Reflections on Learning that Matters

A New Books in Jewish Studies Podcast: Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (Stanford UP, 2024) Hosted by Avi Bernstein-Nahar The New Books Network · March 16, 2025 In his latest book, scholar Ariel Evan Mayse faces up to an enduring question about the Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism: How did it manage to innovate in the realms of Jewish study and practice with such daring and yet at the same time produce communities ready and willing to subject themselves to the rigors of inherited Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Mayse turns to ritual studies rather than history or theology in order to grapple with this enigma, and does so with … [Read more...] about Podcast: Laws of the Spirit

A New Books in Jewish Studies Podcast: Hermann Cohen An Intellectual Biography. With Author Frederick Beiser Hosted by Avi Bernstein-Nahar The New Books Network · Jan 6, 2020 In the course of this NBN conversation, Frederick Beiser and Avi Bernstein-Nahar discuss Hermann Cohen’s lifelong quest for a “religion of reason;” his effort to “rescue” Kant from psychologists who had misunderstood him; hostility to Spinoza; interest in the science and math of infinitesimally small quantities; left-of-center Wilhelmine politics; his system of philosophy; his unrequited love affair with German culture; and his ontological argumentation for God. Cohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism is left largely … [Read more...] about Podcast: Hermann Cohen–An Intellectual Biography