Teaching Podcasts

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​Play episodes of particular interest from the Bully Pulpit Podcast in educational settings.  Our study guides are designed to engage your community members in learning and conversation on important topics in Jewish life.

Hosted by Dr. Joshua Holo, dean of the HUC-JIR Jack H. Skirball Campus in Los Angeles and associate professor of Jewish history.  He publishes on the Jews of the medieval Mediterranean.
Click on the below links or scroll down to view interviews
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How We Talk About God

Rabbi Michael Marmur, Ph.D. explores the way language influences how we think and speak about God. 

Study Guide Coming Soon

Rabbi Dr. Michael Marmur is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Previously, he served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. In recent years he has taught courses in Theology, Homiletics, and Pluralistic Jewish Education.Born and raised in England, Rabbi Marmur completed a BA Degree in Modern History at the University of Oxford before moving to Israel in 1984.

Critique and Rebuke​

How far should we go to change someone’s opinion? Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi Ph.D. takes a look at Jewish tradition and draws some lines.

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​Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi Ph.D. serves the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion as the National Director of Recruitment and Admissions and President's Scholar.
Prior to this appointment, Rabbi Sabath served as Vice President of the Shalom Hartman Institute and for over a decade as a member of the Institute's faculty, and directed the Hartman Lay leadership, Rabbinic leadership, and Christian leadership programs. Ordained at the HUC-JIR twenty years ago, Rabbi Sabath also earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary. For several years Rabbi Sabath wrote a monthly column in the Jerusalem Post and has co-authored two books and published numerous articles. Rabbi Sabath also teaches and mentors students of HUC-JIR and speaks throughout North America on leadership, Israel, gender, and theology. She is currently writing a book on the future of covenant for Jewish Peoplehood.

Jewish Law in Reform Judaism​

Without Jewish law, there would be no Jewish action says ​Rabbi Mark Washofsky, Ph.D. Join this esteemed scholar as he discusses the impact of law on Jewish life and it's place within the Reform movement.

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Rabbi Mark Washofsky, Ph.D. is the Solomon B. Freehof Professor of Jewish Law and Practice at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati. Dr. Washofsky has been a member of the HUC-JIR faculty since 1985, most recently serving as Professor of Rabbinics, and specializes in the literature of the Talmud and Jewish law. He received his rabbinical ordination (1980) and Ph.D. (1987) from HUC-JIR. He succeeded his teacher and mentor, Dr. Ben Zion Wacholder, z”l, as holder of the Freehof Chair on July 1, 2006. Dr. Washofsky chairs the Responsa Committee of the Central Conference of American rabbis, which was founded in 1906 by Kaufmann Kohler and empowered by its most prolific writer, Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof. His extensive publications include Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice, Revised edition (URJ Press, 2010), Reform Responsa for the Twenty-First Century (CCAR, 2010), and essays and articles on medieval halakhic literature, the application of legal theory to the study of Jewish law, Jewish bioethics, outreach and conversion, among others. The Solomon B. Freehof Professorship of Jewish Law and Practice was established in honor of Dr. Solomon B. Freehof by The Allen H. and Selma W. Berkman Charitable Trust.

​What Makes Me a Reform Jew​?

Rabbi David Ellenson, Ph.D. examines the tensions of Jews as they moved from seclusion in the pre-modern Jewish world to assimilation and the evolution of Reform Judaism.

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Rabbi David Ellenson, Ph.D., is Chancellor Emeritus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies (Brandeis University), as well as Visiting Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. He served as President of HUC-JIR from 2001-2013.

Ellenson is a prolific scholar of modern Jewish thought and history with a particular expertise in the emergence and development of Orthodox Judaism in 19th c. Europe. He has also written on Orthodox legal rulings on conversion in modernity, religion and state in Israel, contemporary Jewish movements, Jewish ethics, and emerging trends in Jewish life in North America. His writings include seven solo-authored or edited books and hundreds of articles and reviews, including peer-reviewed pieces and writings for the general public in many media outlets.
Among his books are Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah and the Boundaries of Jewish Identity (University Press of America, 1989), Between Tradition and Culture: The Dialectics of Jewish Religion and Identity in the Modern World (Scholars Press, 1994), After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (HUC Press, 2004 and National Jewish Book Award winner), and Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa, co-authored with Daniel Gordis (Stanford University Press, 2012, National Jewish Book Award finalist). The Jewish Publication Society has published a collection of his essays in its “Scholar of Distinction” series with the title Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity (2014).
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Ellenson was ordained by HUC-JIR in 1977 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. He holds MA degrees from HUC-JIR and the University of Virginia, as well as the M.Phil. degree from Columbia. He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary.

​Muslim Violence Through a Jewish Lens

Rabbi Rueven Firestone, Ph.D. uses the Bully Pulpit to explain Muslim violence through a Jewish lens. 

Study Guide Coming Soon

Rabbi Reuven Firestone Ph.D. is the Regenstein Professor in Medieval Judaism and Islam at HUC-JIR/Los Angeles.
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Since 1993, Dr. Firestone has served as associate and then full professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at HUC-JIR. He founded the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (CMJE), a joint program of Hebrew Union College, the Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Foundation and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
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In 2012-2013 he was appointed DAAD Visiting Professor in Jewish and Islamic Studies at Universität Potsdam/Geiger Kolleg in Berlin-Brandenburg. Chosen to be a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he received the Fulbright CASA III Fellowship for study and research at the American University in Cairo in 2006. In 2000, he was awarded the fellowship for independent research from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his research on holy war in Judaism. In 1992 he was awarded the Yad Hanadiv Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University to conduct research on holy war in Islamic tradition.

Poetry and Translation

As a poet and translator, Dr. Rachel Tzvia Back, discusses how her own poetic sensibility enables her to inhabit and translate the work of Israeli poet, Tuvia Ruebner.

