Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple
2023-04-27 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Haines 39/Zoom
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 species of fruit that caused the Fall of Man, nor do any of its many translations. While early Christian and rabbinic commentators identify various species as the forbidden fruit—the fig, the grape, the citron—they never include the apple. How, then, did the forbidden fruit come to be identified as the apple? Examining the history of biblical translation and of the artistic representation of the Fall of Man, the presentation offers a new explanation for the emergence of the apple as a symbol of temptation and forbidden knowledge.
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Azzan Yadin-Israel is professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash and The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and CMRS Center for Early Global Studies.

History and Ideology: Is There A Second Temple Judaism?
2023-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
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 is anchored in the ideological commitments—often implicit and unrecognized—of their authors. A great deal of work has been devoted to examining these questions as they pertain to the assumptions informing modern history, particularly in the fields such as colonial history and women’s history. And while the issue has received less attention among scholars of the ancient world, it is no less pressing. This talk will address the broader theoretical question of periodization itself, and provide a detailed discussion of one example—the assumption that there is a Second Temple period.

Azzan Yadin-Israel is professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash and The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.
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This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Mark of Contradictions: The Creation of Judah's History and the Case of Samson (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-03-14 14:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Presented by: Professor Mahri Leonard-Fleckman of College of the Holy Cross

Where Was Adam Buried? Textual Communities and the Changing Location of a Sacred Site
2023-03-09 16:00 | Online on Zoom
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Because neither the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, nor Qur’ān specify the place of Adam’s burial, its location became an object of contention over the ages among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The oldest Jewish traditions locate Adam’s tomb in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, thereby associating Adam with the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs buried there (Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Early Christians debated whether Adam was buried in Hebron or in Jerusalem, where his burial was associated with the passion and redemption of Jesus Christ. Later, Muslims entered into the debate, sometimes arguing for Hebron or Jerusalem, and other times for specifically Muslim traditions that locate Adam’s burial in Mecca, Najaf (in Iraq), or Sri Lanka. What was at stake in these contests was the religious symbolism and meaning of the final resting place of the ancestor of all of humanity, but more often than not the debate was shaped by pragmatic concerns having to do with political power, ecclesiastical rivalries, and economic gain, whose forms often reveal the early history of pilgrimage and religious tourism.

Fred Astren is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. His current work encompasses Jewish history—in both the East and West—in the years 500–950. Forthcoming is a journal article on the failure of Visigothic anti-Jewish legislation in Spain, and a book chapter on the impact of ninth century Muslim Arabic book culture on Jewish sectarianism. He is currently working on a book chapter on Iranian contexts of the eighth-century Jewish messianic figure, Abū ʿĪsā al- Isfahānī. Recent publications include a journal article that examines ways that minority and majority groups “co- produce” historical narratives in medieval Islam and a chapter in the Cambridge History of Judaism on medieval non-rabbinic Judaisms other than Karaism. Astren is the author of Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (University of South Carolina Press, 2004), and co-editor of Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Interaction, and Communication (Brill, 2000). Astren serves on the Advisory Board of the Mediterranean Seminar.

Presented by: Professor Fred Astren of San Francisco State University

“Abba has begun to make money from the beer business”: Beer, Business, and Halakhah in Rabbinic Literature (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-02-28 14:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Presented by: Professor Jordan D. Rosenblum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison

A Royal Osirian Funerary Rite? The Awakening of Osiris Ritual in Tutankhamun’s Tomb
2023-02-23 16:00 | Kaplan 365
Over 100 years after its discovery, the tomb of Tutankhamun continues to be the focus of numerous Egyptological studies and scholarly research. Due to Howard Carter’s meticulous documentation of the tomb, it’s possible to continue to “excavate” the tomb and make new discoveries about ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, kingship ideology, and funerary practices, including a new interpretation of the layout of the Burial Chamber as related to the Awakening of Osiris Ritual.
The earliest depiction of the Awakening of Osiris Ritual comes from the 19th Dynasty, which represents the reanimation of Osiris by his son Horus in the presence of various deities connected to the Osirian myth. In the scene, the mummiform figure of Osiris lays prone and enshrined upon a lion bed, surrounded by various crowns, weapons, clothing, and other emblems. It is here argued that Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber is a physical manifestation of this ritual, which is not only represented in image and text, but also by objects and even the body of Tutankhamun himself. The author proposes a number of hypotheses for why this ritual physically manifested itself within Tutankhamun’s burial, and how this analysis provides us with more information on royal funerary practice during the New Kingdom.

