Mark Oppenheimer: Reform Isn’t Necessarily Unorthodox

“Unorthodox” Podcast host takes questions on American Judaism and Jewish culture.

Author and freelance writer, Mark Oppenheimer, wrote the “Beliefs” column for The New York Times from 2010 until the summer of 2016. He now hosts a weekly podcast “Unorthodox,” produced by Tablet magazine. On iTunes’s #1 Jewish-themed podcast, he delivers the News of the Jews to the world, and interviews guests (Jewish and non-) from Roxane Gay to Simon Doonan, from Transparent’s Kathryn Hahn to Dan Savage. His magazine journalism and reviews appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Believer, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Yale and has taught at Yale, Stanford, Wesleyan, Boston College, and NYU.

He has written two studies of religion and popular culture. The first, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, describes how the tumult of the 1960s affected Protestants, Catholics and Jews in America. The second, Thirteen and a Day, tells the story of my cross-country trip in search of unique bar and bat mitzvahs, from the Ozark Mountains to rural Louisiana to Alaska. He gives a lot of talks, mostly on faith, community, media, and politics, and he appears on TV and hosts on the radio. He has given NPR commentaries about Quaker summer camp and the demise of the hippie and was featured in an NPR segment about Portnoy’s Complaint. He has also made appearances on CBS Early Show and CBS Sunday Morning.

Mark has won awards for his writing and scholarship, including the Hiett Prize, the Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award, the Connecticut Book Award, and the John Addison Porter Prize from Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, four daughters, one son, two dogs, and cat.

He is currently writing Squirrel Hill, the definitive study of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and how a neighborhood came together to support each other in the aftermath (to be published by Knopf in 2021).