Host
Mark Oppenheimer, Ph.D. is a professor of practice and editor of the journal Religion & Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University. Oppenheimer holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University and has taught at Stanford, Wesleyan, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College, and Yale, where he was the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote the “Beliefs” column, about religion, for The New York Times, and he has also written for publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, GQ, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. He created Unorthodox, the world’s most popular podcast about Jewish life and culture, with over 7 million downloads. More recently, he hosted an eight-part podcast called Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. He is the author of five books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and, most recently, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood. He is currently working on a biography of children’s author Judy Blume.