Archive of Events

What Are Jews For? The History of the Idea of Jewish Chosenness

Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - 7:00pm

Location: Moyer Hall, Miller Forum, Muhlenberg College

What Are Jews For?

The History of the Idea of Jewish Chosenness

The biblical ‘election of Israel’ – the setting apart of the Jews by God, as recipients of divine protection, and bearers of special holiness – has been the focus of fascination and repeated reappraisal by both Jews and non-Jews throughout the modern era. This theological concept lies at the heart of a broader question: what is the particular purpose of Jews in the world?

In this lecture Professor Sutcliffe will trace the history of the ‘Jewish Purpose Question’ from its biblical and medieval roots, through key early modern thinkers such as Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, and up to the twenty-first century.

Professor Adam Sutcliffe

Kings College London

Tuesday, April 2

7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Moyer Hall, Miller Forum

Open to the public

Kosher dessert reception following lecture.

93 QUEEN Documentary Film Showing and Talk Back

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 7:00pm

Location: Sinclair Auditorium

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, 93QUEEN follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are resisting the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City. With unprecedented — and insider — access, 93QUEEN offers up a unique portrayal of bold women who take matters into their own hands to change their own community from within.

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 at 7:00 p.m.

Sinclair Laboratory Auditorium, 7 Asa Drive

Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015

This is a free and non-ticketed event open to the public.

Sponsors

Lehigh University's Berman Center for Jewish Studies, Lehigh Hillel and Office of Jewish Life, Religion Studies Department, Film and Documentary Studies, Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Health, Medicine and Society Program, Muhlenberg College’s Jewish Studies Program and Muhlenberg College’s Hillel.

Jews, Whiteness, and the Broadway Musical

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - 7:30pm

Location: Williams Hall, Roemmele Global Commons

Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies

Jews, Whiteness, and the Broadway Musical
Warren Hoffman, PhD
Executive Director, Association for Jewish Studies, NY

Jewish Americans served as the main creators behind the growth of the Broadway musical in the U.S., but what does the Broadway musical have to say about issues of race, especially the racial identities of its Jewish creators? In this talk, we'll look at four musicals: Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, and West Side Story to see how the musical art form engaged with the concept of race in different time periods, looking particularly at the question of white racial identity and the ways in which musicals themselves helped Jews assimilate into the white mainst ream .

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

7:30 PM, Lehigh University, Roemmele Global Commons, Williams Hall, Building 31.
On street parking or Zoellner Arts Center.
Book signing to follow.

For more information contact: The Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, 610-758-3996 I incasip@lehigh.edu

Co-sponsors: American Studies Program and the Association for Jewish Studies Distinguished Lectureship Program

A German-Jewish Hermeneutics

Monday, October 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - 5:00pm

Location: John Evans Alumni Center, Evanston Illinois

For more information, click here...

Connections that Make a Difference!

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 - 4:00pm

Location: Williams Hall, Roemmele Global Commons

Interdisciplinary Academic Programs Dialogue and Networking

Meets 5 x 10 professional growth and success requirement! Bring a Friend...or two!

Africana Studies • Global Studies • Asian Studies • Cognitive Science

Environmental Studies • Jewish Studies • Global Citizenship

Science, Technology & Society • Health, Medicine & Society

American Studies • Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies • Classical Studies

Sustainable Development • Latin American and Latino Studies

Environmental Policy • Community Fellows

FIRST-YEAR & TRANSFER STUDENTS

Learn about interdisciplinary studies within the College of Arts & Sciences

CURRENT STUDENTS

Re-connect with classmates and faculty

FACULTY

Meet perspective and re-connect with current students

REFRESHMENTS and GIVEAWAYS!

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 | 4:00 - 5:00 PM | Williams Hall, Roemmele Global Commons

Office of Interdisciplinary Programs: 610-758-3996 | incasip@lehigh.edu

On Being A Jewish Writer

Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - 7:00pm

Location: Lewis Lab, Room 270

On Being a Jewish Writer

Dara Horn

American Novelist, Scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish Literature

"Can one find the universal in the particular? In this talk, Dara Horn, American novelist and scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, will discuss the history of Jewish languages, what it means to write stories grounded in the Jewish literary tradition in contemporary America, and how she came to write her most recent novel, about a woman who can't die."

