The Promise and Perils of Revolution: Jewish Life in the Soviet Union After 1917
Jul 13, 2020 By David Fishman | Public Event video | Video Lecture
The 1917 Russian revolution and its aftermath were a time of both promise and crisis for the Jews of Russia, who constituted the largest Jewish community in the world at the time. The Soviet Union was the first state to outlaw antisemitism, and more than half of the first Soviet cabinet consisted of Jews. Yet the new regime mercilessly persecuted organized religion and outlawed all non-Communist political movements, including Zionism. Focusing on the years between the revolution and the Second World War, this session explores the diversity of Jewish responses to sweeping political and social change.
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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—led God to threaten to destroy all of Israel. Responding to this crisis, Moses protected Israel from God’s temper and renegotiated the terms of the people’s 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’s 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’ve lost to future generations? Through a close reading of Yehuda Amichai’s “And Who Will Remember the Rememberers?”, a poem sequence exploring Israel’s 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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“A Time to Weep”: 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 “the very soul and essence of religion.” 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’s Presence—for 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–novels, 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, JTS fellow and assistant 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’ll 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’ll 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’s manifestations.
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