Nick Brown is an American Egyptologist who has worked as an archaeologist in Egypt since 2011. He received his MA degree in Egyptology from the American University in Cairo in 2016, and currently is an Egyptology PhD candidate at the UCLA. Currently he lives between Los Angeles, CA and Cairo, Egypt. His excavation experience includes working with archaeological sites in Aswan (at Elephantine Island and Wadi el-Hudi), as well as funerary sites in Luxor, Amarna and the Sudan. In 2016, Nicholas spent the summer working at the MFA, Boston as the Terrace Curatorial Research Associate in Egyptology. He returned to the MFA over the summer of 2019 to conduct archival research for the Egyptian Art Department’s exhibit “Ancient Nubia Now.” Nicholas’s research interests include funerary material culture from the New Kingdom, as well as the use and perception of ancient Egypt within modern contexts.
Presented by: Nick Brown (NELC UCLA)

Grupo Madera: 20th Century Afro-Venezuelan Religiosity, Rhythms, and Resistance
2023-02-15 16:00 | Kaplan 365
Grupo Madera (Wood Group) was founded in 1977 in San Agustín del Sur – an Afro-Venezuelan working-class barrio – by Afro-Venezuelan youth committed to Third World liberation struggles, global Pan-Africanism, and Black consciousness. As a traditional Afro-Venezuelan musical ensemble and community organization, Grupo Madera responded to the people’s calls for economic justice and political participation during an era of U.S. backed government repression in Venezuela. On August 15, 1980, while en route to an event with Indigenous communities in the Amazonas region, 11 of the founding members drowned in the Orinoco River. Survivors and social movements consider the tragedy one of the most egregious and vile acts of state violence against Afro-Venezuelan popular masses in contemporary history. In the aftermath of their death, several remaining members of Grupo Madera (1977 – 1980), along with other artists, activists, relatives, and communities, swore an oath to continue the founders’ legacy and have done so for 42 years. Join us to learn more about Grupo Madera and the role of culture, religion, and arts in people’s struggles in 20th century Venezuela.

Jeanette Charles is a proud daughter of the Haitian Diaspora raised by working-class Black and Brown Los Angeles. She is pursuing her PhD in History at the University of California, Los Angeles (MA ‘19). Her research focuses on Black Radicalism, popular religiosity, and political economy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to this, she studied at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, with the Cátedra Libre África, a research institute focused on Afro-Venezuelan, African diasporic, and African continental histories. She is also a long-time international solidarity organizer, language interpreter, and independent journalist.

Presented by: Jeanette Charles, UCLA

At the Origins of Monotheism: A Socio-economic Confrontation in Ancient Syro Mesoptamia
2023-02-14 14:00 - 15:00 | Bunche Hall 2209A, 11282 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
What is known as monotheism may be seen, in it earliest manifestation, in the light of an epistemic confrontation of the biblical tradition with the system of knowledge that had developed in the great cities of Mesopotamia. The paper presents a view that is at variance with the communis opinio, both in terms of the nature of the confrontation and of its historical setting.
As for the nature of the confrontation, I consider the notion of fate as being more central to Syro-Mesopotamian religion than normally acknowledged. Polytheism was a major intellectual feat in its attempt at breaking down the absolute into component parts, i.e., the deities that represent diverse elements of the world of nature. Fate had remained untouched by this process, and in this regard it may be seen as a form of monotheism ante litteram.
As for the historical setting, I consider the patriarchal tradition as encasing the epic memory of a Syro-Mesopotamian splinter group that detached itself from the land of the four banks at a time of de-urbanization in the middle Euphrates, and in the process lost its contacts with the organized systems of cult and divination and brought new life to the notion of fate now seen as a living absolute.
This presentation comes at a point in the course when one looks at the founding figures, and in particular Abraham. My approach puts the biblical patriarchal tradition in a different and very unconventional light, drawing not only on the biblical text and on historical records, but also on archaeology and ethnography.

