writings of Flavius Josephus and their reception in Latin, Syriac, Hebrew, and other languages.

J.J. and Dr. Alan Mittleman make meaning out of a moment (or two). How does the Jewish tradition handle the big existential question? What does this all mean? Why are we here? 

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Alan Mittleman is the Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Chair in Jewish
Philosophy Emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He is the author of eight books. His most recent is Absurdity and Meaning in Contemporary Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His previous book, Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition (Princeton, 2018) won the National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience in 2018. Other works include Human Nature and Jewish Thought: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter (Princeton, 2015), A Short History of Jewish Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and Hope in a Democratic Age (Oxford, 2009). He has edited six books, most recently Jewish Virtue Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023).Prof. Mittleman holds a B.A. (Magna cum Laude) from Brandeis University and an M.A. and Ph.D. (with distinction) from Temple University. He is the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship and served as Guest Research Professor at the University of Cologne (1994 and 1996). He has lectured widely in Germany in over fifty trips to that country. Mittleman received a Harry Starr Fellowship in Modern Jewish History from Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies (1997) and served as Visiting Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University (2007). He has received grants from the Herzl Institute and the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, both sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. In 2020-21, he was a Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. In 2023, he was a Senior Fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg.

J.J. and Dr. Chaim Saiman compare the two dominant modes of Jewish legal transmission, and put them in conversation with global legal traditions. 

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Chaim Saiman is a scholar of Jewish law, insurance law and private law and published Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law with Princeton University Press. Saiman has served as the Gruss Visiting Professor of Talmudic Law at both Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a visiting fellow at Princeton University and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Bar-Ilan, Hebrew University, IDC and Pepperdine University faculties of law. Saiman sits as a rabbinical court judge (dayyan) with the Beth Din of America and serves as an expert witness in insurance law and Jewish law in federal court. Saiman received his BS from Georgia State University and his JD from Columbia University School of Law. He also studied for a number of years at Yeshivat Har-Etzion (Gush) and Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Israel. Prior to joining the faculty at Villanova, he was an Olin Fellow at Harvard Law School a Golieb Fellow at NYU Law School, a law clerk to Judge Michael McConnell on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked as a corporate associate with the firm Cleary Gottlieb in New York. At Villanova, Saiman teaches contracts, insurance law, insurance coverage disputes, Jewish law and arbitration.