In the Wake of the Golden Calf: Is God Punishing Us?
Jul 6, 2020 By Yedida Eisenstat | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Israel’s fashioning of the Golden Calf–an immediate and direct violation of the first commandment they had just heard directly from God鈥攍ed God to threaten to destroy all of Israel. Responding to this crisis, Moses protected Israel from God鈥檚 temper and renegotiated the terms of the people鈥檚 relationship with God. In this session, we revisit this episode and closely read a number of fascinating interpretations. In particular, we focus on the questions of divine justice and mercy raised in Rashi鈥檚 comment that in every generation God will exact a little bit of punishment from Israel for fashioning the Golden Calf.
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Remembering the Pandemic: Learning from Yehuda Amichai
Jun 29, 2020 By Barbara Mann | Public Event video | Video Lecture
What will we remember from this pandemic? And how will we preserve and pass down the memory of those we鈥檝e lost to future generations? Through a close reading of Yehuda Amichai鈥檚 鈥淎nd Who Will Remember the Rememberers?鈥�, a poem sequence exploring Israel鈥檚 memorialization of 1948, we reflect on the elusiveness of memory, the limits of public forms of memorializing and mourning, and the paradoxical relationship between memory and forgetting.
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鈥淎 Time to Weep鈥�: The Power of Lament in Times of Crisis
Jun 22, 2020 By Alan Cooper | Public Event video | Video Lecture
More than a century ago, William James asserted that prayer was 鈥渢he very soul and essence of religion.鈥� At the same time that James was writing, biblical scholars were identifying and analyzing the forms and genres of biblical prayer. One of the most prominent of them is the lament, in which worshippers (individual or communal) cry out to God in times of duress. The effusion of pain and grief is a way of reaching out for the knowledge and comfort of God鈥檚 Presence鈥攆or reassurance that the suffering has been noticed and that God may be moved to provide relief. In this class, we consider selected prayers of lament in order to discern the continuing power of the genre as form of prayerful expression.
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Literature as Lifeline: What were Jews Reading and Writing in the Ghettos?
Jun 15, 2020 By Edna Friedberg | Public Event video | Video Lecture
During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned in urban prison zones known as ghettos. Reading and writing offered a form of spiritual sustenance to these communities under siege. This is an exploration of the literature that Jews passed around the ghettos鈥搉ovels, poetry, religious commentary, and even dark humor.
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Is There a Jewish Continuity Crisis?
Jun 8, 2020 By Michal Raucher | Public Event video | Video Lecture
Dr. Michal Raucher, 91快播 fellow andassistant professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, examines the phenomenon of Jewish leaders Invoking the threat of a demographic crisis to implore young Jews to procreate at higher rates. Using biblical, rabbinic, and contemporary texts, she鈥檒l consider what it would mean to think about Jewish continuity not solely in terms of creating more Jews but also cultivating and supporting the values central to our tradition.
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The Immigration Crises Then and Now: What Are the 21st Century Possibilities?
Jun 1, 2020 By Ruth Messinger | Public Event video | Video Lecture
We look at our Jewish history as immigrants in ancient and modern times and then consider the status and treatment of immigrants today in the U.S. and elsewhere. We will briefly review U.S. law and practice on immigration and discuss what the options are for making change and consider what the Jewish position should be on these issues.
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Fake News and the Resurgence of Antisemitism
May 18, 2020 By Shuly Rubin Schwartz | Public Event video | Video Lecture
How can we make sense of the resurgence of antisemitism from both right and left a mere 70 years after the Holocaust? Together we鈥檒l examine foundational texts that gave rise to hatred of Jews and Judaism and reflect on what we can learn from them about how best to respond to today鈥檚 manifestations.
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Life Under Siege: The Talmud鈥檚 Take on Trying Times
May 4, 2020 By Sarah Wolf | Public Event video | Video Lecture
How do we understand the relationship between the multiple complicating factors that arise in moments of communal hardship, such as questions of political leadership, unreliable news sources, physical privation, and economic disparity? The interplay of these challenges is at the core of a Talmudic story about the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans. Through an exploration of the values and priorities portrayed in this story, this class will help shed new light on the tensions of our present moment.
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