The College Commons Podcast

Israeli public intellectual Tomer Persico explains how “God created humanity in God’s image” changed civilization itself. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In addition to hundreds of articles on social and political issues in Israel, he has written three books: The Jewish Meditative Tradition in 2016; In God’s Image: Selfhood, Freedom and Equality , which came out in Hebrew in 2021; and Liberalism: its Roots, Values and Crises in 2024. His second book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea was published in English by NYU Press and came out in 2025.

Rabbi Charles Savenor leads Civic Spirit, promoting civics education in fulfillment of Thomas Paine’s declaration. Rabbi Charles E. Savenor is the Executive Director of Civic Spirit. The mission of Civic Spirit is to educate, inspire, and empower schools across faith traditions to enhance civic knowledge, responsibility, and belonging, in their student and faculty communities. Rabbi Savenor was ordained at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and came to Civic Spirit in 2022 after serving as the Director of Congregational Education at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. His articles on education, parenting, leadership and Judaism in the 21st century have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Week, The New York Observer, Kveller, Hadassah Magazine, and The Boston Jewish Advocate. He won the 2026 Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.

Yael Yechieli walks us through the process of tangible, effective societal change. Yael Yechieli is founder of 50/50, an initiative of the Tzedek Center, dedicated to a simple and very potent mission: To get women into half of all the decision-making positions in Israel. It even tracks the progress of women’s soccer, an important bellwether of social and economic power, not unlike women’s soccer and basketball here in the US. 50/50 organizes public outreach, lectures, and all-important social and political campaigns to position women to take their place in Israel’s public sphere.

Description: Producer/Director John Rokosny tells the remarkable story of Fred Biermann in his film The Kid Officer . Biography: John Rokosny is an award-winning producer and director of film, television, and music. His previous film, They Survived Together , aired nationally on PBS and earned a NY Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary. Most recently, John has filmed nearly 100 Holocaust survivors for the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg and a partner organization of the Hebrew Union College. His new documentary film, The Kid Officer , tells the story of Holocaust survivor Fred Biermann’s escape from Vienna to Mandatory Palestine.

Description: Though contemporary individualism means all Jews are, in some measure, Jews by choice, Gary “Pips” Phillips made that choice during the Holocaust. Biography: Dr. Georgette Bennett is at TED Speaker and an award-winning sociologist, author, popular lecturer, and former broadcast journalist. Bennett has founded no less than three interreligious nonprofit organizations, and she served in the U.S. State Department Religion and Foreign Policy initiative’s working group on conflict mitigation. Bennett is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact. Her book Crimewarps: The Future of Crime in America , was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and her most recent book titled, Half-Jew, Full Life – The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream.

Description: Jeffrey Marx wrestles with both the truth and the antisemitic fantasy of Jewish Arson in the early 20 th century. Biography: Ordained in 1983, Rabbi Marx served as the spiritual leader of The Santa Monica Synagogue from 1985- 2021. As an independent scholar, he has examined the out-of-the-way chapters of American Jewish history, from his article titled “Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox” to his book Smoothing the Jew about Jewish self-representations at the turn of the 20th century, designed to counteract the classic ethnic stereotypes; and most recently, Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to WWI , coming out in July of 2026 from New York University Press.

Description: The historian behind the history of HUC: Michael Meyer takes us on a sesquicentennial journey of American Judaism. Biography: Michael A. Meyer received his B.A. from UCLA and his doctorate from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. From 1964 to 1967, he taught at the Los Angeles campus of HUC. Since 1967 he has been on the faculty of HUC’s Cincinnati campus, where he is currently the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus. Professor Meyer also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem campus of HUC, and the University of Haifa and Ben Gurion University. Professor Meyer’s books have won three Jewish Book Awards, including The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824 (1967); Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (1988); Jewish Identity in the Modern World (1990); and a collection of essays entitled Judaism Within Modernity (2001). He has published more than two hundred articles and longer reviews. Professor Meyer was president of the Association for Jewish Studies, chaired the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History in New York, and served as international president of the Leo Baeck Institute. His two most recent books are Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2021) and Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (2025).

