The IDRA Hour will bring you compelling conversations with some of the most interesting Jewish culture-makers, thinkers, artists and scholars at work today, in the United States, Israel and across the Jewish Diaspora. IDRA aims to expand the Jewish conversation to embrace the full complexity of Jewish identity today — hosting conversations across the geographic, religious, ideological and political lines that too often separate us. 

Joe Schwartz, a native of New York City's Upper West Side, has always sought a place of Jewish belonging that would host the loud, impassioned conversations and arguments that he associated with the best of Jewish life, an unabashedly cosmopolitan, ideas-oriented venue that would reward and deepen curiosity and feature great music, delicious food and a vibrant, heimish and hip atmosphere. It didn’t exist — so he’s building it in Brooklyn. IDRA will be three spaces in one: a restaurant / café serving the finest global Jewish cuisine; a learning center, featuring classrooms, and library / beit midrash; and an arts and performance venue for concerts, screenings, panel discussions and more. Joe Schwartz is a David Hartman Center Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute — a new, selective fellowship for emerging Jewish thought leaders and public intellectuals in the early stages of their careers. He was ordained as a rabbi by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies (Conservative) in 2014, is a graduate of Columbia College and the NYU School of Law, and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with his wife, Alyson, and their children, Zev and Paz, whom they are raising speaking Hebrew.