Ph.D., Princeton University, philosophy, 1977
Dissertation Title: “Reduction, Realism and the Mind”
Dissertation advisor: Thomas Nagel
B.A., Summa Cum Laude, Barnard College, Columbia University, 1972
Guggenheim Fellow, 2006-2007
Radcliffe Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2006-2007
Koret International Book Award in Jewish Thought (“Betraying Spinoza”), 2006
Willard O. Eddy Lecture Award, Colorado State University, 2006
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005
MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 1996-2001. Citation:
“Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being. Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.”
Best Books of 2005 (“Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel”): Discover, Chicago Tribune, New York Sun
Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2001 (declined)
Honorary Doctorate, Spertus Institute, Chicago, Ill, 2000
Honors in Fiction, Massachusetts Book Awards (“Properties of Light”), 2001
100 Great 20th Century Works of Fiction by Women (“The Mind-Body Problem”), Feminista: The Journal of Feminist Construction, 2000
Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, 1998
Prairie Schooner Award for Best Short Story of 1997, University of Nebraska Press
Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Mazel, University of Hartford, 1996
National Jewish Book Award for Mazel, 1995
National Jewish Book Honor Award for Strange Attractors, 1994
Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, for The Dark Sister, 1993-94
American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship, 1984
Whiting Foundation Fellowship Award, philosophy, 1975-76
National Science Foundation Fellowship Award for philosophy of science, 1972-75
Montague Prize for excellence in philosophy, Barnard College, 1972
Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College,
Scholar in Residence, Brandeis University, 1999-2000
Professor of Creative Writing, MFA Program, Columbia University, 1993-1996
Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Honors Program, Rutgers University, 1988-1990
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, 1976-86
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Nextbooks/Schocken, 2006).
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (Atlas Books/Norton, 2005). Translated into Czech, Italian, and German. Translations pending in other languages.
Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Translated into German.
Mazel (Viking, 1995, reissued by The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Translated into German.
Strange Attractors: Stories (Viking, 1993, Penguin, 1994). Translated into Italian.
The Dark Sister (Viking, 1993, reissued by the University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)
The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)
The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 1983; Dell, 1984; reissued by Penguin, 1994). Translated into German.
Demons Dreamers and Madmen. Tikkun, March, 1999.
The Secret of My Art. Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Gifts of The Last Night. Commissioned by National Public Radio, 1993; reprinted in Prairie Schooner, Spring, 1997. Reproduced in Hannukah Lights: Stories from the Festival of Lights, Audio Editions, 1998. Reprinted in The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Writing, University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Rabbinical Eyes. Commentary, 1991. Reprinted in R. Goldstein, Strange Attractors. Penguin, 1994.
The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish. New Traditions, 1984. Reprinted in Jay David (Ed.), Growing up Jewish. (William Morrow, 1996. Reprinted in Ilan Stavins (Ed.), The Oxford Book of Jewish Short stories. Oxford University Press, 1998. Reprinted in R. Goldstein, Strange Attractors. Penguin, 1994.
Review of Mark Lilla's “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West,” New York Times, Sept 16, 2007.
Why I’ve Learned to Love the Novel, New Scientist, Aug. 25, 2007.
Review of Saul Bellow’s “Novels 1956-1964,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 25, 2007.
Review of Robert Richardson’s “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 17, 2006.
Review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million,” New York Observer, Sept. 18, 2006.
Review of Deborah Blum's “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death,” New York Sun, Aug. 9, 2006. .
Reasonable Doubt, New York Times Op-Ed page, July 29, 2006.
Review of “Philosophy Made Simple” by Robert Hellenga, New York Times Book Review, April 24, 2006.
Review of “The Literary Animal,” ed. J. Gottschall & D. S. Wilson, Nature, April, 2006.
Review of “The Triumph of Numbers” by I. B. Cohen, New York Review of Books, in press.
Essay In J. Brockman (Ed.), What we believe but cannot prove: Today’s leading thinkers on science in the age of certainty. New York: Free Press.
Against Logic. In Derek Rubin (Eds.), Who We Are. Schocken, 2005.
Mothers with Wombs. In Ruth Ellenson (Ed.), The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt. Dutton, 2005
The Two Cultures. In M. Kramer (Ed.), The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Literature: Two Worlds? Special issue of Maggid. The Toby Press, 2004
The Seed Salon (with Steven Pinker). Seed, Summer 2004
Dark Afterthoughts on Fiction and the Self. Black Clock, California Institute of Arts.
Writers on Writing: Carried From the Couch on the Wings of Enchantment. New York Times, December 16, 2002.
Truth and Imagination. In Berel Lang (Ed.), Method and Truth: The Search for Norms Across the Disciplines. Trinity College, 2002.
Portrait of the Artist as a Risk-Taker. Shma, 2000
Passover Kitchen, NEST, Spring 2000
Millennium visions. Tikkun, December 1999
Against Logic, Tikkun, 1998
Essay in Simon Wiesenthal (Ed.), The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Schocken, 1997.
