Past Events

Stop by Miller Hall to unwind with students and faculty!
Learn about exciting academic opportunities, all while enjoying some delicious treats.

Thursday, March 26th, please come to Rutgers Academic Building (15 Seminary), Room ABE2400 for a panel and Q&A discussion, hosted by Michal Raucher, titled Rethinking Christian Zionism: Theology, Empire, and Power. Professors Rachel Feldman and Joseph Williams will explore the theological, historical, and political dynamics of Christian Zionism. They will reflect on the intersections of territorial ambitions, power, religion, and geopolitics.

The panel starts at 5:30PM and will include a Q&A.

As part of  Aresty Scholar, Noam Sienna's current research project on Hebrew printing in early 16th-century Constantinople (Istanbul), he has come across a singular text, printed in 1520s Constantinople, which uses the form of paraliturgical poetry (baqqasha) to celebrate the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes in 1522.
What might have motivated this composition among the Sephardi communities of the Ottoman Balkans, and what would it have meant to bring this text into print at the time?
Using the interdisciplinary methodologies of book history, this talk will attempt to situate this baqqasha in its literary, political, social, and material contexts.

Shaul Tchernichovsky, writing in war-torn Odessa in 1919, chose to articulate his world-view as a vitalistic pantheist and to address large issues of culture and history in a demanding poetic form inherited from the Italian Renaissance, a corona of fifteen tightly interlocked sonnets. The result was one of the outstanding longer poems written in the 20th century. The paganism it expresses does not seem to be ideological gesturing, like the use of pagan motifs elsewhere in modern literature, but an authentic response to the nature of the world as he saw it.

Register by emailing info@JewishStudies.rutgers.edu

A comparative look at Syriac Christian and Jewish Babylonian writers illustrates the conceptions and
sanctions these authors had for challenging apostasy in a changing cultural and political sphere. This
seminar will discuss different ways applied by these religious communities to both embrace and attract
some of these returning apostates, while suggesting creative ways, such as mourning, grieving, ex-
tracting confessions, and threatening physical punishment, to sanction others.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion, and Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

This seminar will explore the ways in which collaboration between the humanities and the sciences can
shed light on ancient rabbinic literature. Network analysis developed in the biological sciences illumi-
nates links between Jewish and Christian texts; cognitive neurosciences offers insights into the relation-
ship between ancient authors and audiences; and artificial intelligence aids in reconstructing lost texts.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religion, Program in Global Medieval Studies, and Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative.

This seminar will explore how Judaism is represented in the modern Middle East, with a focus on Iran,
Iraq, and Lebanon. The Abraham Accords emerged within the context of a sectarian political and reli-
gious struggle between Shia dominated Iran and the Sunni states that are partners to the Accords--a
struggle in which Israel as the self-proclaimed Jewish State has chosen clear sides in its alliance with
these Sunni states against Shia Iran. The seminar will examine the existence of a variety of discourses
about Judaism in contemporary Muslim public spheres that are increasingly constructed along sectari-
an lines.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion, and Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Toledot Yeshu (TY) is a long-lived polemical body of literature that treats the life of Jesus, entertaining to
some, obnoxious to others. This anti-Christian narrative has been a best-seller among Jews since its initial
anonymous composition in Late Antiquity and continuing through medieval and modern times. Recent
research has highlighted the extent of its popularity and its wide variety of renditions among European Jewish
communities. TY, though, was also highly popular among Jews living under Muslim rule in the Near East
and Mediterranean. It is attested in a surprising variety of renditions in Judeo-Arabic, and also circulated
extensively in the Near East in Hebrew. In my presentation, I will introduce the composition, highlighting and
detailing its early and significant Judeo-Arabic attestations. I will also contextualize the Jewish presentation
of Jesus within the Arabic-speaking contexts of the medieval Near East, considering how this parodical Jewish
story transmitted so extensively forms part of a multi-confessional patchwork of traditions about Jesus in
Arabic.

Co-sponsored by the Department of AMESALL, History, and Religion and the Program in Global Medieval Studies.

Based on Eviatar Zerubavel’s most recent book, this seminar examines a yet unarticulated and thus far never
systematized method of theorizing (“Social Pattern Analysis”) by making the process underlying the practice of
“concept-driven” research more explicit. We often tend to study the specific at the expense of also studying the generic.
To correct this imbalance, Zerubavel examines the theoretico-methodological process by which one can “distill” generic
social patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which one encounters them,
championing “generic” research that is pronouncedly transcontextual in its scope. In order to uncover generic social
patterns, data are collected in a wide range of social contexts. Such diversity is manifested multiple-culturally,
multihistorically, as well as multisituationally by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and
historical periods and a wide range of social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross-contextual
commonality, such research reveals formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. The seminar examines the
four main types of cross-contextual analogies “generic” researchers use (cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-domain,
and cross-level), disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded
formal equivalences.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology.

Open to faculty and graduate students.

New Year’s Day 2020 saw a crowd of over 90,000 Jews assemble in freezing temperatures at New Jersey’s
MetLife Stadium. Instead of the usual football game, the attraction was the Siyum ha-Shas of Daf Yomi, a
ceremony celebrating the completion of the study of the entire Talmud over the course of 7.5 years by learning
one page (a daf) per day (yomi). Scores of parallel events took place on five other continents. Since the
inception of the daf yomi cycle in the 1920s, the overwhelming majority of partakers have been men. While this
remains the case, the 2020 festivities marked a watershed when over 3,000 women congregated in Jerusalem's
Binyanei ha-Umah Auditorium for the inaugural “Women’s Siyum Shas.” Exploring the processes that
precipitated this conspicuous moment, Professor Adam Ferziger will contextualize the expansion of women’s
daf yomi within contemporary Orthodox Judaism’s struggles over the religious standing of women and the ways
digital technology is reshaping religious practices.

Co-sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Center of Jewish Life and the Department of Religion.

Open to faculty and graduate students.

Composed amid social tensions in fourteenth-century Castile, the anthology of ethical literature known as the Menorat Ha-Maor (“The Lamp of Enlightenment”) by the talmudist Yitzhak Aboab includes three talmudic stories about Jewish sages executing Jewish informers.

By analyzing the compilation process of the Menorat Ha-Maor and comparing these stories to contemporaneous rabbinic responsa, Ron Lasri will show that these stories are vital to understanding Jewish culture in medieval Castile. More broadly, Lasri will reflect on the ways literary anthologies can serve as key primary sources for the study of cultural history.

Co-sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, the Department of History, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Program in Global Medieval Studies.

Open to faculty and graduate students.

Archaeological discoveries and fresh readings of rabbinic texts are revolutionizing understandings of Jewish communal
leadership in medieval Europe. Previously, this leadership was imagined as a scholarly religious elite that governed on the
basis of Jewish law. Now, by contrast, it is increasingly recognized that laymen were key players in urban governance.
Professor Effie Shoham-Steiner will share his research on these dynamics with a focus on the city of Cologne and the
ways lay leadership shaped communal decision-making.

Co-sponsored by the History Department and the Program in Global Medieval Studies.

Open to faculty and graduate students.