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Department of Political Sciences with support from the Student Senate, Religion Department, Africana Studies and Berman Center
Come hear Jewjer Ilham, Enes Freedom, Dr. Samanatha Lakin, and Elfidar Iltebir discuss the genocide of Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
VIRTUAL, Register Here...
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 7 in the Series
The Unmelting Pot: Jewish American Diversity, 1970-2020
Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 6 in the Series
Passover Seders and Jewish-Christian Relations in 20th Century America
Dr. Jessica Cooperman, Muhlenberg College
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 5 in the Series
Between Genocide and Climate Change: Is There a Lesson to be Learned from the Holocaust?
Dr. Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 4 in the Series
Thinking About God through a Rabbinic Lens: Maimonides (12th C.) and Hasdai Crescas (14th C.) on Berakhot 33b
Dr. Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 3 in the Series
Ages upon Ages: Multiple Worlds and Historical Epochs in Medieval Kabbalah
Dr. Hartley Lachter, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 2 in the Series
Who was a Jew? Jewish Diversity in the Second Temple Period
Dr. Ben Wright, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studes with the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley present Moments in Jewish History, a 7-part series.
Each presentation in the series will be presented via ZOOM at 7:00 p.m.
Cost for the entire series is $54 per household. Go to www.jewishlehighvalley.org to register.
Part 1 in the Series
Between Babylon and Jerusalem: Israel and Mesopotamia in their Ancient Near Eastern World
Dr. Dustin Nash, Muhlenberg College
5 x 10 CAS Interdisciplinary Majors and Minors Dialogue/Networking VIRTUAL Event
CAS Interdisciplinary Majors and Minors can help you get on the right road to success!
https://lehigh.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwpcOiqpjIiGNM9CuNYmgNI3q-I-WNh0xxJ
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5uSIWsB0S82n_q1CpcG03w
For the complete program of this event, please click here...
Israel-Palestine Panel
Open to the Lehigh Community
Panelists included:
Sa'ed Atshan is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He received his BA from Swarthmore in 2006. His research interests are at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, the anthropology of policy, critical development studies, and gender and sexuality studies. He has two forthcoming books with Stanford University Press: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique and Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories (Anthropology of Policy Series). He also has co-authored, with Katharina Galor, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, to be published with Duke University Press in 2020.
Arie M. Dubnov is an associate professor of history and the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University. His publications include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and two edited volumes, Zionism – A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context.
Nitzan Lebovic received his B.A. in History and Theory of Literature from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. from UCLA. His first book, titled The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013) focuses on the circle around the Lebensphilosophie and anti-Semitic thinker Ludwig Klages. His second book, Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi, came out in Hebrew in 2015 and will be published in June 2019 with the "New Jewish Philosophy and Thought" series at Indiana University Press.
Jodi Eichler-Levine is associate professor of religion studies and associate BermanProfessor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University. She is the author of Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature, which explores how traumatic pasts are represented for young people; she is completing a book tentatively titled Crafting Judaism, forthcoming from UNC Press in 2020. Her academic interests in Jewish American children's literature, popular media, and material culture give her a vantage point on the diverse ways that Jewish Americans approach the conflict.
Lior Sternfeld is an Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University. He is a social historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on minorities and social movements in the region. His first book, Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran, was published in 2018 by Stanford University Press.
For more information contact: Office of Interdisciplinary Programs incasip@lehigh.edu
What Are Jews For?
Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies
Jews, Whiteness, and the Broadway Musical
Warren Hoffman, PhD
Executive Director, Association for Jewish Studies, NY
On street parking or Zoellner Arts Center.
Book signing to follow.
For more information, click here...
Venue: Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York 10011 (USA)
Organized by: Nitzan Lebovic, Daniel Weidner
Research project(s): Prophetic Politics in Transatlantic Transfer
Organized in cooperation with the Zentrum Fur Literatur – Und Kulturforschung (Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin) and the Center for Jewish History, New York
Modern forms of prophetic rhetoric became important models for social and political change. The rise of modern political theology, political messianism, secularization, or the revival of “prophetic charisma” contributed to a different mode of revolutionary or reformative change. This change has been characterized by a tight relation between ethical and epistemological, normative and utopian claims, all of which integrated tropes of prophetic rhetoric. From this perspective, it is not sufficient to talk about religious rhetoric in relation to concepts such as hegemony and control; it is as important to consider its appearance in non-institutional discourses and different expressions of popular resistance, and then not only as mere gestures, but in the form of specific practices.
Our workshop in New York will continue in laying the foundation for a transatlantic cooperation about prophetic politics in the twentieth century. A first workshop was held in Berlin in June 2017, and focused mostly on references to an elitist and theoretical form of political prophecy in the Weimar republic. The second workshop, in New York, will follow the prophetic figure across the ocean, as it moves, with A.J. Heschel, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, to the American context. Here, historians believe, prophetic politics became more vernacular and more democratic. The second workshop will examine how and where the radical intellectual figure meets with other traditions of prophetic speech, such as the American Jeremiad, Walt Whitman’s transcendental prophetic plea, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s use of prophetic tropes, and the American-Muslim call for social and political reform.
