Andrew Brody: His podcasts are a boon to aspiring attorneys.
by Tamar Snyder
Jewish mothers everywhere must have sighed when Andrew Brody, a nice Jewish boy who scored a perfect 180 on his LSAT and received a scholarship to NYU Law School, decided against law. Yet Brody, 29, may be responsible for helping their own sons gain acceptance to top law schools. After graduating from Georgetown, Brody got a job with The Princeton Review teaching the Law School Admission Test. Since then, he’s been promoted to be national content director for the LSAT programs, where he trains more than 400 LSAT teachers across the country.
But he’s probably best known for the popular podcast he regularly produces, “LSAT Logic in Everyday Life” (www.theprincetonreview.com/lsat-logic.aspx). Between 20,000 and 30,000 people download each episode of the podcasts, which
apply the logic and reasoning tested on the LSAT to current events — from the trampling of a Wal-Mart greeter on Black Friday to the election coverage. “My brain is naturally wired to question assumptions and figure out what really is the basis of the argument,” he says.
It’s not just aspiring lawyers who are tuning into Brody’s podcasts; people of all ages and professions enjoy the under 10-minute presentations in which Brody finds flaws in everyday arguments being shared around water coolers or in the news.
“It’s a time in our country when people are saying, ‘Let’s question assumptions, let’s learn to think more critically,’” Brody says.
Since he began recording the podcast in 2006, it has held the distinction of being among the top educational podcasts and a staff favorite on iTunes (where it can be downloaded for free). Brody grew up in Wilmette, Ill., where he studied Hebrew at a public high school and attended a synagogue. While in college, he interned at the Israel Policy Forum and studied for a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University. Logic and reasoning are Jewish values, he says.
“It was culturally bred into me,” he says, adding that his father and grandfather are lawyers, his uncle is a judge and his roommate in the Village is a law student at Fordham. “I was always taught that it’s OK to question things in Judaism as opposed to blindly following. It’s in our Talmudic tradition to get to the core of an issue, and try to see things from a lot of different angles.”
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