Imagination and The Moral Life. In Joram Graf Haber (Ed.), Ethics for the 90s. MacMillan, 1997
Strange, in Tonya Boldin (Ed.) 33 Things Every Young Girl Should Know. Random House. 1997
The Ashes of the Akedah, The Ashes of Sodom (with Yael Goldstein). In Judith A. Kates and Gail T. Reimer (Eds.), Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holidays. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Looking Back at Lot's Wife. Commentary, 1992. Reprinted in Christina Buchman and Celina Spiegel (Eds.), Out of the Garden: Women Writers on The Bible. Balantine 1994. Reprinted in Linda Hogan & Brenda Peterson (Eds.), Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening. North Point Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004.
“Spinoza’s Mind,” John Macnamara Memorial Lecture, McGill University, Feb. 8, 2007.
“Mathematicians as Philosophers,” Symposium on Randomness and Complexity, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, Nov. 15, 2007.
Panel on “Secularism Through History: From Spinoza to JFK,” The Secular Society and its Enemies, Center for Inquiry/New York Academy of Science, World Trade Center 7, Manhattan, Nov. 10, 2007.
“The Afterlife of Skeptics,” Beyond Belief 2.0, Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2007.
“Spinoza's Mind: How Spinoza Thought About the Mind and How Spinoza's Mind Thought.” Jewish Community Endowed Fund Lecture, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University, Oct. 25, 2007.
Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture, Institute for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Portland, OR, May 2007.
Conference on Philosophy and Literature, Wesleyan University, May 9, 2007.
“The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity,” New York University Medical School Grand Rounds, April 27, 2007.
“Betraying Spinoza,” Yale University Hillel Association, February 15, 2007.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, January 24, 2007.
“Spinoza’s Mind,” University of California, Santa Barbara, January 31, 2007.
“The Mind-Body Problem,” Musselman Library, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, Nov. 28, 2006.
“Betraying Spinoza,” Center For Inquiry, Amherst, NY, Nov. 16, 2006.
Panel on “The World of S. Ansky,” Jewish BookFest, San Francisco Jewish Community Center, Nov. 5, 2006.
“Betraying Spinoza,” Willard O. Eddy Award Lecture, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, Sept. 28, 2006.
“The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity,” Harvard Jewish Faculty Lunch Group, Sept. 15, 2006.
“The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity.” Center for Jewish History, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, May 24, 2006.
“Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy.” Programs in Literature, Writing, and Philosophy, MIT, May 3, 2006.
“The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity.” Blanchard W. Means Memorial Lecture, Trinity College, April 24, 2006.
“Mind, Machines, and Freedom: Gödel, Neurophysiology, and other Amenities.” SconfinataMente conference, Rome, 2006.
Presentation at “Poetics and Cognition” Conference, Dactyl Foundation, New York, 2005.
“The Beauty of Structure in Mathematics and Fiction.” Mathematics and Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Mykonos, Greece . Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, 2005.
A Conversation with Rebecca Goldstein. Smith College, 2005.
“Betraying Spinoza: The Philosopher and the Jews.” New Perspectives on Jewish Literature, Culture & Ideas. Metro Washington Writers Series, 2005.
“Finding Art in Mathematics.” National Arts Club, Washington DC, 2005.
“The Incompleteness of Kurt Gödel.” The Graduate School, Princeton University, 2005.
“The Incompleteness of Kurt Gödel.” Council for the Humanities, New York University, 2005.
“Communicating Science in Fiction.” Annual Meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, George Washington University, 2005.
A Conversation with Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman. Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. Interdisciplinary Humanities Center & Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005.
“Communicating Science: Language Across Disciplines.” Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader: Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. Interdisciplinary Humanities Center & Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005.
“The Incompleteness of Kurt Gödel.” Mathematical Sciences Research Institute & The Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, 2005.
Panel on The Next Generation of Jewish American Writing: Reading, Conversation and Celebration. University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, 2003.
Panel on Confronting the Holocaust. Representation of the Holocaust in Germany and the United States . Remembering the Holocaust, Brecht-Haus, Berlin, 2003.
Jewish Dualism and Hebraic Memory. Keynote Address, Session on the Fiction of Rebecca Goldstein, Annual Meeting on Contemporary Jewish Fiction, Modern Language Association, West Palm Beach, 2003.
Fiction reading. Creative Texts, Jewish Contexts: A Conference on Jewish Writing. Bar-Ilan University, 2003.
An Evening with Novelist Rebecca Goldstein, Chicago Public Library, 2003.
“The Two Cultures.” The Jewish Mind and the Culture of Science. Bar-Ilan University, 2003.
“Ansky, Mazel, and Creative Borrowing.” Between Two Worlds: S. Ansky at the Turn of the Century, An International Conference. Stanford University, 2001
“Two Conceptions of Science and Art.” 2001: Space, Science, and Technology. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2001.
On the Future of the Humanities. Educated Guesses: Cross-Disciplinary Predictions for the Next Century. Princeton University, 2000.
Panel on Proof in Performance and Prose. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 2000.