Welcome to 36learningmatters.com

I am Avi Bernstein-Nahar, founder of 36learningmatters.com.

We provide teaching, convening, and consulting services. Our mission is to help you design and deliver the adult Jewish learning experiences that matter most to you and your organization.

In 2024-2025, our practice is focused on three programmatic areas:

(1) The Hebrew Bible in English translation and the translation-tradition of Hebraicizing English;

(2) the fateful exchanges between Martin Buber (Vienna, 1878–1965), Franz Rosenzweig (Kassel, 1886–1929), Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892 - 1940), Hannah Arendt (Hanover, 1906 - 1975), and Gershom Scholem (Berlin, 1897–1982) and their less well-known interlocutors as they sought to overthrow their parents' Jewish world and forge a new vision — ultimately a new reality — for themselves and their progeny; and

(3) Zionism, with the aim of fostering understanding of the “Jewish question,” or alternatively put, historical events and structural problems in European societies that led Jews of the 19th century to seek an exit, whether through revolution, emigration, or the founding of a new state. I seek to join together with anyone who is genuinely curious in exploring this area, regardless of their disposition to the state of Israel.

In 2025-2026, we will be adding two additional points of focus:

(4) Consulting and educational services designed to help Jewish communities identify the teachers that best express their communities’ vision and direction, and to help their educational leaders make these teachers and their Torah more consequential across the organization.

(5) Summer School for scholar-teachers: we are especially interested in building capacity for teaching and scholarship in the religious studies community (e.g. university scholar-teachers, clergy, writers, etc.).

If you are interested in learning more about how 36learningmatters.com can be of value to you, or have questions about our practice, please write me at 36learningmatters@gmail.com

Avi Bernstein-Nahar

Avi Bernstein-Nahar received his doctorate in religious studies from Stanford University and a BA in philosophy from Brown. His dissertation, Accounting for Modern Jewish Idenitity: Hermann Cohen and the Ethics of Self-Maintenance, presented Herman Cohen’s Marburg Neo-Kantianism as an initiative to provide transcendental foundations for Jewish identities in Wilhelmine Germany, and to use the resulting theory to critique existing attitudes about, inter alia, die jüdische Gemeinde/government sponsored religious community, Eastern European Jewry, and sacred texts. In a concluding chapter, Bernstein-Nahar argued that contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, while not aspiring, like Cohen, to an entire system of philosophy, made similar moves in offering transcendental foundations for identities, and in utilizing the resulting picture of “human parts,” i.e. narratives, goods, virtues, practices, imagined communities, in order to function as a social critic.

Updated portions of his dissertation appeared in the edited volume, Hermann Cohen’s Ethics (Gibbs 2006) as “In the Name of a Narrative Education: Hermann Cohen and Historicism Revisited.” Here he expanded the dissertation’s picture of Cohen as a critical theorist trying to dodge the Scylla of “crisis-ridden” historicism and the Charbydis of a benighted rationalism. As Scott Edgar notes in his 2024 Herman Cohen entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Bernstein-Nahar finds in Cohen’s ethical monotheism a transcendental basis for Jewish identity-pluralism, including, it should be remarked, Faith Keepers (rabbinic Jews), Renaissance Seekers (cultural Jews), and Ethically-Driven Returnees (liberal and radical Jews).

In January of 2020, Bernstein-Nahar had the privilege of interviewing Frederick C. Beiser on the occassion of the publication of his intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen, You can listen to the interview here.

He has been lauded as a “gifted and passionate teacher,” and praised for bringing “deep learning and empathy” into the classroom. He has taught at Rutgers, Boston College, and at Brandeis University. From 2012 to 2023, he served as Executive Director of Brandeis’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and, earlier in his career, as Dean and Director for Adult Learning programs at Hebrew College. Currently Bernstein-Nahar is a Visiting Scholar in Brandeis University’s Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, a Tamid faculty member at Hebrew College, Newton, MA, and founder of 36learningmatters.com, an adult Jewish learning practice, based in Newton, MA.