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Tomer Persico (UC Berkeley Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies; Tel-Aviv University)

At some time after end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple.

How can an ancient religious ritual convey current social and political needs? This question emerged from eight years (2007-2015) of documentation of Sukkot, the Jewish festival that annually commemorates the Israelites’ Biblical journey through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land.

Beginning in September 1941 and throughout the war, Central Asia and Iran became places of refuge to hundreds of thousand of Jewish and Catholic Polish citizens.

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Hatred against Jews has re-emerged today as a major problem on the Left and the Right– in European and American politics, and frequently on college campuses. What accounts for this resurgence? What has been the historical evolution of antisemitism that helps explain the current moment? What forms is antisemitism taking today? How much is it connected to or distinct from the rise of other hateful ideologies? This panel of experts addresses these issues, with ample time for questions and discussion.

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Download Flyer Here

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

A video of this event will be available later this month at: www.youtube.com/channel/UCCPL8cexBhqbWP2zxEtwhcA

4:30pm Roundtable on Bible Translation: Profs. R. Hass, R. Hendel, J. Sheehan

5:30pm Robert Alter Lecture
6:30pm Light Refreshments
All events located at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

Organizer

Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

For ten years Dory Manor lived in Paris and wrote poetry in Hebrew. Early on in his stay in France he debated trying to shift into French, but soon realized that poetry—as opposed to other sorts of writing—was an art he could perform only in his mother tongue, Hebrew. This is not surprising: as opposed to authors and playwrights, very few modern poets have written in an acquired language. Even poets who were immigrants and exiles generally clung to their mother tongues.

The Song of Songs is a puzzle: a collection of secular — often erotic— love poetry that stands alone within the sacred books of the Hebrew Bible. Many of these poems are riddles that lead readers to more than one solution. When we read them for the first time, we might think their solution to be patently clear, but a second reading shows another solution, more daring than the first and sometimes its mirror opposite.

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is the author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, along with several other well-respected scholarly works on the Holocaust and genocide, including Hitler’s Army, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. He has written for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review.

Jason Wittenberg is associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley and a former Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He is the co-author of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2018). His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge, 2006), won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics.

Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.She taught at Princeton University in 1990- 1992 and was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and 2006, and at Harvard in 2012. During the fall of 2009 she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn and in fall of 2017 she was a fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

How are Holocaust survivors’ life stories informed by other narratives with which they are familiar?