The New Jewish Canon is both text and textbook, a rich collection of major Jewish ideas from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. With over eighty excerpts from key primary source texts and insightful corresponding essays by leading scholars, on topics of history and memory, Jewish politics and the public square, religion and religiosity, and identities and communities, The New Jewish Canon promises to start conversations from the seminar room to the dinner table. (Academic Studies Pres)

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. Yehuda is a leading thinker on the essential questions facing contemporary Jewish life. He is the author of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past, the co-editor of The New Jewish Canon, the host of the Identity/Crisis podcast. He writes, teaches, and lectures widely about contemporary Jewish life.

Yehuda is trained as a scholar of ancient Judaism and rabbinics with a doctorate in Jewish Studies from Harvard University and previously served as a member of the faculty at Brandeis University, where he held the inaugural Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation.

In this wide ranging conversation Yehuda will reflect on his unusual upbringing as the child of a diplomat with a front row seat to Middle East politics, on falling in love with second century rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity, and his optimistic take on a new path forward for Israel and the Middle East.

Yehuda Kurtzer’s Five Books:

As a Driven Leaf, by Milton Steinberg
Zakhor, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
In The Land of Israel, by Amos Oz
The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden
The New Jewish Canon, edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin

The Five Books has the advisory and promotional support of The Jewish Book Council.

The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.

Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen

Produced by Odelia Rubin

Artwork by Dena Friedman

Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions

Yehuda Kurtzer on Grappling with History and Memory