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Spring 2007 Jacob Perlow Lecture
"Kabbalah: Right Now"
Conversations with the Scholars: A series of lectures with scholars of contemporary Kabbalah: October 8-9, 2007
There’s no getting around it: kabbalah has changed in the past thirty years. It’s easy to get kabbalistic texts, and easy to find interpreters of them. Its wider circulation is due in part to technology allowing inexpensive mass production and distribution of information, such as cheap printing and the internet, in part to changing Jewish attitudes about esoteric knowledge and who has the right to access it, and in part to changing, post-modern attitudes about religion as it is de-emphasizes institutions and places more emphasis on personal practice and ‘spirituality.’ This has led to a change in both the canon of kabbalistic texts and in the community of its practitioners.
This conference brings together the premier scholars of contemporary kabbalah to explore the most fundamental questions about the practice of kabbalah right now. What is the difference between popular kabbalah and its traditional practice? Does the Kabbalah Centre teach ‘real’ kabbalah? Is it a cult? Does the absorption of kabbalah into popular culture, in literature, comics, and film harm whatever is “sacred” in Judaism? Is kabbalah still, or was it ever, the exclusive property of the Jewish tradition? How do contemporary Jewish movements ‘use’ kabbalah, and is this use legitimate?
Six scholars from around the world will present their research on these questions and others, and engage in serious debate about them and their implications. Please join us for a rigorous and exciting inquiry into Kabbalah: Right Now!
The Conversations:
Monday, October 8, 2007
Davis Auditorium, 7:00 pm
Boaz Huss
Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Kabbalah and the Politics of Inauthenticity: Controversies Over the Kabbalah Centre
Chava Weissler
Department of Religion Studies
Lehigh University
Performing Kabbalah
Jody Myers
Religious Studies Department
California State University
Marriage and Sexual Behavior in the Teachings of the Kabbalah Centre
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Davis Auditorium, 7:00 pm
Pinchas Giller
Department of Jewish Thought
American Jewish University
Finding Shar'abi: Issues in the Study of Early Modern Mizrachi Kabbalah
Harry Brod
Department of Philosophy and Religion
University of Northern Iowa
From Golem to Supermentsh: The Amazing Adventures of Jewish Superheroes
Zion Zohar
Religious Studies Department
Florida International University
Magic and Kabbalah Manipulation at the "service" of Jewish Fundamentalists-The Case of Pulsa Dentura
A collaboration between the Office of the Dean of Special Program and the Department of Religion
Spring 2007 Jacob Perlow Lecture
Pearl Abraham
"Orthodoxy: the End of Prophecy"
A lecture on the interconnection of religion and literature
Thursday, April 5, 2007
7:00 pm Davis Auditorium
 Pearl Abraham is the author of The Seventh Beggar, a finalist for the 2006 Koret Award in Fiction along with David Grossman’s Her Body Knows and Francine Prose’s A Changed Man. The Romance Reader, her first novel, a finalist for The Discover New Writer’s award, named ‘Best Book of 1995’ by Library Journal, selected as first title by Contra Costa Times of San Francisco, has also been on bestseller lists in Germany and The Netherlands. About Giving Up America, her second novel, one critic wrote “In spare prose, with painstaking attention to quotidian detail, the book magnifies the anticlimactic dissipation of love and unflinchingly dissects the familiar, and often irreconcilable tension between commitment and self-realization, daily partnership and romantic fantasy…A page-turner.” Abraham is also the editor of the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature (Meulenhoff, 2000). Recent essays appeared in Who We Are (Schocken Books), The Michigan Quarterly, and “Forward.” Recent short stories have appeared in “Epoch” (Cornell), “Forward,” and Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Press). Her story "Hasidic Noir," won the 2006 Shamus Award for Best Short Story About A Private Eye. Abraham grew up in a Hasidic family, the third of nine children. She graduated from Hunter College and received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University. |
- Sidney Greenberg
- Robert Chazan
- Joy Levitt
- Charles Silberman
- Nisht Geferlach Klezmer Band
- Moshe Waldoks
- Henry Feingold
- Riffat Hassan
- A. James Rudin
- Marvin Wilson
- Wolf Blitzer
- David Harris
- Alan Mittleman
- Jerome Hornblass
- Steven Bayme
- Arthur Hertzberg
- David Grossman
- Jonathan Sarna
- Neil Gilman
- Jack Wertheimer
- Francine Klagsbrun
- Gary Rosenblatt
- Alan Berger
- Alan Fine
- The Saratoga Chamber Players
- John Felstiner
- Mary Lowenthal Felstiner
- Carolyn Forche
- Lawrence Fine
- Robert Goldenberg
- Raymond Scheindlin
- The Klezmatics
- Tom Segev
- The Klezmer Conservatory Band
- The Saratoga Chamber Players
- Samuel Bak Exhibit at the Tang
- Lawrence Langer
- The Isles of Klezbos
- Meir Zamir
- Nimrod Hurvitz
- "Hated Music" collaboration
