Top 10 Podcasts of 2022 from Jerusalem

If you like to listen and learn, but you haven’t tuned in yet, now’s a good time to click on Spotify (or Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, etc.) and subscribe to The Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. You’ll be glad you did.

With its worldwide audience growing at a dizzying rate, the Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas delights and educates listeners with a range of thinkers and writers on topics dear to Israel and significant to the rest of the world. We have deep, wide-ranging conversations with authors of books that touch every part of Israeli culture, including:

• Erica Brown, “Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile”
• Jerry Muller – “Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes”
• Deborah court and Randa Khair Abbas, “The Israeli Druze Community in Transition”
• Peter Mandaville, Islam and Politics
• Corinne E. Blackmer, “Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism
•  Gideon Sapir and David Statman, “State and Religion in Israel: A Philosophical Legal Inquiry

Our authors deal with subjects of universal interest.

• Hagai Boas, “The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From?”
• Erich Schwarel, “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy
• Mary Frances O’Connor, “ The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss”

Not content with limiting ourselves to thinkers and writers, The Van Leer Series on ideas also features do-ers, people who pour their creative energies into helping to solve the biggest problems. Listen to Hannah Rothstein, who works to prevent suicide among LGBTQ teens and young adults, a highly vulnerable group. Hear how Joseph Gitler founded and grows Leket, the largest food rescue program in Israel. In another podcast, Micha Odenheimer shares his understanding of the religious obligation to reduce global hunger, and works to do it through his organization, Tevel B’Tzedek.

Is there an author or activist you’d like to suggest? Your thoughts are very welcome.  In the meantime, stay tuned to The Van Leer Series on Ideas.

You’ll never be bored.