Presenters
Anna Sapir Abulafia was born in New York and moved to Holland when she was fifteen. She studied at the University of Amsterdam and has been a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College since 1987, where she is now Vice-President. She has published widely on medieval Jewish–Christian relations.
Anna’s lecture today will explore the ambiguities of medieval Jewish-Christian relations by looking at how Jews and Christians viewed each other – in their religious texts and on the street.
Geoffrey Alderman & Naomi Alderman Geoffrey Alderman is well-known to everyone who reads the Jewish Chronicle, for his trenchant, combative prose. He is also a very well-known academic, with a long career in Jewish History. His daughter, Naomi Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was an eye-opening account set within domestic crises of the orthodox community. Together, they make a formidable family team.
And as such… seem a perfect couple to discuss how image has always counted for more than reality in the Anglo-Jewish world, in which truth has never been permitted to stand in the way of dogma. Geoffrey and Naomi Alderman offer a two-generational perspective on this most Anglo-Jewish of maladies.
Julian Barnett Julian Barnett knows the buildings, streets and sects of Jerusalem better than anyone. Teacher, traveller, collector and columnist, he is a superb guide - funny, informed and with a great eye for the interesting people and places. His talk at the last Cambridge Day Limmud was a massive hit, hence the return gig.
His illustrated talk will take you on a magical tour through the intense and closed world of Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities in the City of Longing.
Philip and Christine Bohlman Philip Bohlman is one of the leading professors of music in America, who doubles as the Head of Jewish Studies at Chicago University – thanks to his brilliant knowledge of klezmer and other Jewish music. He is also a performer, with his own Jewish cabaret troupe. His wife, Christine, a former student of Menachem Pressler, teaches piano at Chicago.
Philip and Christine Bohlman will perform the final musical dramatic work of the Holocaust, Viktor Ullmann’s stunning setting for speaker and piano of one of the most famous prose poems from fin-de-siècle Europe. They will also tell us about its historical context, and how the piece survived the Holocaust.
Lisa Cohen is an Emmy award winning television news magazine producer with over twenty years of American network news experience. First at ABC News “PrimeTime Live” and then at CBS News “60 Minutes” she produced reports on topics as diverse as the right to bear arms, have abortions and exercise the death penalty. In 2004, Cohen left television news to teach and write “AFTER ETAN,” the 25-year running case of the iconic, culture-shifting disappearance of six year old Etan Patz from the streets of New York, the most famous case of child disappearance in U.S.A, a subject she covered extensively both at ABC and CBS News.
Contrary to popular belief, Jews do not control the American news media. But they have created an impressive national grapevine in the form of specialized websites, publications and other venues for spreading News for Jews. Lisa Cohen will tell us about the religious breakdown of movers-and-shakers in broadcasting, followed by a journey through the niche journalism reporting on all things Jewish.
Peter Cole is officially a genius: in 2007, the Macarthur Foundation awarded him their top fellowship, known colloquially as the genius award. It is very rare for a poet to win such an honour, but thoroughly justified. Peter is one of the world's leading poets, and a superb translator, who writes wonderfully well about poetry, especially Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain. This is one of our leading speakers in the world of the arts.
Peter is going to see if poetry can reveal something special about the Jewish Mind, through reading and talking about his own poetry, and the poetry of other Jews, alive and dead.
Laoise Davidson Jazz singer and Klezmer musician with a passion for Jewish music and old recordings from the 1920s–1940s, Laoise has worked for the Jewish Music Institute for the past five years managing projects and events including KlezFest and Simcha on the Square. Laoise sings Jewish Jazz and Yiddish Swing hits in her own band “Zing”, as well as songs from World War II, Irving Berlin songs, Yiddish folk songs, Swing numbers and Jazz Standards. She is also a 78 DJ under the name “DJ AK”. Today she asks what Jewish “Yoof” were listening to in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
Take a trip down memory lane or jump through a window into the past and listen to some fantastic old music and comedy records from the golden era of Yiddishe-keit in America.
