Rebecca Goldstein
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Rebecca Goldstein (née Newberger, born 1950) is an American novelist, philosopher and teacher. She has written five novels, a number of short stories and essays, and biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York and did her undergraduate work at Barnard College. After earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University, she returned to Barnard to teach courses in various philosophical studies. Here she published her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), a serio-comic tale of the conflict between emotion and intelligence, combined with an examination of Jewish tradition and identity. Goldstein said she wrote the book to "...insert 'real life' intimately into the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel."
Three more novels on similar themes followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), Mazel (1995), and Properties of Light (2000). Goldstein published a collection of short stories, Strange Attractors (1993), that also treated "interactions of thought and feeling," to quote the cover jacket. Her most recent novel, The Dark Sister (2004), was something of a departure: a postmodern fictionalization of family and professional issues in the life of William James.
Recently Goldstein has turned to biography with her books Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005) and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006). The books reflect her continuing interest in the relationship between the life of the mind and the demands of everyday existence from a Jewish perspective.
Goldstein has taught at Columbia and Rutgers in addition to Barnard, and is currently a visiting professor at Trinity College. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) along with other fellowships and awards.
External links
- [Rebecca Goldstein's personal web page]
- [Interview, April 11, 2006]
- [An interview with Rebecca Goldstein, about her book "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity"] California Literary Review, June 4, 2006
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