Description: Professor Emeritus David Mendelsson looks back at a half-century of momentous change for HUC in Israel. Biography: David Mendelsson recently stepped down as Director of the Year-in-Israel program at Hebrew Union College/Jerusalem where he fulfilled this role for eight years. Aside from lecturing at Hebrew Union College in the field of Israel Studies and Modern Jewish History, David also lectures at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University. He has been scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California, Brandeis University, and Michigan State University. He has lectured widely in the United States to various Jewish agencies and in Israel to multiple groups of visitors to the country. David completed his doctorate and M.A. in the Department of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University and received his undergraduate degree at Manchester University, England. The subject of his doctorate was the History of Jewish Education in England between 1944-88 which was published by Peter Lang. David lives in Mevaseret Zion with his partner, Dalia. They have three children, Galit, Yael, and Itai.

Soundscape of the Soul Jewish Music transplanted from Europe to American, via Hebrew Union College. Judah M. Cohen, Ph.D. is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College. Cohen previously served as the Lou & Sybil Professor of Jewish Culture in the Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research and Creative Activity at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Over the course of four books and over 50 articles, Cohen has explored the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process. His research interests include music in Jewish life, American music, musical theater, popular culture, Caribbean Jewish history, diaspora, and medical ethnomusicology. His training as a musicologist and an anthropologist, and his professional activity within Jewish studies, has allowed him to explore many aspects of Jewish culture and history. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard, and for his doctoral work he explored the meaning of becoming a Reform Jewish cantor at the turn of the twenty-first century, based on three years of ethnographic study with cantorial students. In his first book, Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. , he offered both a historical narrative and a meditation on writing the history of a small community. Subsequent projects have led him to investigate the history of Jewish music scholarship in the United States, musical theater works that address Holocaust memory, contemporary forms of Jewish musical expression and musical representations of such cultural figures as Anne Frank and Shylock. His other books include The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor (2009); Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011), which received the Greater Hudson Heritage Network Award for Excellence; and Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (2019). Throughout his research, he has focused on the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and recreated over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers and activists. He has aimed to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity.

Jessica Roda: Sacred Drugs - Jews, Psychedelics, and Healing (An HUC Connect Crossover Episode) 2026 Fritz A. Bamberger Lecture As interest in psychedelics grows once again, people from many backgrounds—biomedical researchers, religious leaders, spiritual practitioners, and healing communities—are exploring their potential in new ways. Unlike the early psychedelic movements that emerged before the War on Drugs, today’s revival is strongly focused on legitimizing these practices through the lens of mental health and well‑being. Within this broader movement, ultra‑Orthodox Jewish communities have begun engaging with psychedelics in surprising and innovative ways. For many participants, these psychedelic practices reveal a desire to detach from the suffering produced by highly controlled societies and an attempt to find better alignment with one’s inner self. Biography: Jessica Roda is Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. An anthropologist and ethnomusicologist trained in Europe and North America, her research explores the intersections of music, religion, cultural heritage, gender, health, and media. Her latest monograph, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), analyzes how ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, and women who have left religious life, mobilize artistic practices, performance, and digital media to negotiate, challenge, and transform religious authority and gendered norms. The work has received multiple distinctions, including the Cashmere Award from the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021), the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021), the 2024 Society for Ethnomusicology Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize, and it was shortlisted for the 2025 Religion and the Arts Book Award from the American Academy of Religion. Her current research examines altered states of consciousness, breathwork, and psychedelics, focusing on how global wellness cultures and plant-based healing practices are translated and reframed within Jewish theological and communal contexts.

Charlie Scheidt follows the forgotten trail of his family from Europe to the United States. Charlie Scheidt is the chairman emeritus of Roland Foods, the company founded by his parents in 1939. Among his leadership roles, he is active with the Leo Baeck Institute and sits on the board of the Auschwitz Institute for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. On her deathbed, Charlie’s mother, the last survivor of the generation of the Holocaust, directed him to files from the armoire. 20 years later, Together with Austrian filmmaker, Kat Rohrer, Charlie began to investigate those files. Together, the two began a journey of discovery, retracing his family’s steps through Germany, France, Holland, and ultimately to the US. The result is the book Inheritance: Love, Loss and the Legacy of the Holocaust which came out in March 2026 from Rutgers University Press.

David Oppenheimer traces the diversity principle back two centuries. Biography: David B. Oppenheimer is a Clinical Professor of Law, Co-Director of the Pro Bono Program, and the Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-discrimination Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at a number of universities, including the Sorbonne and University of Bologna, and published widely, including, among others, his most recent book, The Diversity Principle .

Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein: The rabbinate is changing faster than it’s shrinking (but it’s also shrinking) Description: Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein breaks down a landmark study of road to the rabbinate. Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein is the Executive Director of Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation. Previously, Rabbi Epstein served as Executive Director of the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, and as a member of the faculty of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Rabbi Epstein publishes and teaches widely in the Jewish community, and has served at various congregations, Jewish youth groups and summer camps as an educator. In her current role at Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, she oversaw the publication of a landmark study that came out in November of 2025, titled “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership.”

