Podcast · Devotional & Spiritual

edJEWcation

by edJEWcation · English · Devotional & Spiritual

Your weekly dose of Jewish wit and wisdom. Each week Rabbi Abba Perelmuter, Chayaleah Sufrin, and Jay Covitz explore Jewish history, culture, and writings. Whether you're a relapsed Jew or an old pro there is something for us all to learn.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr
Latest: 12 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026 · 23 minNew

Murder in Tel Aviv: The Life of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 3

This episode starts off with a murder on a Tel Aviv beach, how that murder would fundamentally change the future of the Zionist movement, Jabotinsky’s role within it. In this episode, we get into: Why Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall” and how it set him at odds with the Zionist establishment Development of various aspects of his philosophy from Betar to Hadar to Monism The “fascist” smear and the problems Abba Ahimeir made for the Revisionists His banning from ever returning to Eretz Israel The Revisionists storming out of the 1931 Zionist conference at Basel Why are so many of the movements…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
King Solomon's Book of Proverbs
Hashem offers a 12-year-old king anything he wants. Wealth, power, conquest, all on the table. Solomon asks for wisdom, and nearly three thousand years later we’re still reading what he did with it. This week we discuss the Book of Proverbs, Solomon’s advice to his kids, and find that a lot of it reads like a group text to modern America. But first, a mazel tov: ChayaLeah’s other show, Ask a Jew, got picked up by Ark Media and is now Chosen People Problems. Yes, CCCP. We had jokes. In this episode, we get into: Solomon’s three wisdom books and the old argument over which came first: Song of…
5 Oct 2026 · 20 min
15 Years for Defending Jews: Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 2
Picking up where we left him last time…Jabotinsky is in a refugee camp in Egypt with 12,000 Jewish refugees, who had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks. He surveys the camp, the Jews within it and comes out with one conclusion: pity won’t build a nation, soldiers will. What follows are the three of the loneliest years of his life, followed spending time in a British prison for the crime of defending Jews against Arab violence. In this episode, we get into: The Jewish Legion, and why nearly every Zionist leader thought Jabotinsky was a mad man How Joseph Trumpeldor became one of his…
30 Sep 2026 · 59 min
What Do Diaspora Jews Owe Israel
In this episode we discuss Compulsory service vs. a Second Temple style tax to Jerusalem, and why the Law of Return covers even Noam Chomsky Israelis flying home to vote, and the rabbis who spend Yom Kippur bashing Israel The Rabbi’s rules for when to confront someone and when to keep your mouth closed (hint: it’s called wisdom) A grandmother’s edible sukkah, magicians and moon bounces in shul, and why American Judaism is in triage Hillel vs. Shammai on thin Jewish identity, plus why Hebrew school is a concession A sneak peek at Jay’s four-part series on Ze’ev Jabotinsky, including the only…
29 Sep 2026 · 24 min
"Why Don't You All Go to Hell?" The Life of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Part 1
Ze’ev Jabotinsky could have been a great Russian novelist. Everyone, including the Russian novelists, said so. Instead, a spring evening in Odessa in 1903 set him on the hardest road available to a Jew in the Russian Empire, and he never got off it. This week Jay goes solo for the first episode in a four part series about Jabotinsky’s life. In first episode of the series, we get into: What growing up in Odessa would mean for what Jabotinsky became How the Kishinev pogrom influenced his perspective on where Zionism was and where it needs to go Why he ran out of patience for the leaders of…
23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
Sour Milk, Shots of Gin, and Dual Loyalty
The Rabbi’s Ten Days of Repentance began with a bowl of cornflakes topped with rancid milk, which somehow leads to him doing shots of Gin on Simchas Torah…with an MIT fraternity. Once we helped him process the milk tragedy, we get into our real discussion. We talk about: Is it American-Jew or Jewish-American? And what two thousand years of never quite belonging has to do with it. Why Jewish emancipation made antisemitism worse, and why America is the one country besides Israel where being Jewish has nothing to do with your rights On the accusation of dual loyalty: Why pointing the accusation…
16 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Our Sins of Omission and Commission
In honor of Yom Kippur, we talk about two kinds of sins we commit. Sins of omissionand sins of commission. Sins of omission are the things we should have done and didn’t, and almost nobody puts those on their list of things to repent for because, well, we may not have known we committed them. Sins of commission are the things we were aware did: the thing we said, the thing we took, the person we hurt. In this episode, we get into: Sins of omission: the Noda B’Yehuda, the widow at the edge of town, Bilaam’s “I have sinned, for I did not know,” and John Wooden coaching only the mistakes his…
