History and Literature in the Study of the Bible

Sunday, January 24, 2010, 12:00 – 4:00 PM
Jewish Community Federation, San Francisco

The Bay Area Academic Consortium invites you to participate in its new winter program, History and Literature in the Study of the Bible, for faculty and graduate students in Jewish Studies.

Winter 2010 Living Writers Series: Rebecca Goldstein

Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 5:00 PM
Humanities Lecture Hall.

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God and six works of fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem, Mazel, and Properties of Light.

Book Review: Varieties of Anti-Semitism

Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few phenomena in history that have a history of 2,000 years. Antisemitism is one of those phenomena.

Moshiah Now: Perspectives on Jewish Messianism

Sunday, November 22, 2009, 1:00 PM
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

What is the Jewish concept of the Messiah? Join scholars Moshe Halbertal and Nathaniel Deutsch in this eye-opening discussion.

Tasha Oren: “I’m Going to Make You Love Me: History and Israel’s Tele-Imagination”

Television has taken part in articulation of cultural and national identity all over the globe. How is a sense of “the local” changing as media grows increasingly mobile and new global television forms dominate world-wide programming? In Israel, a debate about television’s birth escalated to a national argument over occupation of Palestinian territories, relations with Arab neighbors, and it’s internal, conflicting visions of shared culture and identity.

James Young

James Young: “Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine”

The selection of a design for the Berlin Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews was a contentious one. After September 11th, the memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center was compared by some to holocaust memorials before it, and by one reporter specifically to the Berlin Memorial. How did it come to pass that the memorial at Ground Zero would evoke Berlin’s Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews?

Joel Blecher: “The Maimonides Madrasah: Islamic Secular Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Damascus”

A visitor to the last standing Jewish day-school in Syria, the Maimonides Madrasah, will notice the logo of the Syrian Arab Republic’s Ministry of Education proudly chiseled above the entrance. The secular state stakes out an overt presence in many other Jewish sites in Damascus. The very centerpiece of the Syrian National Museum is a historical reconstruction of a 3rd century Jewish synagogue.