Rebecca Newberger 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 graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and earned her PhD from Princeton University, where she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship. 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. Her latest book is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.

In addition to Barnard, Goldstein has taught at Columbia and Rutgers. She 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. She is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy and English at NYU, as well as Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities, London, England

Goldstein has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2014 National Humanities Medal given by President Barack Obama, the 2011 Humanist of the Year from the American Humanist Association, the Koret Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought for her book Betraying Spinoza, the National Jewish Book Award for Strange Attractors, and the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Mazel. Goldstein has been named a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also been awarded Whiting Foundation Fellowship.