Ruth Davis (and friends) Ruth Davis (convener) , Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Cambridge, Philip Bohlman, Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at University of Chicago, John O’Connell, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Cardiff University and Abigail Wood, Joe Loss Lecturer in Jewish Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
A wonderful trip round the Mediterranean to uncover the soundscape of Sephardi music... A team of brilliant musicologists reveal the music, the songs, the voices, from Tunis, Istanbul and Jerusalem, which together make up the tapestry of Jewish Music from Sephard. This panel gives a narrative of how this soundscape developed, with beautiful and surprising examples from the different cultures of the Mediterranean.
John Deathridge is the world's leading scholar of Wagner, well known for his talks on Radio 3, at Covent Garden and round the world. He writes on other aspects of German music too – and on that specially complex relationship between Jewish life and German culture.
John's talk, with music, will investigate how German musicians re-created German music in America in the twentieth century.
Abraham Diskin is a former chair of the Israel Political Science Association, Senior Adviser to the National Elections Committee of Israel and Consultant to Israeli governmental institutions, political parties and politicians. He is a frequent contributor to the Israeli and foreign media (including the BBC and the Israeli Broadcasting Authority). He comes to us straight after the Israeli Elections to tell us how it really was.
His presentation will focus of the results on the February 10th elections, and what the political outcome of the new government is likely to be.
David Feldman (historian) lives in London where he teaches history at Birkbeck College, London University. He is the author of Englishmen and Jews, 1840–1914 and writes brilliantly about the history of immigrants in Britain as well as on Jewish history.
The question of where the Jews should live was a burning issue at the beginning of the last century. Millions left Russia, ten of thousands settled in England but the idea arose that the British Empire should provide a home for the Jews in Uganda. Briefly this idea captured the imagination of the British government and many Jews.
David’s presentation will explore the story and significance of this extraordinary scheme.
David Feldman (lawyer) is an academic lawyer specialising in constitutional law and human rights (including religious freedom). He was a legal adviser in the Houses of Parliament and, since 2002, has been a judge of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where many cases arise from the ethnic conflict of 1992-95 and its aftermath. Law and Religion became a hot topic in the UK last year following the Archbishop of Canterbury's much-reported (or misreported) comments about Islamic Law and English Law. Jews have many reasons to be interested, from their own long history of negotiating between Jewish Law and the Law of the Land to more practical considerations, such as the potential for external legal involvement in the decisions of a Beth Din or a Jewish Day School.
In this lecture, David Feldman will look at these issues from a different perspective, comparing the significance of rights to freedom of and freedom from religion in English law with that in a post-conflict society in former Yugoslavia.
Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceila Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, and Chair of the Graduate School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, and Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, Jerusalem. He is author the ground-breaking Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997), and many stimulating articles on religion and political thought. This will be Menachem’s arena today. With the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish history has entered a new and challenging era. Yet it lacks both a religiously motivated political philosophy and a religious incentive to think one through.
Menachem will reflect on this though an exploration of what Seder Night aspires to remember, and what it has come dramatically to forget.
Ardyn Halter is a British-born Israeli artist at the very top of the special field of stained glass design and construction. You will have seen his work in synagogues – and should have seen the memorial he constructed with his father, Roman Halter (whose memoir of the shoah is a best seller) at Yad Layeled at the Ghetto Fighters' Museum. He also designed and made the monumental stained-glass windows for the Rwandan national genocide monument. Articulate, intelligent and committed – and a great guide to Jewish public art.
Ardyn will talk about how image and memory work, with specific focus on the Shoah, and how hard it is to find visual expression for inherited memory.
Adina Hoffman Writer and Jerusalemite Adina Hoffman is the author of the enchanting House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighbourhood, and in April Yale University Press will publish her new book My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, a life and times of Taha Muhammad Ali. She is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, which publishes the literature of the Levant.
Today Adina will offer us an archeology of daily life in two lesser-known neighbourhoods (one Jewish, one Muslim) of the most complicated town on earth.