Program
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Daniel Weidner (ZfL) and Nitzan Lebovic (Lehigh University): Introduction
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Brian Britt (Virginia Tech University): Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Sam Brody (The University of Kansas): Prophecy and Powerlessness
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Sarah Hammerschlag (The University of Chicago): Believing in the U.S.A.: Derrida, Melville and the Great American Charlatan
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (New York University): The Prophetic Voice: Political-Theological Perspectives
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Keynote Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College): Political Prophecy versus Liberation Theology: Ethical and Mystical Dimensions
Thursday, September 14, 2017
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Reading session: Written prophecy
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Saladin Ambar (Rutgers University): Catch on Fire: Malcolm X and the Black Prophetic Tradition
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University): Samuel Delany as Prophetic Critic
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
John Pettegrew (Lehigh University): James Baldwin's "Gospel of Love" in Mid-20th Century Democratic Thought
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Concluding discussion
In this lecture, I explore the affinities between the atonality of Heidegger’s speculation on the essence of the truth of being that eludes objectification and the nonsystematic system championed by the kabbalists in their effort to diagram the infinity that resists all schematic representation. I will argue that Heidegger’s Seyn and the kabbalistic Ein Sof are postontological constructs that call into question the suitability of systematic thinking applied to the being that is the singular fragmentation of all beings but that can never be confined to any particular being. Heideggerian and kabbalistic hermeneutics can be contemplated from the perspective of the atonality of thought, which is profitably compared to a musical fugue wherein the different aspects are joined together compositionally into a polyphonic whole in which each jointure intones the same sequence of notes from a contrapuntal perspective without a tonal center.
Co-sponsors: The Humanities Center, Department of Philosophy and Department of Religion Studies
Joy Ladin
David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English
Director, The Beren Writing Center
Yeshiva University
Joy Ladin is often asked how she reconciles being religious with being transgender. In this talk, she will explain how her childhood experience of hiding both her trans identity and her relationship with God has led her to see transgender experience as enriching rather than challenging, opposing or "queering" religious tradition, a perspective she will illustrate by reading the story of Jonah (a man who preferred to die than live as who he was) from a trans perspective. Building on the work of feminist theologians, she will argue that expanding our understanding of humanity to be more gender-inclusive enables us to expand our understanding of God.
Joy Ladin's return to Yeshiva University as a woman after receiving tenure as a man made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution and made page-3 news in the New York Post. Her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, and she is also the author of seven books of poetry, including Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University, and her work has been recognized with a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Council of Learned Societies research fellowship. She has spoken about gender identity issues around the country, and is currently writing a book of trans Jewish theology entitled, I Am What I Will Be: Meeting God at the Burning Bush of Becoming.
Co-sponsor: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.
Free non-ticketed event.
Paid parking available at Zoellner Arts Center or on street meter parking.
https://zoellner.cas2.lehigh.edu/directions-parking
Thursday, December 3rd - 4:10PM
Humanities Center, Lehigh University
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies
The Humanities Center
present:
Kocku von Stuckrad
Professor of Religious Studies, Dean of Faculty, Theology and Relgious Studies
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
"Buber, Scholem, and the Birth of Twentieth-Century Kabbalah from Jewish Intellectual Discourse"
Monday, November 30 - 7:00pm
Seegers Union, Muhlenberg College
Writing Transparent: Revealing the Modern Jewish Family on Television
Micah Fitzerman-Blue
Writer and Supervising Producer of Transparent
Gil Anidjar, Professor, Department of Religion & Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University
The notion of a 'founding murder' seems strange enough, yet it is a common enough motif. What is even more interesting is that -- contra Freud -- the ancient Greek and Hebrew stories posit a fratricide, rather than a patricide at the origin. I want to explore these two answers -- for it's all in the family, or so it seems -- to the question of murder. If time permits, I shall proceed to reflect on kinship and politics -- or kinship and violence, if there is a difference -- in the Western tradition.
On Friday, October 9 from 11am – 12:30pm there will be a response to Professor Anidjar’s book “Blood” facilitated by Lehigh professors Nitzan Lebovic from History and Hartley Lachter and Khurram Hussain from Religion Studies at the Humanities Center, 224 W. Packer Ave. for faculty and graduate students. Please RSVP to sus3@lehigh.edu for the Friday event.
Book signing & reception to follow.
The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies presented the Benjamin and Judaism ConferenceThursday, March 5, 4:10 p.m. in Linderman Library, 200Keynote Speaker:Dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University“Toward the Apokatastatic Will: Patristics and Esoteric Judaism in Walter Benjamin’s Late Theological Politics”Friday, March 6, 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in Linderman Library, 200Paper Presentations and Discussions Dr. Brian Britt, Virginia TechDr. Christopher Driscoll, Lehigh UniversityDr. Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth CollegeDr. Eric Jacobson, University of RochamptonDr. Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh UniversityDr. Michael Jennings, Princeton UniversityDr. Annika Thiem, Villanova UniversityFor more information or to download, view the flyer here or click on the image at right.Office of Interdisciplinary Programs - 610-758-3996 - incasip@lehigh.cdu
co-sponsored by the Berman Center