Mark of Contradictions: The Creation of Judah’s History and the Case of Samson (Bible and the Ancient World series)
314 Royce HallPresented by: Professor Mahri Leonard-Fleckman of College of the Holy Cross
History and Ideology: Is There A Second Temple Judaism?
Periodization is a critical tool for historians, but it is also practice fraught with difficulty. As scholars have come to recognize, the division of historical narratives into broad analytic rubrics...
How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple
With the exception of the cross, the apple—as the forbidden fruit—may be the most widely-recognized biblical image. Yet the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew original does not name the...
Ancient Judaism between Christian Memory and Jewish Forgetting
Drawing on her in-progress book project on Forgetting, this seminar will explore the place of memory and forgetting in the reception of Second Temple Judaism, revisiting the supposed Rabbinic...
Lost Books: The Forgetfulness of Writing and the Forgetting of Jewish Pasts
314 Royce HallIt is often noted how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of ancient Judaism, radically expanding our evidence for Jews and Judaism prior to the...
The Mothers, the Mamzers, and the Rabbis: Reconstructing Family and Community in Post-Holocaust Jewish Law
Haines 39/ZoomThis talk centers on the little-known story of the children of illicit unions that resulted from a highly unusual situation in post-Holocaust Munkacz, a SubCarpathian town that had been...
Mark of Contradictions: The Creation of Judah’s History and the Case of Samson
236 Royce HallIn biblical texts, we find preserved the “mark of contradictions, fragmentations, and adjunctions,” as intellectual historian Michel de Certeau once wrote (The Writing of History 1988: 313). This talk...
Ethics in Paul and Paul in Ethics
ZoomThis talk looks at a few examples of Paul's ethical reasoning and then discusses how his ethical discourse compares with those of several types current today. RSVP required for...
Different Roads, One Goal: Gandhi and Jainism
314 Royce HallThe nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the last century's most revered figures, has exerted enormous influence across the world. Gandhi was himself greatly influenced by Jainism, an...
From Enchanted to Re-enchanted: Trajectories of Vietnamese Buddhism in a Post-modern World
Royce 243Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies. It is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Buddhist modernity has often taken on the form of a secularized, rationalist and democratic Buddhism that accentuates meditative techniques and a focus on psychology and salvation attained through...