My Bio. — I’m a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside where I hold the Maimonides Chair in Jewish Studies. At UCR I enjoy my unbelievably talented students and colleagues. I’ve also taught at Yale University in New Haven (pizza), the University of Washington in Seattle (salmon), the University of Oklahoma in Norman (brisket), and Temple University in Philadelphia (pretzels), and have learned that there’s great food, creative students, and just good people everywhere you go.

I’ve been teaching myself jazz guitar for thirty years. Someday soon I hope to actually swing.

I live in Los Angeles with my family. My spouse Catherine Gudis is also a professor at UCR and knows a lot about the history of American cities and especially Los Angeles. Her interest in the historical causes of urban homelessness has brought our whole family closer to the work of the Los Angeles Poverty Department and their Skid Row History Museum and Archive, where I presented my first research on Making Peace with the Universe.

I am also the author of Jazz Age Jews which won a National Jewish Book Award.

My work. — I enjoy exploring inner space. By this I mean I like to poke around in our inward worlds and the experiences of ourselves. To me this interior terrain is more fascinating than any Mars probe or other outer-space exploration.

In my early career I became fascinated by the power of stories to shape identity, especially my own identity. To explore this I turned to the Israelite myth of the Exodus as an example of a story that continues to influence the beliefs and behaviors of modern Jews, even in America. That period of my thinking culminated in Jazz Age Jews, and while I have had more current thoughts regarding this topic, I think the earlier work holds up pretty well.

At this time in my career, I have turned to face broader questions in the psychology of spiritual experiences. I’m especially interested to discover whether the basic spiritual instincts that seem to hold true for so many human beings may actually have some therapeutic potential. Could it be that our age of runaway technology has wrongly overlooked the great spiritual traditions as effective sources of personal wellbeing? Spiritual therapy is what my book Making Peace with the Universe is about.

Future projects further this interest in therapy and wellbeing. I am now investigating the fields of psychiatry, neurology, and especially neurosurgery. As all of our human experiences become so throughly intertwined with machine interfaces, we will certainly see more neurological interventions into problems of the psyche and self. So I’ve become interested in psychosurgery. It seems finally the sciences of our interior and exterior worlds are poised to become one and the same. Freud predicted this day would come, and it has.

I am also working on a project regarding biblical myth, perhaps a return to my earlier interests. Stay tuned!