Sit by the Fire and Tell a Story Description: Rabbi Michael Zedek shares his stories and the values the drive them. Biography: Michael Zedek is rabbi emeritus of two wonderful synagogues: Emanuel Congregation in Chicago and Temple B’nai Yehudah in Kansas City, Missouri. After his retirement from Emanuel, he served as senior advisor to the CCAR and now serves as rabbi-in-residence at the St. Paul School of Theology. A dedicated community activist, scholar, and teacher, Rabbi Zedek received a Fulbright-Hays Grant, and he was honored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In 2025, Rabbi Zedek published the book titled “People Are Like…” with the subtitle “Stories for young readers and readers who wish to stay young.”

Jewish and Twelve-Step Traditions at the Crossroads of Addiction Description: A Jewish ethical tradition called Mussar and a uniquely Jewish approach to twelve-step recovery. Hannah L. is the author of Mussar in Recovery: A Jewish Spiritual Path to Serenity and Joy , which is the topic of today’s conversation. Mussar in Recovery offers an approach to recovery from addiction based in a complementary approach between the 12-step program and Mussar, a Jewish program of ethical development and self-improvement through the balancing of personal character traits. Rabbi Harvey Winokur, collaborator on Mussar in Recovery, is the founding, and since 2018, emeritus rabbi, of Temple Kehillat Chaim located in Roswell, Georgia. Rabbi Winokur is a Jewish spiritual director and facilitator of Mussar.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series Adam Ferziger: A Patchwork of Jews Opinions and approaches inhabit the entire spectrum of Jewish thought and practice, but how do they speak to each other? Biography: Adam S. Ferziger is an historian of religion, and he holds the Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He researches Jewish intellectual, social, and spiritual responses to modern and contemporary life. His book Beyond Sectarianism , won a National Jewish Book Award and his newest work, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism , was published in July by NYU Press.

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series Arnold Eisen: Dimensional and Complex Judaism More than a religion, resisting extremes, but also hard to pin down, Judaism and Judaism’s God inspire Arnold Eisen’s spiritual search. Biography: Arnold M. Eisen, a foremost authority on American Judaism, is professor of Jewish Thought and chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He previously served on the faculties of Stanford, Tel Aviv, and Columbia universities. He has contributed regularly to print and online media, including the Wall Street Journal , The Jewish Week , Huffington Post , and Tablet , on topics of Jewish education, philosophy, and values. He is a prolific scholar and author, most recently, of Seeking the Hiding God: A Personal Theological Essay .

Advancing Ellenson's Legacy Series Rabbi Dalia Marx: The Prayerbook As a Living Text Rabbi Dalia Marx editor of the new Israeli Reform prayerbook muses on the siddur as both reflection and shaper of community. Biography: Rabbi Professor Dalia Marx is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at the Hebrew Union College, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar . She is also the co-editor of the new Israeli Reform Siddur called “Tefillat ha-Adam” together with Alona Lisitsa. She is a public intellectual in Israel, appearing regularly on Israeli media, and she co-hosts with Rabbi Dan Prat a sister podcast of this one in Hebrew, also on HUC Connect, titled “Kanfei Ruach”.

For Rabbi Ed Feinstein meaning-making is story-telling, and the rabbi’s business. Biography: Rabbi Ed Feinstein came to Valley Beth Shalom in 1993 at the invitation of the renowned Rabbi Harold Schulweis z"l , and succeeded Rabbi Schulweis as the congre gation’s senior rabbi in 2005. He now serves on the faculty of the Ziegler Rabbinical School of the American Jewish University, the Wexner Heritage Program, the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and lectures widely across the United States. He is the author of several books, and he enjoys a well-earned reputation as wonderfully engaging lecturer and storyteller, and one of this generation’s great sermonizers.

A second generation of Holocaust survivors re-examine their lives through the lens of their parents. Aron Hirt-Manheimer (he/him) is the Union for Reform Judaism 's former editor-at-large, the former editor of Reform Judaism magazine (1976-2014) and founding editor of Davka magazine (1970-1976), a West Coast Jewish quarterly. His books include Jagendorf’s Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust (HarperCollins, 1991) and Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (HarperCollins, 1998) with Arthur Hertzberg. (Photo credit: Rose Eichenbaum)