Giorgio Buccellati is a Research Professor in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of History at UCLA. He founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as first director from 1973 until 1983 and where he is now Director of the Mesopotamian Lab. He is currently Director of IIMAS – The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies and of AVASA – Associazione per la Valorizzazione dell’Archeologia e della Storia Antica.
His research interests include the ancient languages, the literature, the religion, the archaeology and the history of Mesopotamia, as well as the theory of archaeology. His publications include site reports, text editions, linguistic and literary studies as well as on archaeological theory, historical monographs and essays on philosophy and spirituality. In his field work, he has developed new approaches to the preservation and presentation of archaeological sites and to community archaeology. With his wife Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, he has worked for many years in the Near East, especially in Syria, Iraq and Turkey. They are at present co-directors of the archaeological expedition to Tell Mozan/Urkesh in North-Eastern Syria.

Presented by: Giorgio Buccellati, UCLA

Mothers and Rituals of Child-Naming in Ancient Israel (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-01-25 14:00
Presented by: Professor Susan Ackerman of Dartmouth University.
This event will be recorded with no live audience and shared with community after.

At the Origins of Monotheism: A Socio-economic Confrontation in Ancient Syro Mesoptamia
2023-01-01 00:00
Presented by: Professor Giorgio Buccellati of UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Date/Time/Loc TBD

The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal
2022-11-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
Throughout much of history, the Jewish way of life has been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions legislated by the Torah: dietary laws, ritual purity, circumcision, Sabbath regulations, holidays, and more. But precisely when did this unique way of life first emerge, and why specifically at that time? In his talk, Professor Yonatan Adler will present the conclusions of his new book which methodically engages ancient texts and archaeological discoveries to identify the earliest evidence of Torah observance among ordinary Judeans.

Professor Yonatan Adler is an Associate Professor in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel, where he also serves as Head of the Institute of Archaeology. Adler specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. Adler has served as a member of the Israeli Council for Archaeology since his 2018 appointment by the Israeli Minister of Culture.

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Why Religion Matters for Educational Stratification
2022-11-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
It’s well-known that Americans’ academic outcomes vary by race, class, and gender. But what about their religious upbringing? In this talk, Dr. Ilana Horwitz will discuss findings from her recent book, God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (January 2022, Oxford UniversityPress). Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, Dr. Horwitz identifies a new type of childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups: religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will explain why teens raised with religious restraint earn higher grades, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from working class and lower middle-class families benefit the most from religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will also show how religious restraint recalibrates the academic ambitions of teens from the professional class, especially girls, leading them to question the value of selective colleges.

Dr. Ilana Horwitz is a sociologist of education and religion who examines how people’s religious upbringing, social class, gender, ethnicity, and race influence their life course, especially their educational outcomes. Currently, Dr. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology and Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Previously, Dr. Horwitz was the Education Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity, and she earned her PhD in Sociology of Education from Stanford University. Dr. Horwitz’s research has appeared in academic and public outlets, including the American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed. Her current book projects include The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A Guide for Academics (under contract with Princeton University Press), and The Price of Good Intentions: Why Universities Can’t Deliver on their Diversity Promise. You can learn more about her at www.ilanahorwitz.com.