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Dr. Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, a translator of Hebrew poetry, a scholar and an educator. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a PEN Translation grant, a Dora Maar Brown Foundation Fellowship, and a Hadassah-Brandeis Research grant. In addition to five volumes of her own poetry (English) and a study of the poetics of the American poet Susan Howe (1999), Back has published important collections of Israeli poetry in translation. Her collection In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (Hebrew Union College Press and University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) won the triennial Risa Domb/Porjes Prize in 2016, and was a finalist for both the National Translation Award in Poetry and the Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry in 2015.

Her new translation collection On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg is forthcoming from Hebrew Union College Press and the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring 2017. Her other acclaimed translation works include Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (2006), With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (2009) and Night, Morning: Selected Poems of Hamutal Bar-Yosef (2008).

Back lives in the Galilee, where her great-great-great grandfather settled in the 1830s; she teaches at Oranim College, in the foothills of the Carmel Mountains. Her classes include students from Jewish, Muslim and Christian backgrounds; thus, the classroom becomes a laboratory for inter-ethnic and religious dialogue through literature among people dwelling in a political, religious, and ethnic conflict zone.

Photo courtesy of David H. Aaron.
in-Brandenburg. Chosen to be a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he received the Fulbright CASA III Fellowship for study and research at the American University in Cairo in 2006. In 2000, he was awarded the fellowship for independent research from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his research on holy war in Judaism. In 1992 he was awarded the Yad Hanadiv Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University to conduct research on holy war in Islamic tradition.

Advocacy & Activism​

Rabbi Jonah Pesner discusses the history and work of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the pressing social issues they address.

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Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner serves as the Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He has led the Religious Action Center since 2015. Rabbi Pesner also serves as Senior Vice President of the Union for Reform Judaism, a position to which he was appointed to in 2011. Named one of the most influential rabbis in America by Newsweek magazine, he is an inspirational leader, creative entrepreneur and tireless advocate for social justice.
Rabbi Pesner’s experience as a community organizer guides his pursuit of social justice. He has been a principal architect in transforming the URJ and guiding the Reform Movement to become even more impactful as the largest Jewish denomination in the world. Among other initiatives, he is a founder of the Campaign for Youth Engagement, a bold strategy to mobilize tens of thousands of young people in the Jewish community.

Sinai and Synapses

What is the relationship between science and Judaism?  Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman argues that you can value science and religion without rejecting either.

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Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman is the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization that bridges the scientific and religious worlds, and is being incubated at Clal – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.
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His work has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Emanuel J. Friedman Philanthropies, and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and his writings about the intersection of religion and science have appeared on the homepages of several sites, including The Huffington Post, Nautilus, Science and Religion Today, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and My Jewish Learning. He has been an adjunct professor at both the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion and the Academy for Jewish Religion, and is a sought-out teacher, presenter, and scholar-in-residence throughout the country.

American Judaism in Israel

From Liberal Zionism to American Judaism and the state of Israel, Rabbi Rick Jacobs discusses Reform Judaism's strengths and challenges in grappling with today's most pressing issues. 

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Rabbi Rick Jacobs is president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the most powerful force in North American Jewish life.
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A longtime and devoted creative change agent, Rabbi Jacobs spent 20 years as a dynamic, visionary spiritual leader at Westchester Reform Temple (WRT) in Scarsdale, New York. During his tenure, he reshaped communal worship, transformed the congregation into a community of lifelong learners, and strengthened the synagogue's commitment to vibrancy and inclusion. Under Rabbi Jacobs' leadership, WRT completed a new "green" sanctuary, one of only a handful of Jewish houses of worship in the nation to carry this designation.

Memory and Conscience

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are Alice Greenwald's most moving and challenging projects. Join us for a probing discussion on the complexities of memorializing tragic events.

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As the chief executive, Alice Greenwald is responsible for the overall vision, financial well-being, management, and long-term sustainability and relevance of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. From 2006-2016, Ms. Greenwald served as Executive Vice President for Exhibitions, Collections, and Education and Director of the Memorial Museum. In this role, she oversaw the articulation and implementation of a founding vision for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, managing its programming, collecting, exhibition, and educational initiatives.
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Ms. Greenwald previously served as Associate Museum Director, Museum Programs, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Her 19-year affiliation with USHMM began in 1986, when she served as a member of the “Design Team” for the Permanent Exhibition.

From 1986-2001, Ms. Greenwald was the principal of Alice M. Greenwald/Museum Services, providing expertise to various clients including, in addition to USHMM, the Baltimore Museum of Industry, the Pew Charitable trusts, and the Historical Society of Princeton.
Ms. Greenwald has served as Executive Director of the National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia (1981-86); Acting Director (1980), Curator (1978-81) and Assistant Curator (1975-78) of the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, and Curatorial Assistant at the Spertus Museum of Judaica, Chicago.

Secular Humanism

Join Bart Campolo and Josh Holo as they tackle the intersection of religion, philosophy, and morality.

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Bart Campolo is a secular community builder, counselor and podcaster who recently spent three years as the first Humanist Chaplain at the University of Southern California, before assuming a similar position at the University of Cincinnati.
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Born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Bart became an evangelical Christian as a teenager and was immediately attracted to urban ministry. After graduating from Brown University, he returned to Philadelphia to found Mission Year, a national service organization which recruits young adults to live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods. While becoming an influential evangelical leader, however, Bart increasingly questioned his own faith, but it wasn’t until 2011 that he finally completed his transition from Christianity to secular humanism. His work - and his podcast, Humanize Me - now focuses on inspiring and equipping people to flourish by building loving relationships, making things better for others, and cultivating gratitude for the many wonders of this life.