Secular Global Institute

Dr. Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, which went on to become a critical and popular success. More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer’s Award, Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award. Her 2005 book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, was featured in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, received numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Sun. Goldstein’s most recent published book is, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity, published in May 2006, and winner of the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. Her latest novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was published by Pantheon Books in 2010.

In 1996, Rebecca became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award". In 2005, she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address. Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and Freethought Heroine 2011 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In that year she also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University.

Aside from Barnard, Goldstein has taught in the Columbia MFA writing program and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers, has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University, and taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was the Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute in 2011, and will be the Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center in 2012 and the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College in 2013.

Goldstein has served as a judge for many book prizes, including the Koret International Jewish Book Award, the Sammy Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, and the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction. She frequently reviews books for The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Rebecca lives in Boston and in Truro, Massachusetts.