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The God of Possibilities: God, Human Freedom and the Obligation to Heal the World by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller and Professor Leora F. Batnitzky as Respondent
2022-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaplan Hall 348
This discussion constitutes a personal effort at articulating a meaningful notion of God that is spiritually fulfilling, intellectually uncompromising and morally compelling. The search ranges across the Jewish tradition from the fundamentals of Biblical monotheism to Maimonides’ rationalism and onto Hasidic mysticism. The result is a contemporary notion of God that can nurture personal humility and the development of an ethical personality.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller recently celebrated his fortieth year of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He was ordained in 1971 at Yeshiva University where he completed a Masters in Rabbinic Literature. Chaim has been a lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute,North America and of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. In 2014 he initiated a fact finding mission for non-Jewish student leaders to Israel and the Palestine Authority which is now offered on ninety campuses. In 2020 a Festschrift entitled Swimming Against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the 21st Century was published in Chaim’s honor.
Dr. Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she also directs Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies. She is the author of several books, edited collections, and numerous articles and book chapters that span the fields of modern Jewish and Christian thought, continental philosophy and philosophy of religion, legal and political theory, and biblical hermeneutics. She is currently writing a book on the Jewish apostate and Catholic Saint Edith Stein.

Tending the Garden: Ahimsa in the Early Indian Literature
2022-10-19 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall/Zoom
Source: Shakyamuni Buddha – Jataka (Previous Lives). 1800, Zanabazar Mongolia National Museum, Mongolia, https://www.himalayanart.org/items/50191. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022.

The practice of ahiṃsā (non-violence) has a long and illustrious history both in South Asia, where it originated, and elsewhere. This talk will tour a selection of the rich body of texts composed by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus in premodern India that engage with the theme of ahiṃsā to non-humans. These works range from imperial propaganda to stories that illustrate with engaging vividness the karmic dangers of injuring other living beings, the rewards earned by those who refrain from doing so and the relationship between ahiṃsā and the doctrine of reincarnation.

Co-sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Anahita Hoose is a scholar of Indian languages, texts and cultures. Originally from England, she crossed the pond in 2016 to join the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies as a PhD student and moved to the Center for the Study of Religion after graduating in 2022. In her PhD dissertation, based on texts composed in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain circles over a period of more than a thousand years, she discusses the use of verbs in multiple premodern Indian languages. Her linguistic research is complemented by her interests in religion, myth and literature and she has published articles on both linguistic and cultural topics.

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Welcome Reception Fall 2022
2022-10-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2022 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Study of Religion: Commencement Toast 2022
2022-06-11 13:30 - 14:30 | Kaplan 365

Antisemitism in the Pagan World
2022-05-18 16:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 306/Zoom
What counts as antisemitism? Did antisemitism exist among Greeks and Romans? How far and how deep did hostility to Jews extend in the pagan and pre-Christian world? What impact did it have on Jewish experience in the period of the Second Temple? In short, was there a “Jewish problem” in Greco-Roman antiquity?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Classics, History Department, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Erich Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing have been primarily in Roman history, Hellenistic history, and Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He has published or edited 14 books, the most recent of which is Ethnicity in the Ancient World – – Did it Matter? (2020). Most important, he has supervised or served on the PhD dissertation committees of over 100 students, most of whom are now teaching in various colleges and universities in this country and abroad.

Wolakota kagapi: The Study of Peace Making on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
2022-05-17 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Unfortunately, the Center for the Study of Religion must postpone this event due to extenuating circumstances. We apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to welcoming you at our next event.

The Oglala Lakota Peace Making Team, was instrumental in putting together a number of training sessions for community members to become Peace Makers. The tribe developed a Peace Making Room in the new court house. The Peace Making room is used for Peace Making for the community membership.
A Peace Maker has a vision for the future, knows traditional ways, shares and develops leadership, serves and protects the tribal community, develops trust, and shows respect for all tribal people. Native communities are centered on culture, spirituality, language, and stories. They are not centered on financial profit, politics, or religion. These elements of culture are important for explaining the practice of (Wolakota) Peace making.