Book signing will follow lecture.

Co-sponsors

Jewish Studies Program, Lafayette College

Hillel Society, Lafayette College

Creative Writing Program, Lehigh University

“We Charge Genocide": American Racism, Memory, and the Genocide Convention in the Cold War

Monday, March 5, 2018 - 6:00pm

Location: Roemmele Global Commons, Williams Hall

“We Charge Genocide": American Racism, Memory, and the Genocide Convention in the Cold War

Anson Rabinbach

Princeton University

The United Nations Genocide Convention was deeply entwined with the politics of race in early post World War II America. In 1951, a group of prominent African-American intellectuals and political activists, including W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson, saw the Convention as an opportunity to address lynching in the American South. The result was a petition entitled We Charge Genocide; The Crime of Government against the Negro People, presented to the United Nations in December 1951. Despite its’ adoption by the United States in 1948, the Convention was not ratified until 1987. It was effectively blocked by Southern Senators, who feared an infringement of state’s rights and Jim Crow. Trapped in the politics of the Cold War, the Genocide Convention became a casualty of the confrontation between the African American experience of slavery, segregation, racial violence, and its origins in the immediate postwar experience of the crimes of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia 'teach in'

Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 4:15pm

Location: Williams Hall, Roemmele Global Commons

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia 'teach in'

Panelists

Jodi Eichler-Levine, Professor, Religion Studies

Khurram Hussain, Professor, Religion Studies

Hartley Lachter, Professor/Chair, Religion Studies

Robert Rozehnal, Professor, Religion Studies

Open Q & A Conversation

Berman Center for Jewish Studies | Center for Global Islamic Studies | Religion Studies Department

The Power of the Future: Prophetic Politics between Political Crises and Civil Rights

Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 11:00am to Thursday, September 14, 2017 - 4:30pm

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

Hitler's Rise: Are There Parallels to 2016?

Wednesday, February 8, 2017 - 4:00pm

Location: Roemmele Global Commons, Williams Hall

Temporal Diremption and the Open System: Kabbalistic Atonality and Heidegger's Inceptual Thinking

Thursday, November 3, 2016 - 4:15pm

Location: The Humanities Center

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

Alive in the Depths: Transgender Identity and Religious Tradition

Wednesday, October 19, 2016 - 7:00pm

Location: Roemmele Global Commons

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

Buber, Scholem, and the Birth of Twentieth-Century Kabbalah from Jewish Intellectual Discourse

Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 4:15pm

Location: Humanities Center, Lehigh University

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"

Writing Transparent: Revealing the Modern Jewish Family on Television

Monday, November 30, 2015 - 7:00pm

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

Drawing Lena Finkle: Sex, Love, Immigration, and a Search for Self

Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - 7:15pm

Location: Kirby Hall of Civil Rights Room 104, Lafayette College

Whodunit?

Thursday, October 8, 2015 - 4:15pm

Location: Williams Hall, Global Commons

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.

We're Mixing it Up

Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: Williams Hall, Global Commons

Welcome Back Mixer: Interdisciplinary Academic Programs

Africana Studies

American Studies

Asian Studies

Global Studies

Classical Studies

Cognitive Science

Environmental Studies

Global Citizenship

Global Studies

Health, Medicine & Society

Jewish Studies

Latin American Studies

Science, Technology & Society

Sustainable Development

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

NEW STUDENTS: learn how interdisciplinary studies can enhance your academic goals, declare a major or a minor

CURRENT STUDENTS:re-connect with classmates and faculty

FACULTY: an opportunity to meet students and answer questions

Light refreshments served

Little Failure: A Reading & Conversation with Gary Shteyngart

Monday, April 27, 2015 - 6:00pm

Location: Wood Dining Room, Iacocca Tower at Lehigh University

Book signing & reception to follow.