9 Sep 2026 · 1 hr
No Apologies: Antisemitism and Rosh Hashanah
Jay has been doing some reading, and he opens this week with an essay he refuses to attribute until the Rabbi guesses. From there the Rabbi gets on a roll about Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, and Hasan Piker (he calls him something else), and why the four in ten Jewish college students pulling back from Jewish life are a bigger threat than any of them. Then we hit the holidays, because Rosh Hashanah 5787 is a week away and ChayaLeah brought questions. In this episode, we get into: Jabotinsky’s “No Apologies” and why we should stop defending ourselves to people who already wrote the verdict…
3 Sep 2026 · 48 min
Jonah Ghosted God. It Did Not Go Well.
Jonah gets swallowed by a fish, and that is the part everybody remembers, but the real story is what happens after: Nineveh repents, Hashem forgives, and Jonah sits down under a plant and sulks about it. In this episode, we get into: The kikayon, the plant that grows over Jonah and dies overnight, and the question God closes the book with about 120,000 people Why justice and mercy are not opposites, and why the Rabbi says everyone alive needs some measure of both How a tzaddik does teshuvah when he has not sinned, and what unreached potential has to do with it A murder trial in the news…
19 Aug 2026 · 58 min
Listener Questions: Elul, Damages, and Israel
Some weeks we pick the topics. This week you picked them for us. The Rabbi opens by informing both of us that the frivolity is over, because Elul has arrived and we have thirty days to get our act together before Rosh Hashanah. Also, he would like an apology for being cut out of last week’s episode (an apology is not forthcoming). Then ChayaLeah tells us about a 6 am Uber ride in Jackson Hole that she was too tired to want, with a driver who would not stop talking about Hashem, trees, and energy, and who turned out to be saying exactly the thing she needed to hear. And then we open the…
12 Aug 2026 · 40 min
Planning a Chabad Wedding
It is just CL and I this week, because we wanted to give her a chance to speak this week (sorry, Rabbi). Her oldest son got engaged a few weeks ago, there has already been an engagement party in Crown Heights and a second one on the West Coast, and the wedding is coming fast. So we thought people would be interested: what actually goes into planning a Chabad Hasidic wedding? The answer starts with a phone call where you plan a huge party with people you have never met, and it only gets more interesting from there. In this episode, we get into: Why dating stays a secret until the engagement…
7 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
The Book of Deuteronomy: Moses' Last Words
Moses has five weeks left. He starts talking on the first of Shevat, he dies on the seventh of Adar, and in between he delivers the longest, most repetitive, most urgent speech in the Torah. The traditional name for it is Mishneh Torah, the repetition of the Torah, and many commentators say this is the one book Moses spoke on his own behalf. So this week we skip the parsha by parsha treatment and take the whole book at once, because the themes only show up when you stand back far enough to see them. In this episode, we get into: Why Deuteronomy reads differently from the first four books,…
29 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Parenting Adult Children: Boundaries & Grace
Nobody warns you that the hardest parenting years might come after your kids are grown. We opened with a story Jay picked up in a Delta Lounge, a man quietly putting on tefillin who turned out to be a Soviet Jew that did not learn he was Jewish until his family reached America. That pulled us into the Rebbe and Soviet Jewry, quiet diplomacy versus loud demonstrations, and a father exiled to Kazakhstan whose wife made ink from berries so his Torah could survive. Then we turned to the question a lot of you have written in about: how do we stay parents to our kids once they are adults with…
22 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Lament This: The Book of Lamentations
Tisha B’Av is coming, and before we sit on the floor with the lights low, we’re doing our homework. This week we open the Book of Lamentations, the scroll Jeremiah wrote as Jerusalem fell (or was about to fall, depending on which commentators you ask). It’s a book with a wild backstory: a king who burned the first draft, a scribe named Baruch who took dictation for round two, and an alphabet-shaped message hiding in the book. In this episode, we get into: Who Jeremiah was and why nobody wanted to hear his “doom and gloom” prophecies The scroll King Yehoyakim burned, and what Rashi says was…
15 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Matot-Masei: Vows, Tribes & Cities of Refuge
The Rabbi opens with a request: can we please put a moratorium on the word “anti-Semitism” until next July 4th? (Spoiler: no, but we try.) Then we celebrate some family news and dive into Matot-Masei, the double portion that closes out the book of Numbers. The Rabbi calls it one of the juiciest parshas of the year, and he makes his case: a war, an angry Moses, a real estate negotiation gone sideways, and an ancient legal system for accidental killers. In this episode, we get into: Why some Torah portions are read as doubles, and who divided (and named) the parshas in the first place The trup…