Richard Iron Cloud Ph.D., Oglala Lakota, Richard is a founding member of the Oglala Lakota Peace-Making Team. A group of Oglala Lakota individuals who came together to look for alternatives to the Colonial System of Justice. Richard has been involved in social justice issues, researching systems of oppression in its various forms. Richard believes in looking out for others needs rather than one’s own, such behavior is salient in the Lakota (ounye) way of life.

Losing Control of the gods: How Religion Slipped Out of the Hands of Men in the Early Roman Empire
2022-05-12 17:00 - 18:00 | Dodd Hall 248
The dignified and extravagant public rituals of Romans – ancestral institutions as the last generations of the Republic imagined them – definitively failed in the last century BCE. Future senatorial priests presided only over the cults of a city that was less and less a capital. In place of a narrative of early imperial religion that sets the worship of the emperors at its center, I shall argue for a systemic shift in the religious order, a disintegration of authority that reflected much wider changes in the nature of Roman culture.

References
Beard, Mary, John North and Simon Price (1998). Religions of Rome. 2 volumes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Feeney, Denis (1998). Literature and religion at Rome. Culture, contexts and beliefs. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Feeney, Denis (2016). Beyond Greek. The beginnings of Latin literature. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Gasparini, Valentino, et al. Eds. (2020). Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Berlin & Boston, de Gruyter.
MacRae, Duncan (2016). Legible religion. Books, gods, and rituals in Roman culture Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Nongbri, Brent (2013). Before Religion. A history of a modern concept. New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
Rüpke, Jörg (2018). Pantheon. A New History of Roman Religion. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.
Rüpke, Jörg and Greg Woolf, Eds. (2021). Religion in the Roman Empire. Stuttgart, Verlag W.Kohlhammer.
Scheid, John (2016). The gods, the state, and the individual. Reflections on civic religion in Rome. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Várhelyi, Zsusanna (2010). The Religion of Senators in the Roman Empire. Power and the beyond. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Classics and the History Department

Greg Woolf arrived in UCLA in September 2021 to become the first Ronald J Mellor Professor of Ancient History. Before then he directed the Institute of Classical Studies in the School of Advanced Study in London for six years, and before that was Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has held visiting appointments in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. His work straddles the fields of ancient history and archaeology, and he has published on a range of cultural historical subjects from the history of libraries and the impact of Roman imperialism on ancient societies to (more recently) numerous studies of Roman religion and Roman urbanism. His most recent books are the second edition of Rome. An Empire’s Story (Oxford 2022) and (with his long term collaborator Jörg Rüpke the edited collection Religion in the Roman Empire.) He is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for the Study of Religion.

The Ten Commandments: Who What When Where Why
2022-05-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Kaplan 365
For over two thousand years the Ten Commandments have been understood as the fundamental set of divine laws in the Hebrew Bible. Even for those who do not believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the Ten Commandments have retained their place as especially ancient, and especially important in the religious and communal life of Israel. In this lecture, Joel Baden will explain why this is, essentially, all wrong – and how we should understand, and grapple with, the true origins of these most famous words.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and its Bible and the Ancient World Seminar Series

Prof. Joel Baden works widely in the field of Hebrew Bible, with special attention to the literary history of the Pentateuch. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other books include J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch (Mohr Siebeck, 2009); The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 2012); The Promise to the Patriarchs (Oxford University Press, 2013); The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperOne, 2013); Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2015); and Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2017). He is the co-editor of the volumes The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions (TVZ, 2009), Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls (Brill, 2017), and The Oxford Handbook of the Pentateuch (with Jeffrey Stackert; Oxford University Press, 2021).
Current projects include editing The Routledge Handbook of Marginalization in the Bible and a special issue of the journal Religions devoted to the Hebrew Bible, race, and racism, along with writing forthcoming commentaries on Deuteronomy (IECOT), Exodus (Anchor), and Lamentations (Oxford).
Prof. Baden has published numerous scholarly articles and essays. He has also written widely for a popular audience, in venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN, and The Daily Beast.

