Jewish Studies

Compost Theology

The urgency of action to decarbonize and mitigate the worst effects of planetary disorder is clear to most of us by now. Changing our ecological trajectory depends not only on large- and small-scale practices, however, but also on shifting how we conceptualize the world. Mara Benjamin explores how dirty and decomposing matter offers a pungent way in. She suggests the humble backyard compost pile proffers a theological-ecological site in which new life rises from the dead.

Faculty, staff, and students are invited to a conversation with Kenneth Stern, drafter of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, and Emma Saltzberg of the Diaspora Alliance, on its implications for teaching, research, and campus policy. Speakers will explore how universities can address antisemitism while safeguarding academic freedom and open discourse.

This event will be in hybrid format, with virtual speakers.
Register via the Middlebury website at: go/AAUPIHRA/

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at CUNY. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, a political commentator on MSNBC, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents. Over the years he served as Editor of The New Republic and wrote for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, and the Financial Times. He is the author of four books including The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Harper, 2010) and The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012).

Speaker:
Derek J. Penslar FRSC
William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History
Director, Center for Jewish Studies
Harvard University

Title: Book talk: Our Palestine Question

Geoffrey Levin (Emory University) will discuss his new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 (Yale 2023), a new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel, which focuses on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights.

Lubavitch, Messianism, The Rebbe and the Denial of Death by Samuel Heilman, Howard Proshansky Chair of Jewish Studies, Department of Sociology, Queens College. He is co-author, with Menachem Friedman, of The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, which won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award. Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Religion, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

“The Kabbalah of Poetry, the Poetry of Kabbalah.” Reading and lecture by Peter Cole Peter Cole, poet, translator, scholar and MacArthur Fellow, will speak on and read from his new book, The Poetry of Kabbalah (Yale University Press, 2012), seeking the connection between poetic creation and mystical experience. Booklist has praised this latest work of Cole’s as “a dazzling treasury of verse spanning more than 1,500 years and accompanied by fascinating, illuminating commentary rich in history, biography, and literary expertise.” A book-signing will follow.

“Suffering Job” provides an introduction to the Book of Job for those unfamiliar but interested. Professor Robert Schine will explain the book’s significance in Judaism as a precursor to the October 31 “The Book of Job in Art” by Professor Choon Leong Seow, which will focus on Job’s significance in literature, art, and music.

Screening of “Trembling Before G-d” (2001), a film that shatters basic assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, this documentary portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma: how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality.

Hannah A. Quint lecture Speaker: Maud Mandel, Brown University