Kiryas Joel: A Hasidic Shtetl in Suburban New York

Thursday, April 16, 2015 - 7:00pm

Location: Baker Center for the Arts, Recital Hall at Muhlenberg College

"Who was a Jew?" Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: A 3-Part Mini Course

Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish studies

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - 6:00pm

Location: Jewish Community Center of Allentown, Board Room 702 N 22nd Street, Allentown, PA 18104

Imagining the Jewish Gods in Comics

Thursday, March 26, 2015 - 4:15pm

Location: Lafayette College, Kirby Hall of Civil Rights, Room 104

Benjamin and Judaism Symposium - Day Two

Benjamin and Jewish Philosophy: Workshop

Friday, March 6, 2015 - 9:30am

Location: Linderman 200

Benjamin and Jewish Philosophy: Workshop

March 6, 2015

9:30 - 9:45 a.m.

Nitzan Lebovic (Lehigh University): Introduction

9:45 - 10:00 a.m.

Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth College)

"A Critical Life and Benjamin's Other Biographers"

10:00 - 10:15 a.m.

Eric Jacobson (University of Roehampton)

"Judaic Motifs in Benjamin's Late Work"

10:15 - 10:45 a.m.

Discussion

10:45 - 11:00 a.m.

Brian Britt (Virginia Tech University)

"Framing the Question of Benjamin's Jewishness"

11:00 - 11:30 a.m.

Discussion and short break

11:30 - 11:45 a.m.

Christopher Driscoll (Lehigh University)

"Walter Benjamin, the Twilight of White American Identity, and the Terrible Difficult of Learning to Die"

11:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m

Annika Thiem (Villanova University)

"Benjamin's Messianic Metaphysics of Transience"

12:00 - 12:30 p.m.

Discussion

12:30 - 1:00 p.m.

Michael Jennings (Princeton University) and Nitzan Lebovic: Integrative Commentary

1:00 - 2:00 p.m.

Lunch and Concluding Discussion: Plans for Publication

Benjamin and Judaism Conference

Thursday, March 5, 2015 - 4:15pm

Location: Linderman Library, 200

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

Benjamin and Judaism Symposium - Day One

Thursday, March 5, 2015 - 4:00pm

Location: Linderman 200

Benjamin and Judaism Conference

Thursday, March 5 • 4:10 p.m. • Linderman Library, 200

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Michael Jennings

Princeton University

“Toward the Apokatastatic Will: Patristics and Esoteric Judaism in Walter Benjamin’s Late Theological Politics”

The lecture examines the eschatology that is implicit in Walter

Benjamin’s late work: the writings that grew from the Arcades Project and the book on Baudelaire. The theory of modernity developed there is not merely analytical: it subtends an understanding that the proper use of technologized media accelerates the erasure of the

conditions that currently obtain. It is, in short, an apocalyptic

eschatology. This line in Benjamin’s late thought is organized not

by the concept of messianism, but by the theological concept of

apokatastasis. Benjamin’s use of theological material is always local and always specific to a particular problem. His work deploys a “situational” theological politics oriented to the task at hand, a

recombinatory logic that draws freely on elements of the Christian and Jewish traditions alike.

Michael Jennings is the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages in the Department of

German at Princeton University. He is the author of two books on Walter Benjamin: Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell, 1987), and with Howard Eiland, Walter Bejamin: A Critical Life (Harvard, 2013). He also serves as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin's works, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Harvard, 1996ff.), and the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin's essays.

Jennings sits on the executive committees of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Humanistic Studies. He is an associated faculty member in the

Department of Art and Archaeology and the School of Architecture.

Friday, March 6 • 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. • Linderman Library, 200

Paper Presentations and Discussions

Dr. Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

Dr. Christopher Driscoll, Lehigh University

Dr. Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth College

Dr. Eric Jacobson, University of Roehampton

Dr. Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University

Dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University

Dr. Annika Thiem, Villanova University

Food and the Sacred

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 -