Song of Songs, Time after Time
2022-04-28 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
The Song of Songs has been subject to numerous and varying interpretive approaches since its emergence. Drawing from her recently published book, Perils of Wisdom: The Scriptural Solomon in Jewish Tradition, Dr. Keiter will focus on varying Jewish interpretive strategies toward the Song, highlighting the development of Jewish biblical exegesis and its impact on the King Solomon legend in Jewish thought.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and its Bible and the Ancient World Seminar Series

Dr. Sheila Keiter is a Near Eastern Languages and Cultures alumna and former Teaching Fellow in the UCLA English Department. She is currently an instructor at Shalhevet High School and a Regular Contributor for the “Table for Five” Torah panel column in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Keiter recently published, Perils of Wisdom: The Scriptural Solomon in Jewish Tradition (2021).

Do Robots Have Souls? Intelligent Machines, Digital Humans, and the Future of Technology
2022-04-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
In this lecture, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets the work of Ibn Rushd (“Averroës”), the twelfth-century Islamic scholar of Andalusia who achieved renown as the ‘father’ of secularism, in order to elucidate Ibn Rushd’s theory of the intellect as a power of the soul. Johnson leverages Rushd’s distinction between sensing and knowing in order to examine contemporary, sensory-driven AI technology (particularly brain-computer-interface architectures) as a uniquely generative problem of interest for humanists and technical experts alike. Of central importance is the sensation of pain, as it constitutes a phenomenon of embodiment, a category of human experience, and a political problem.

Sylvester A. Johnson is Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities and Executive Director of the “Tech for Humanity” initiative advancing human-centered approaches to technology at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, which is supporting human-centered research and humanistic approaches to the guidance of technology. Sylvester’s research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and race. He is a Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture and a design-team affiliate faculty member in Virginia Tech’s socio-technical, transdisciplinary Calhoun Discovery Program. In addition to co-facilitating a national working group on religion and US empire, he co-leads a project at Virginia Tech, supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop ethically designed, public-interest Artificial Intelligence that can benefit an innovation-driven society.
Sylvester is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000 (Cambridge 2015), an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California 2017) and Religion and US Empire (appearing from NYU Press in 2022). He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. Sylvester is writing a book on human identity in an age of intelligent machines and human-machine symbiosis.
He currently leads “Future Humans, Human Futures” at Virginia Tech, a series of research institutes and symposia funded by the Henry Luce foundation that focus on technology, ethics, and religion. He is also directing the creation of a university-wide “Tech for Humanity” undergraduate minor, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to prepare future talent at the intersection of humanities, social justice, and technology.

A Conversation with Michael Schur
2022-04-21 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Michael Schur is a television producer, writer, actor and author of How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Questions. With Pamela Hieronymi, Professor at UCLA Department of Philosophy, this conversation with explore the role of religion in contemplating moral and ethical decision-making.
HOW TO BE PERFECT: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question sets out to do for moral philosophy what A Brief History of Time did for astrophysics. (But with jokes!) And by the time the book is done, the reader will know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. He will be perfect, and all his friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, the reader will gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day. The hope is that – in a world of ever-increasing moral stakes and intense disagreement – HOW TO BE PERFECT will provide a foundation for all of us to consider our behavior and ponder how we can do better and be better to one another.

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Michael Schur is a television writer and producer who has worked on shows like The Office, Master of None, The Comeback and Hacks, and created or co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, The Good Place and Rutherford Falls. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer, and their two kids, William and Ivy.

Study of Religion: Spring Snack Social
2022-04-13 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaplan 365

