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Lunchtime Lecture: Leora Batnitzky on Religion in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom
Leora Batnitzky will discuss religion in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.
As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.
About the Speaker:
Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought(Princeton, 2011). She is currently completing a book on Ecclesiastes: A Biography, forthcoming in Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. She is also working on two other books, the first a comparative study of conversion controversies in Israel and India, tentatively titled “What is Religious Freedom? The Case of Conversion in Israel and India,” and the second on the Jewish apostate and Catholic saint Edith Stein, tentatively titled “The Continued Relevance of Edith Stein for Jewish and Christian Self-Understanding.”
She is the co-editor, with Steven Weitzman and Eve Krakowski, of The Princeton Companion to Jewish Studies, which will be published by Princeton University this fall. She is co-editor of several other volumes, including The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (De Gruyter, 2014), Institutionalizing Rights and Religion(Cambridge University Press, 2017), and an anthology Jewish Legal Theories(Brandies Library of Modern Jewish Thought, 2018). Along with Vivian Liska and Ilana Pardes, she is co-director of the International Center for Bible, Culture, and Modernity.
Ticket Info: Free
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book club
LBI Book Club: The Many Lives of Anne Frank - Live on Zoom
Author Ruth Franklin will join the LBI Book Club to discuss her book The Many Lives of Anne Frank.
About The Many Lives of Anne Frank
In this innovative new biography, Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding, now translated into more than seventy languages, is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust.
Comprehensively researched but experimental in spirit, this book chronicles and interprets Anne’s life as a Jew in Amsterdam during World War II while also telling the story of the diary—its multiple drafts, its discovery, its reception, and its message for today’s world. Writing alongside Anne rather than over her, Franklin explores the day-to-day perils of the Holocaust in the Netherlands as well as Anne’s ultimate fate, restoring her humanity and agency in all their messiness, heroism, and complexity.
With antisemitism once again in the news, The Many Lives of Anne Frank takes a fresh and timely look at the debates around Anne’s life and work, including the controversial adaptations of the diary, Anne’s evolution as a fictional character, and the ways her story and image have been politically exploited. Franklin reveals how Anne has been understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea, and opens up new avenues for interpreting her life and writing in today’s hyperpolarized world.
About the Author
Ruth Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Finding the Book
The book can be ordered directly from Yale, which has published it as part of their "Jewish Lives" series.
You can also find it in many library systems and other bookstores. Here is a link to purchasing it via Amazon.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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lecture
Family History Today: Genetic Census of the Jewish People – In-Person Program & Live on Zoom
With the rise of consumer genetic testing, private individuals and academic studies have taken advantage of the lowered costs in order to research the recent and deeper human past. In the Jewish genealogy world, consumer DNA testing has proven to be a valuable tool, helping genealogists break through brick walls, reuniting families torn apart by the Shoah, and providing a wealth of data for multidisciplinary academic research. At the Genetic Census of the Jewish People project, popularly known as Avotaynu, they asked what DNA tells us about Jewish history, from the very beginnings 3,000 years ago to today. Over eight years ago, the project launched a study into the global non-Ashkenazi Jewish world. Their first target was the Sephardic Diaspora, ranging from India in the East to the New World in the West. In this lecture, co-administrator Michael Waas will provide a brief history and definitions for "Sephardic", discuss autosomal, Y, and mitochondrial DNA, and provide some case studies and preliminary findings from the Avotaynu study.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History (CJH) and Ancestry
About the Speaker
Ever since he was a young child, Michael Waas has been interested in history and the world around him. Following a conversation in high school with his cousin about family lore that the famous union leader Samuel Gompers was a cousin , he began his journey into genealogical and historical research. That beginning led him to the path where he is today: Michael is a Heritage Professional specializing in historic preservation and multidisciplinary research into the Portuguese Jews and Ottoman Jewry.
He received his BA in Anthropology with a specialization in Historical Archaeology from New College of Florida, and the subject of his Senior Thesis was "The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis of the Seminole People of Florida," under the direction of Dr. Uzi Baram. Michael recently completed his Masters in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa under the direction of Dr. Ido Shahar and Dr. Shai Srugo. The title of his thesis was “Istorya i oy: A comparative study on the Development of Jewish Heritage of Three Jewish Communities of the former Ottoman Empire.” In addition, he has been volunteering with AvotaynuDNA since 2016, where he is the anthropologist and historian of the research.
Michael is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Society for Sephardic Studies and he is the Associate Director of the Sephardic Research Division at JewishGen. Currently, Michael is pursuing a JD at New York Law School.
Ticket Info:
In person: Pay what you wish; register here
Zoom: Pay what you wish; register here
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