Person
Every book David Wolpe recommended on podcasts
Key facts
- David Wolpe has recommended or discussed 22 books on podcasts, as of October 19, 2026.
- David Wolpe has talked about books on 5 podcasts, as of October 19, 2026.
- Those books came up in 6 episodes, as of October 19, 2026.
- The 3 books David Wolpe has mentioned in the most episodes, as of October 19, 2026: The Denial of Death, The Sabbath and Hitch-22.
- The latest episode with a book mention from David Wolpe aired on October 19, 2026.
Updated
Across 5 podcasts. Every show David Wolpe appears on, in one place — not just one.
David Wolpe’s most recommended books
- The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
- The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
- Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- 1 Maccabees by John R. Bartlett
- 2 Maccabees by Daniel R. Schwartz
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
David J. Wolpe is an American rabbi and author. He was Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and is now the Max Webb Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple. He previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hunter College, and UCLA. Wolpe was named the most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek in 2012, and among the 500 most influential Angelinos in 2016 and 2018. Wolpe now serves as the Inaugural rabbinic fellow for the ADL, and a Senior Advisor for the Maimonides Fund. Wolpe resigned from an advisory group on antisemitism assembled by Harvard President Claudine Gay in December 2023 in response to what Wolpe characterized as a hostile environment to Jews at Harvard. On EconTalk and the Lex Fridman Podcast, Wolpe recommended Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death as a profound and insightful work arguing that our core drive is the denial of mortality rather than sex, connecting its themes to human suffering and literature like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he also recommended Christopher Hitchens's memoir Hitch-22 as an engaging read that reveals complex family history, expressed deep admiration for Saul Bellow's novel Herzog, shared that George Eliot's Middlemarch is his all-time favorite novel, and named Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning alongside Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath as deeply influential works in his spiritual and intellectual life.
Books recommended by David Wolpe
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The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning philosophical and psychological study that argues human behavior is fundamentally driven by an unconscious terror of mortality and the subsequent cultural mechanisms created to deny it.
Recommended“If you read the incredible, I think, an unbelievably insightful book, Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. He feels that basically Freud was wrong, that the basic drive is not sex, that sex is an aspect of our denial of death.”
Where to get it
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The Sabbath
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel is a profound theological exploration of time, sacred rest, and the spiritual dimensions of Judaism.
Recommended“you mentioned one of them which is Victor Frankle's man's search for meaning and I also really really love Hesshel's the Sabbath”
Where to get it
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Hitch-22
Hitch-22 is a candid and intellectually robust memoir by the late British-American essayist and critic Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on his political evolution, literary friendships, and eventual battle with cancer.
Recommended“His uh autobiography Hitch 22 is a great read.”
Where to get it
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Man's Search for Meaning
Man's Search for Meaning is a profound psychological memoir by Viktor E.
Discussed“you mentioned one of them which is Victor Frankle's man's search for meaning and I also really really love Hesshel's the Sabbath”
Where to get it
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, examines the superficiality of conventional bourgeois life and a dying man's agonizing confrontation with his own mortality.
Discussed“And I'll start by saying that Tolstoy makes a really interesting choice. He does not start with Ivan Illyitch dying. He starts with people's reactions to his death.”
Where to get it
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Herzog
Herzog by Saul Bellow is a celebrated modernist novel following a beleaguered intellectual who writes frantic, unsent letters to friends, enemies, and historical figures while suffering a midlife crisis.
Recommended“I also love Saul Bellow, especially 'Herzog.' But that's a very different kind of thinking—person's novel. I read a lot of mysteries, and a lot of other kinds of fiction and literature.”
Where to get it
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Middlemarch
Middlemarch by George Eliot is widely celebrated as a masterwork of Victorian literature, chronicling the lives and aspirations of provincial society in the fictional town of Middlemarch.
Recommended“My favorite novel is Middle March.”
Where to get it
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1 Maccabees
Discussed“we learn about the story of Kaneka from the Mcabes 1 and two, which are not in the cannon of the Hebrew Bible, but they were written later.”
