Rebecca Goldstein Selected Works

In her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein bridged the gap between the comedy of manners and the novel of ideas with a deftness that suggested an American Iris Murdoch. In The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, Goldstein accomplishes an even more impressive feat of architecture, interlacing high romance with an elegant meditation on the conflicting claims of reason and desire. When the ethereal Eva Mueller, a professor of Plato and Spinoza at a small college, undertakes the philosophical education of Michael Fields, who is handsome, clever, and only twenty, she suddenly finds herself in an emotional whirlpool—and in the process discovers the terrifying extremes that unbridled passion and inhuman intellect have led her to in her past.

“I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.”

So begins The Mind-Body Problem, a trenchant, funny, very wise novel about life and love in academia—and the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit in the lives of all of us—that adds up to one of the most delicious and thought-provoking new reading experiences in a long time. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected. The story of her quest for a solution to the mind-body problem, a quest that involves the prickly contemporary dilemmas of sex and love, of doubt and belief, is a hilarious, touching, and always engrossing adventure. Rebecca Goldstein has written a delightfully entertaining and resonant book—a prodigious debut by an original and exciting writer.

A witty and intoxicating novel of ideas that plunges into the great debate between faith and reason. At the center is Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. Dubbed “the atheist with a soul,” he wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum—“the goddess of game theory.” But he is haunted by reminders of two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, 36 Arguments explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.

In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.