8 Jul 2026 · 50 min
Yahrzeit, Kaddish & the 17th of Tammuz
Some episodes start light. This one starts with a candle. We begin with Jay’s yahrzeit for his mom, twelve years gone and still deeply missed, and the Rabbi walks us through what the anniversary of a death really means in Jewish tradition. From there we widen out to a fast day heavy with history and a piece of tech that might change how any of us learns Torah. In this episode, we get into: What yahrzeit means and why we say Kaddish for eleven months, then every year after The Rabbi’s own story of counting down the days, and the strange sadness when Kaddish ends The five tragedies of the 17th…
17 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Hillel & Shammai: Judaism's Dynamic Duo
What makes two rabbis who disagreed about almost everything the most celebrated pair in Jewish history? This week we sit down with Hillel and Shammai, the original dynamic duo, and the answer turns out to be the way they argued, not what they argued about. In this episode, we get into: The lost art of disagreeing with someone you actually like and respect, and why Judaism treats a good argument as something close to sacred. Machloket l’shem shamayim: what makes an argument “for the sake of heaven,” and where the line gets crossed The Hanukkah menorah debate: do you start with eight candles…
10 Jun 2026 · 58 min
The Twelve Prophets, Part 3: Micah to Malachi
We made it to the finish line. After two earlier episodes, we wrap up the Twelve Prophets and tie a bow on them all. Along the way we get into why these texts barely show up in yeshiva, a much-debated Midrash about Adam and the animals, and whether religion or just plain ideology has driven the worst of human history. Then we go prophet by prophet, all the way to the very last words of prophecy. In this episode, we get into: Micah, and the “swords into plowshares” verse that 99 percent of the world wrongly credits to Isaiah Nahum and the fall of Nineveh, plus a thorny question: if God wanted…
3 Jun 2026 · 57 min
The Minor Prophets, Part 2: Hosea to Micah
We picked up where we left off with the Twelve Prophets (Trei Asar), and Hosea throws us straight into one of the strangest stories in all of the Tanakh. Gd is furious that the Jewish people are chasing idols, so He gives Hosea an unusual assignment: go marry a woman of ill repute, have kids with her, and name them “Not My People” and “No Mercy.” It’s harsh, it’s strange, and the Rabbi calls it the most dramatic living metaphor any prophet was ever asked to act out. In this episode, we get into: Hosea, the harlot metaphor, and the Kabbalistic question of whether Gd can actually be affected…
20 May 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
Shavuos: The Forgotten Holiday
Let’s be honest: when someone you’re not a fan of gets bad news, there’s a tiny, guilty dopamine hit. We open this episode by confessing that impulse out loud and digging into what Pirkei Avot (and King Solomon) have to say about rejoicing at your enemy’s fall. Spoiler: it’s a whole thing. In this episode, we get into: The ethics of Schadenfreude and what Pirkei Avot teaches about resisting that guilty satisfaction Shavuos 101: the forgotten major Jewish holiday, why your boss has never heard of it, and why it matters How the giving of the Torah turned a tribe into a nation (and why shared…
14 May 2026 · 59 min
A Jewish Bookshelf
The rabbi’s out this week, so we’re are doing what any self-respecting book nerds would do: geeking out about reading. In this episode, we get into: Jay breaks down his “30 pages a day” habit (spoiler: it adds up to 10,000 pages a year) ChayaLeah confesses her Shakespeare regrets Jay’s system for building a daily reading habit (and why you should keep three books going at once) The “Chan-book-ah” book haul: Arab nationalism, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust memoirs, and Jewish prayer ChayaLeah’s pitch for Cultural Amnesia by Clive James and why Remains of the Day is still on her mind Why understanding…
7 May 2026 · 59 min
The Twelve Prophets of Judaism, Part 1
What does it actually take to be a prophet? Spoiler: it’s not just hearing voices and shouting in the marketplace (though there’s some of that). In this kickoff to our new series on the Trei Asar, the Twelve Prophets of the Tanakh, we set the stage before diving into the individual books. Think of this as Prophecy 101 with a side of cult talk, because honestly, the line between “biblical prophet” and “guy with millions of YouTube followers” is thinner than we’d like to admit. In this episode, we get into: 📜 What prophecy actually is in Judaism, according to Maimonides, and why Moses was…
29 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Dear Rabbi: Jewish Marriage Advice
King Solomon had a thousand wives, wrote a book of proverbs, and still felt the need to write a whole passionate love poem about a shepherd boy and a maiden. Coincidence? We think not. In this follow-up to our Valentine’s Day episode, we go deeper into what Judaism actually teaches about love, including what Song of Songs reveals about God’s relationship with the Jewish people, and we bring it all the way down to earth with real talk about marriages stuck in a rut, whether people can truly change, and why “I can’t” usually means “I don’t want to.” In this episode, we get into: Shir HaShirim…
