Jewish history is filled with dates, places, personalities, wars, migrations, revolutions, and ideas. But what changes when we stop asking only what happened and begin asking what story those events tell about who we are?
Hosted by Pardes faculty member Rabbi Mike Feuer, The Jewish Story approaches Jewish history through the lens of Jewish memory. Rather than presenting the past as a sequence of facts, Rabbi Feuer asks how Jews have understood their own experiences—and how the stories we tell about our past continue to shape Jewish identity, Israel, Zionism, and our vision of the future.
Across six seasons, the series travels through centuries of Jewish experience, combining historical analysis with Torah, Jewish thought, and questions of collective identity. Episodes explore movements and personalities, political upheavals and spiritual transformations, Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, Israeli society, the Temple Mount, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the competing narratives through which history is remembered.
At the heart of the podcast is the conviction that history matters because memory shapes identity. Rabbi Feuer describes the project as telling the Jewish story “from inside and out”: taking historical scholarship seriously while remaining deeply engaged with the Jewish narrative itself.
For listeners who want to understand not simply where the Jewish people have been but how the past continues to live within the present, The Jewish Story offers an expansive journey through Jewish memory—and an invitation to consider what chapter we are writing next.
