Rebecca Goldstein is an American novelist and professor of philosophy. She has written five novels, a number of short stories and essays, and biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Goldstein, born Rebecca Newberger, grew up in White Plains, New York, and did her undergraduate work at Barnard College. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. She has one older brother who is an Orthodox Rabbi, and she also has a younger sister. After earning her Ph.D. from Princeton University, she returned to Barnard to teach courses in various philosophical... studies. There she published her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem , 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." Her second novel, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind , was also set in academia, though with a far darker tone.
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