JTS Professor Wins Prestigious Book Award
David Fishman, professor of Jewish History, won the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Marjorie Lehman, associate professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, and Alan Mintz (z”l), the former Chana Kekst Professor of Jewish Literature, were named finalists in three other categories.
Three distinguished scholars have joined the JTS faculty in the 2018-2019 academic year. In the fall, Dr. Sarah Wolf joined us as assistant professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, and Dr. Arielle Levites became our fourth Golda Och Postdoctoral fellow. In the spring, Professor Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi will be the next Ginor Visiting Professor of Israel Studies.
The Religious Significance of Israel: A Personal Love Story and Accounting
Speech to the 2018 Rabbinical Assembly Convention
The minute I realized that I’d be giving this talk three days after Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and three days before flying to Israel for a day-long yom iyyun sponsored jointly by JTS and the Schechter Institute, I knew that my subject this afternoon would be Israel and our relationship to Israel.
Bridging the Growing Gap between Israeli and North American Jews
Adapted from the text prepared for delivery at a consultation on this subject sponsored by Shaharit, an Israeli think tank, at Beit Avichai in Jerusalem on January 25, 2018
Let me say at the outset that I will address you today not only as a scholar of modern Judaism whose research has long focused on Jewish thought in North America and Israel, and as the chancellor of JTS, a major institution of Jewish learning and the center of Conservative Judaism for over a century. I will also speak personally, one Jew to others, one member of what President Rivlin has recently called the “fifth tribe” of Israel to members of the other four. I will speak out of personal experiences and longings far more than books or surveys—an approach that I trust will lead to the sort of frank and fruitful conversation that must take place more regularly between our two Jewries, and within them both, if we are to draw closer together and bridge the divides that seem to grow deeper with each passing year.
Mychal Springer Remembers Rabbi Neil Gillman (z”l)
I am proud to be a student of Neil Gillman’s. Many of us in this room are students of Neil’s, and many of us could be speaking about the amazing experience of being Neil’s student.
I learned from Neil in three places:
His dining room table.
His classroom.
His office.
Partition in the Land of Israel, Then and Now
Today marks 70 years since the momentous vote by the General Assembly of the United Nations to create two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. Jews in Palestine and around the world danced in the streets upon hearing of the UN’s decision. Arabs in Palestine rioted, killing seven Jews on the first day of violence. David Ben Gurion, who had reluctantly supported the partition agreement as the best the Jewish people could hope for at that juncture, warned his aides that blood would soon flow. He was right, of course, and the conflict with Palestinians and some of Israel’s Arab neighbors has not ceased from that day to this. Even Ben Gurion could not have foreseen that 70 years after the vote, issues of partition and division would remain at the top of the agenda for Jews in the Land of Israel, in two related but very different forms.
Joel Roth Remembers Neil Gillman (z”l)
Eulogy Delivered November 26, 2017
“What Neil really worried about was whether we, all of us, each and every one of us, were grappling with the theological issues with which rabbinic education at The Jewish Theological Seminary was confronting us.”
Our faculty are leading Jewish academics who bring fresh insights to Jewish texts.
The term “Jewish mother” can still evoke the stereotype of a smothering, guilt-inducing matriarch. But thousands of years of Jewish culture have produced far more varied depictions of Jewish motherhood. JTS’s Marjorie Lehman and two colleagues set out to find and examine those depictions, and the result is a new book, co-edited by Lehman, called Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination.