The Jewish Discovery of Islam Revisited
2022-02-23 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
From the oldest European Christian engagements with the Qur’an in the Middle Ages through the advent of modern academic approaches to the Muslim scripture, scholars have frequently seen qur’anic narratives on the biblical prophets and related subjects as the result of formative Jewish influences on the Prophet Muhammad. This approach to the origins of Islam has become enshrined in modern Qur’anic Studies due to the groundbreaking research of Abraham Geiger in his 1833 work What Has Muhammad Borrowed from Judaism? Although contemporary scholarship has shifted away from the problematic, reductionist emphasis on “influence” that once characterized research on biblical narratives in the Qur’an, Geiger’s role as a bridge figure between medieval ecclesiastical polemical discourse and the modern discipline of Qur’anic Studies has yet to be fully explored and appreciated. In this talk, Michael Pregill will discuss Geiger’s context and methodology, and posit that many of Geiger’s insights about the Jewish sources of qur’anic themes and episodes are still valuable for contemporary scholarship—including, paradoxically, in those cases when Geiger is actually wrong.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Michael E. Pregill is a scholar of comparative religion, focusing on the scriptural cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Much of his research focuses on the reception of biblical, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the Qur’an and Islam. His monograph The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Textual Studies). He is currently a lecturer at Chapman University in Orange, California; a visiting scholar at the Dornsife School of Religion at the University of Southern California; and a postdoctoral fellow of the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an,’ pursuing a new project entitled “Re-Orienting Geiger: Revisiting the Jewish Foundations of Western Qur’anic Studies.”

Hearing the Listeners: Jain Perspectives from India’s Islamic Past. A Conversation with Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke, moderated by Alka Patel
2022-02-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Perhaps uniquely in South Asia, Jains wrote voluminously about their interactions with Muslim rulers from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire. Their writings present us with unparalleled views of these rulers and the social, cultural, and religious transformations taking place throughout the 13th to 17th centuries. This period of history is hotly contested today, as the Hindu Right seeks to de-legitimize India’s commitment to secularism and deny India’s Muslim population a place in the nation. In this conversation, historians Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke will discuss how their readings of Jain sources composed in these centuries have shaped their understanding of India’s past—and present—by paying attention to what Jains living in those times said about Muslim rulers, interreligious relations, and their own changing identities. Art Historian Alka Patel will moderate and show how studying Jain and Muslim built spaces can give us a richer understanding of the interactions between these two religious communities.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Steven M. Vose is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Colorado College (Colorado Springs). His research focuses on the formation of Jain communities in (and from) western India from the late medieval period to the present. His first book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge, forthcoming) won the 2020 Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). He is currently working on a study of how globalization and neoliberalism affect identity formation in transnational Jain communities. (Twitter: @StevenMVose)

Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books, most recently, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press, January 2021). Audrey believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower, so you can find her on Twitter (@audreytruschke). She is currently working on a single volume history of India, spanning 4,600 years, with the support of a NEH Public Scholars grant.

Alka Patel is Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her research has focused on South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia, including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004), Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean (2004), India and Iran in the Longue Durée (Brill, 2017), and a guest-edited special issue on reuse in South Asian visual culture in Archives of Asian Art (2007). Patel co-edited Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (with K. Leonard, Brill 2012). Her recent book, Iran to India: The Shansabanis of Afghanistan (Edinburgh 2021), is the first of a two-volume study that analyzes the firm incorporation of South Asia within the Persianate world.

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Caste Marketing: How Hindu Rituals Sell Brahminical Supremacy
2022-02-09 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
“Caste marketing” can be understood in several ways: a description of how companies market products based on a caste profile of their users or “caste” groups as targeted market. This lecture will focus on the latter and delve into the ways Hindu ritual websites embed savarna (dominant-caste) focused terms, symbols, deities, rituals, and ideas into their websites such that they become digital repositories of “caste ideology” (Jaiswal 1998). In this sense, collectively, these ritual websites become another form of what Thenmozhi Soundarajan has called “digital brahminism”. The terms “caste” and “brahmin” do not appear on these sites, rather we see “Vedic” and “pandit” appealing to the sense of “caste innocence” held by many liberal, dominant caste members of South Asian/Hindu diaspora communities. This research shows how Hindu ritual websites use these subtle caste markers to reinforce savarna Hindu traditions as an unmarked “normal” (casteless).

