The College Commons Podcast

Best of College Commons SeriesThis episode originally aired on February 1, 2022.Judaism's views on sex, sensuality, and intimacy within marriage.Noam is now emeritus at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where since 1978 he has been a senior research fellow and educator. He earned a graduate degree in general philosophy at Columbia University and the Hebrew University, while studying Bible and Rabbinics at JTSA and the Hartman Beit Midrash.His popular publications and worldwide lecturing have promoted Homemade Judaism - empowering families to create their own pluralistic Judaism during home holidays - Pesach, Hanukkah and Shabbat. His most popular publications include: A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah; A Different Light: The Big Book of Hanukkah; A Day Apart: Shabbat at Home; The Israeli Haggadah: Halaila Hazeh; and A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (published together with his son).His educational study guides for day school teachers include multidisciplinary analyses of family conflicts such as Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Hagar and Sarah, Abraham’s Calling, Rachel and Leah, Ruth and Naomi, and David and Batsheba. Each unit includes art, poetry, commentary and literary analysis.His most recent academic research encompasses a trilogy on the intellectual history of philanthropy entitled Jewish Giving in Comparative Perspectives (2013) and a nine-part series on Talmudic Marital Dramas (2018). In 2021 Jewish Publication Society publishes Sanctified Sex: The 2000 Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy.Outstanding moments in his personal biography include: growing up as a rabbi’s kid in his father’s Conservative synagogue in Minneapolis (where the Coen brother’s film “A Serious Man” was filmed); going on a student mission to meet Soviet Jewry in 1968 (that ended with interrogation by the KGB and expulsion from the USSR); participating in the Columbia University protests (1968, 1970); and making aliyah during the Yom Kippur War (1973). His Dutch wife Marcelle, the Lamaze teacher, gave him her last name “Zion” (in place of Sachs) and five children and twelve grandchildren.

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 20th 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 SoulJewish 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.