23 Apr 2026 · 58 min
Dear Rabbi: Caring For Aging Parents
We’re kicking off a brand new segment called “Dear Rabbi,” where we bring real-life issues to the Rabbi and actually get into it with honest, often hilarious, sometimes painful conversations about the stuff people are quietly struggling with. First up: how to care for elderly parents without losing your mind, your marriage, or your lunch break. In this episode, we get into: Setting boundaries with elderly parents (and why that’s easier said than done) The difference between being a caregiver and being a nurse Why your parents just want to feel significant — and no, a text does NOT count The…
9 Apr 2026 · 57 min
Plagues, Purpose & Passover Planning
We kicked off this month's Zoom talking about the Rebbe's birthday and why his legacy still hits so hard, from growing Chabad's global mission to his no-nonsense philosophy on turning obstacles into opportunities. Then we got into full Passover mode: ChayaLeah is prepping a community Seder for 120 people and her game plan is SPEED. We broke down the Ten Plagues (why those plagues, why that order, and how long they actually lasted), talked about why you don't need a minimum number of people for a Seder (but the more the merrier), and heard from Moshe Perelmuter live in Israel about what…
1 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
The Seder is a 3,500 Year Old Hack
On this chag episode, we tackle a section of the Haggadah that almost everyone breezes past: Jacob's fateful decision to "temporarily" settle in Egypt, only to buy land, put down roots, and stay for 17 years. From that ancient real estate deal, the conversation spirals into the big questions Jewish families are wrestling with right now: What does Israel really mean to diaspora Jews? Is "dual loyalty" just an antisemitic trope, or something worth actually thinking about? Why did 80% of Jews choose to stay in Egypt even after centuries of slavery? We don't talk about rising antisemitism, the…
25 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Up From Slavery: A Jewish Take
In this edJEWcation Book Club episode, Jay brings the crew one of his all-time favorite books: Up From Slavery , the autobiography of Booker T. Washington. Born into slavery in 1856 and emancipated at nine, Washington went on to found the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and reshape what education could mean for a freed people. Jay, ChayaLeah, and the Rabbi explore the surprising parallels between Washington's vision of education as moral training and the Yeshiva model, debate the Torah's relationship with labor and productivity, and push back hard on today's victim mentality culture. The Rabbi…
18 Mar 2026 · 57 min
Canaan, Palestine, Judea... What Are We Even Calling This Place?
When the British Museum quietly updated some of its ancient Near East exhibit labels from "Palestine" to "Canaan," the internet exploded. But what does the history actually say? Israel tour guide, Jewish educator, and Substack writer Alex Stein joins Jay and ChayaLeah to break it all down, from the Bronze Age Canaanites and the Hyksos to Herodotus, to Hadrian officially naming the Roman province "Palestina" in the second century CE. Along the way we get into Jewish indigeneity, the archaeology of the Israelite conquest (spoiler: it's complicated), dual-narrative tourism, and how you'd even…
11 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Can You Uber on Shabbos...and other Responas
What happens when a wealthy man buys up all the synagogue seats and blocks the aisles? Or when a rabbi tries to convince the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a trained engineer, that an ocean liner basically "runs itself" on Shabbos? In part 2 of their Responsa deep dive, the edJEWcation crew explores how Jewish law evolves to meet the real world, from Talmudic property rights to Shabbos doorbells in modern Brooklyn. The Rabbi, ChayaLeah, and Jay cover it all: the Cypriot chicken saga, the kosher cheeseburger question raised by lab-grown milk, getting a "hetter" (permission slip) for nail polish at the…
4 Mar 2026 · 1 hr
70 Years, One Unforgettable Journey...the Rabbi turns 70
In this special birthday episode, ChayaLeah and Jay sit down with the man of the hour, the Rabbi, as he turns 70. Born in Montreal on March 4th, 1956 (the 22nd of Adar on the Jewish calendar), the Rabbi reflects on a life he never could have predicted: from growing up in a non-Chabad home and boarding a bus to a New Jersey yeshiva on a whim, to serving as a Schlaich in Seattle, building a Chabad presence in Boston's Kenmore Square, and eventually putting down roots in California where, through decades of challenge, a global pandemic, and more than a few permit headaches, his community…

About edJEWcation

edJEWcation is a English devotional & spiritual podcast from edJEWcation. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: edJEWcation
Language: English
Category: Devotional & Spiritual
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr
Latest episode: 12 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1734042349
Rights: edJEWcation

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