Spring Quarter 2019 Schedule

Unless otherwise noted, meetings are generally held on Mondays from 5:00-6:30pm in Swift Hall 201.

Tuesday, April 16th – Dr. Allison Schachter, English Department & Program Director of Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University
“Flaubert on the Shores of Jaffa: Dvora Baron and Aesthetic Labor in Palestine”
5:00pm, Swift Hall 200

Monday, April 22nd – Rachel Katz, PhD Student, Divinity
“Al-Ghazali in Hebrew: Ibn Hasdai’s Moznei Zedeq
5:00pm, Swift Hall 400A

Monday, April 29th – Yoni Shemesh, PhD Candidate, Divinity
“The Role of Averroes’ Tahāfut in Narboni’s Commentary on the Guide”
**Co-sponsored with the Philosophy of Religions Workshop**
5:00pm, Swift Hall 201

Wednesday, May 8th – Professor Harriet Murav, Greenberg Visiting Professor, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
“Jewish Responses to Violence: Necropolitics, Hefker, and Yiddish Literature of the 1920s”
12:00pm, Swift Hall 106

CANCELLED – Monday, May 13th – Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought, Divinity School; Associate Faculty in the Department of History
“Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities”
5:00pm, Swift Hall 201

Note: We have had to cancel this workshop due to health issues. We hope to reschedule it for a later date.

Monday, May 20th – Andrew Katzenstein, PhD Student, Anthropology & Divinity
“Sanity and Settlement in Israel/Palestine: Toward Imagining the Settler Other-wise”
5:00pm, Swift Hall 201

Monday, March 11th – Paul Reitter Book Talk – “The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon”

On Monday, March 11th at 4:30pm in Swift Hall 106, the Jewish Studies Workshop is excited to host Dr. Paul Reitter, Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. Dr. Reitter will discuss his new English translation of the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, and read from the book. Dr. Reitter’s translation is the first complete and annotated English translation of this work.

According to the publisher:

“Solomon Maimon’s autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt…. Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah—and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city’s famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the ‘sharpest’ of Kant’s critics, as Kant himself described him.”

Dr. Reitter’s translation of Solomon Maimon’s autobiography may be purchased at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore, where it is currently featured on the display table for notable new books in religion and philosophy.