Where to get it
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2 Maccabees
Discussed“we learn about the story of Kaneka from the Mcabes 1 and two, which are not in the cannon of the Hebrew Bible, but they were written later.”
Where to get it
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Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is a monumental masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature exploring themes of love, family, societal hypocrisy, and tragic fate.
Discussed“I mean, he writes Anna Karenina, which is one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and then says, he repudiates it and says, I shouldn't have written it”
Where to get it
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God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens is a prominent polemical manifesto of the New Atheism movement that argues organized religion poisons everything, undermines moral responsibility, and distorts human understanding.
Discussed“So, for example, the idea that you would call a book 'Religion Poisons Everything'—I think he did that deliberately and provocatively so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible: that it poisons everything.”
Where to get it
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Infidel
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a powerful memoir detailing the author's escape from a oppressive upbringing in Somalia and her eventual journey of self-discovery and political awakening in the West.
Discussed“she wrote a book called Infidel she said when I was growing up in Somalia”
Where to get it
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Letters from Earth
Discussed“Mark Twain has a passage in letters from Earth where he says people think they're going to list lie on green fields and listen to harp music”
Where to get it
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Letters from the Earth
Discussed“One is that every image of what it's like is foolish; like Mark Twain has in 'Letters from the Earth' says, 'We're going to lie on green fields and listen to harp music,' which you wouldn't want to do for five minutes while you're alive, but you think you'll be happy for the rest of eternity doing it after you”
Where to get it
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita centers on the deeply disturbing relationship between an adult narrator and a young girl whom he exploits across America.
Discussed“The reason is he said all love require all real love stories require an obstacle. And usually it was you know, adultery or something like that. He says but when all barriers have been leveled and the only obstacle less left is an adult may not touch a child. It was part of Nabokov's genius to make that into a”
Where to get it
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Mishneh Torah
Discussed“So, what Maimonides wanted to do was take all of this messy, giant Talmudic and other tradition and and make it simple. And one of the things that he did that he later said he regretted, but didn't have the chance to fix, was he didn't add footnotes.”
Where to get it
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Survival in Auschwitz
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi is a harrowing autobiographical account of the author's imprisonment in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, detailing the profound degradation and resilience of the human spirit under unimaginable totalitarian cruelty.
Discussed“There's one place, I think in Survival in Auschwitz, where Primo Levi talks about a bricklayer that the Nazis asked him to build a wall and he couldn't persuade himself to build it badly.”
Where to get it
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The Arc of a Covenant
The Arc of a Covenant by Walter Russell Mead is a comprehensive political analysis examining the historical relationship between the United States, Israel, and the Jewish people.
Discussed“Walter Russell me who is uh the foreign fairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal just wrote a a long book that I actually blurbed and I can't remember now the name of it it's I think it has the word Arc in the title but it's all about the uh the ark of a covenant there it is the”
Where to get it
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The book of Genesis
The book of Genesis by Victor P.
Discussed“The beauty of the Book of Genesis is all through Genesis brothers are fighting, even though they don't kill each other in the end.”
Where to get it
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The Book of Samuel
Discussed“Um and in terms of the establishment of a political order, I think there the idea, at least in Samuel, what starts to happen is that there is an understood division between the political order and the religious order.”
Where to get it
The other 2 books David Wolpe recommended or discussed, ranked
- The Exodus by Richard Elliott Friedman
- The Talmud of Babylonia by Jacob Neusner
Appearances
Other mentions (2: passing, ad reads, own books)
“Yeah, you wrote in your book 'Why Faith Matters': 'Walt Whitman wrote that in order for there to be a great book, there must be great readers.' For a book to remain powerful throughout generations, it cannot have a single meaning; scripture, like great poetry, is not reducible to other words.”
“one of my books that called why Faith matters the preface was written by Rick Warren now the idea that an Evangelical Minister would write a preface to a rabbi's book about faith about faith”