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She is a scholar of ritual, nationalism, and digital culture in South Asia. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Specifically, she is interested in how online mechanisms of meaning-making like hashtags operate through the aggregation of capital, relying on power, privilege, and access to be successful. Much of her work thinks about the savarna logics of virtual platforms and how caste-oppressed, Adivasi, and minority religious communities are characterized, minimized, and effaced within these spaces. Her current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma: The Making of a Global Hindu Brand examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively “branding” religious identities through a neoliberal “Vedicizing” of virtual spaces.

Black and White Color Symbolism in Early Christian Apocalyptic Literature
2022-01-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom
Reconciling the modern categories of race, ethnicity, and religion with ancient examples of identity formation continues to befuddle historians of antiquity. This problem of fusing disparate ancient and modern conceptual categories has been particularly acute for historians of early Christianity. This paper investigates the color symbolism employed in early Christian apocalyptic literature and demonstrate the role that such rhetorical strategies have on the formulations of Christian imperialism and anti-black prejudice. Yonatan Binyam proposes that racial formation theory as currently employed in premodern race studies can be a productive heuristic for analyzing Christian social formations in late antiquity.

Yonatan Binyam is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Prior to coming to UCLA, he was an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a doctorate in Religion from Florida State University. His research focuses on medieval Ethiopic receptions of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as the study of race, ethnicity, and religion in late antiquity.

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“Surely There is No Fear of God in This Place” – The Biblical Plagues and OUR Plague: An Anthropocentric “Theology” and a Lesson for Our Times
2021-12-01 12:00 - 13:00
**Please note this talk has been postponed to Wednesday, December 1 at 12pm via Zoom**

The onset of the coronavirus brought with it a slew of perverse efforts to identify the ‘sinful’ behaviors for which the plague was God’s punishment. Through an analysis of “Vehaya im Shamoa”(Deut.11:13-21) I offer an alternative understanding of punishment as a disciplinary act attributed to God but, actually, the direct consequence of human conduct. Proceeding to outline the Pharoanic behavioral antecedents of the Egyptian plagues I move on to focus on the causal chain of human missteps that have led to the current crisis. In doing so I hope to diminish the degree of randomness with which we frame the pandemic and argue that this human induced ‘plague’ imposes on us a moral obligation to take corrective actions that could bring healing to our beleaguered planet.

Chaim Seidler-Feller recently celebrated his fortieth year of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He was ordained in 1971 at Yeshiva University where he completed a Masters in Rabbinic Literature. Chaim has been a lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute,North America and of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. In 2014 he initiated a fact finding mission for non-Jewish student leaders to Israel and the Palestine Authority which is now offered on ninety campuses. In 2020 a Festschrift entitled Swimming Against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the 21st Century was published in Chaim’s honor. He is married to Dr. Doreen Seidler-Feller, a clinical psychologist, and is the father of Shulie, a photojournalist and Shaul, an ordained rabbi who is currently serving as a Judaica consultant at Sotheby’s while pursuing a doctorate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University.

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The Constantinian Compromise: Senators, Bishops and the Emperor in Late Antique Rome
2021-10-28 16:00 - 17:00
Given the historic role played by the victorious Constantine in spreading Christianity, it is ironic that senatorial aristocrats were more cooperative with Constantine than were the early fourth-century bishops of the city. Although the bishops of Rome and the clergy, along with other Christians, benefitted greatly from the restoration of their property and the recognition of their legal standing under Constantine, their resistance to imperial intervention in the Donatist controversy marginalized the bishop of Rome for centuries to come, as I demonstrate based on a range of texts and documents from the fourth-fifth centuries.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Classics and the UCLA Department of History

Michele Renee Salzman is Professor and Chair of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research focuses on the religious and social history of late antiquity. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Letters of Symmachus: Book 1 Translation with Michael Roberts, Introduction and Commentary by Michele Renee Salzman, (Society of Biblical Literatures, 2011; Brill Press, 2012). Her new book, The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience and Resurgence in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), offers a new perspective on the fate of this vast city and the remarkable families who returned again and again to renew it in the last three centuries of its empire. She is the recipient of numerous awards, with Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the NEH, the American Academy in Rome, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

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