Take Shelter: Teaching and Learning about the End Times, from Late Antiquity to Our Times
ZoomIn Jeff Nichols’s 2011 film Take Shelter, Michael Shannon portrays Curtis, a blue-collar family man who is haunted by terrifying prophetic visions of the end of the world. As he becomes obsessed with building a shelter in his backyard, convinced a storm is coming, Curtis’s relationships suffer and his life falls apart. How are we...
Religion is Physics: A Different Kind of Theory. A Different Kind of Everything.
Zoom(Fear not! No math is required for this talk!) Religion is accused of being many things, but how could Religion be Physics? Physics aims to understand everything with the most economical set of basic concepts, the so-called Theory of Everything. So what is the most economical explanation of Religion? What are its most basic elements?...
The Talmud Talks and We Listen: How the Talmud Became the Authoritative Voice in Jewish Life
ZoomThe Talmud is an obscure, elitist document that emerged from a small community of scholars who held no recognized authority, living as a minority in a land not their own. How did such a document become the authoritative voice of Jewish life and practice? In this session, Prof. Kraemer will discuss the journey of the...
Religion in a Time of Crisis: In the Shadow of the Holocaust
ZoomDuring the latest installment of the Center for the Study of Religion’s “Religion in a Time of Crisis” series, panelists Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Aaron Hass will discuss Susan H. Brown’s recent memoir. A stirring collection of poetry and prose, Circles: A Legacy will serve as an occasion to talk about the ways in...
Organs for Sale: Markets, Motives, and the Spirit of Medicine
ZoomThis talk is based on my forthcoming book, Organs for Sale, which is an extended case study of the bioethical question of how to increase human organ supply, focusing on the rhetoric of competing advocates, namely, the altruism-based status quo and market alternatives. But it is also an inquiry into what a public values and...
Music and Hebrew Infusion
ZoomJoin Sarah Bunin Benor, Co-Author of Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (2020), and sociologist Dan Lainer-Vos as they discuss the role of music in how camps infuse Hebrew in Jewish summer camps. This event will be moderated by Mark Kligman, Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. Click...
Reading the Story of Dinah in Context and in the Age of #MeToo
ZoomDinah, the only (mentioned) daughter of the patriarch Jacob, emerges in Genesis 34, only to disappear from the text. Dinah goes out to visit the women of the land. She is seen by Shechem, the prince of the local village, also named Shechem, who takes her and has sex with her (Gen 34:2). He then...
Can Sacrifice be Literary? Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Inauguration Day Episode
ZoomOne of the most enduring conclusions in pentateuchal studies is that the legal and narrative elements of the Pentateuch have distinct origins. Yet this argument is based more on outdated ideas of what counts as “literary” than on any textual or compositional evidence. In this talk, I will present an example from my recent book...
Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Adaptation of Two Biblical Themes
ZoomIn this talk I will discuss Nicolas Poussin adaptation of two biblical narratives in two masterpieces: “The Plague at Ashdod” (1630) inspired by an episode in 1 Samuel, namely the theft and desecration of the Arc of the Covenant by the Philistines; and “Eliezer and Rebecca” (1648) inspired by the episode in Genesis in which...
Studying Buddhism to Study Women: Sources, Topics, and Questions from Medieval China
ZoomTaking the example of Northern Wei Empress Dowager Ling (d. 528 CE) as a case study, this talk asks the question of “What new things can we learn about women in medieval China through Buddhist Studies?†Particularly, by contrasting the ways in which the Empress Dowager is depicted in normative dynastic histories and other historiographical...