Howard Jacobson So where have you been not to know Howard Jacobson? England's most celebrated and funniest Jewish novelist, journalist, regular broadcaster (most recently seen on Channel 4 as writer and presenter of Jesus the Jew) and all round superstar. His most recent book is called The Act of Love, and he claims it is not as Jewish as some others…we will see.
Matthew Kalman is a journalist and film maker from Jerusalem. He reports as foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other major international media. Circumcise Me is his first documentary film. The film is about the three-times converted stand up comedian Yisrael Campbell – described by the Economist as "Hilarious and Moving", and by the Toronto Sun as "not to be missed".
Matthew will show the film – it takes 50 mins – and then introduce a short discussion about the film and how it came to be made.
Ed Kessler is a leading thinker in Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim Relations. He is Founder of the Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths, and a Fellow of St Edmund's College. He has written or edited nine books including What do Jews Believe? (2006) and Bound by the Bible (2004).
Today he asks why it is crucial to have good relations with the world of Islam and how we can improve them.
Gabriel Levin is an extraordinarily gifted translator of Hebrew poetry (as well as a fine poet in his own right). If you haven't read his versions of Yehuda Halevi, go out and buy it now. He lives in Jerusalem and together with Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, also presenting here today, is a founding editor of Ibis Editions, a publishing house dedicated to poetry and prose from the Levant. We are delighted to welcome him to his first major reading in Cambridge.
Gabriel Levin will read poems from his latest collection and discuss his work in the context of his own pet theory of what he calls a poetics of the Levant, a way to incorporate historic, religious, mythic and aesthetic motifs from across the Middle-East.
Reva Mann set more than the Jewish Chronicle into a fever with her book The Rabbi's Daughter, an autobiographic tale of sex, drugs and orthodoxy. This best-selling book, a story of ricocheting from the holy to the profane, the pious to the promiscuous has captured audiences worldwide. She now lives in Jerusalem with her kids, where she writes and teaches writing.
Reva's going to give us her personal longing for Eden, peppered with readings from her memoir and gems from Torah commentaries on redemption
Hadar Manor grew just outside Jerusalem, and spent her childhood dreaming of far places and singing Beatles songs. Since Hadar won the title: 'Queen Of The Underground' in a competition for London’s buskers, she has sung for former Mayor Ken Livingstone, Kevin Spacey and Michael Eavis. She visited No. 10 Downing St and appeared on the South Bank Show with Melvin Bragg. Hadar likes to write songs about the people she meets while travelling, and her experiences as an urban gypsy.
Hadar Manor shares stories, anecdotes and -- most importantly -- her beautiful songs, telling her story so far as an Israeli busker in London. She will be interviewed today by Jonah Lipton.
David Moss has one of the greatest galleries in Jerusalem, just down from Jaffa Gate. It opens up the world of this fantastic illuminator, transformer and animator of Jewish sacred texts, objects, spaces, souls. His handmade ketubahs are extraordinary works of art; his haggadah – the full-scale version goes at a snip for $30, 000 – is one of the most transfixing pieces of Jewish liturgical art you will ever see. His talk last Cambridge Day Limmud was such a success, that by popular demand he is back again.
David's talk will demonstrate how the creative synthesis of texts, research, aesthetics and imagination can enhance Jewish objects and life.
David Newman is Professor of Geopolitics at Ben Gurion University, Editor of the International Journal of Geopolitics and Representative of Israel's Universities in the UK; formerly from the UK, he has lived in Israel since 1982. His research focuses on the changing functions and significance of borders throughout the world.
If any form of a Two State solution is ever to be achieved between Israel and a Palestinian State, it will necessitate the drawing of boundaries. This presentation, accompanied by relevant maps, looks at the way in which the drawing of borders has changed over time and discusses the ways in which both Israelis and Palestinians think about their territory.
Ada Rapoport-Albert Reader in Jewish History and Head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, Ada Rapoport-Albert is a world expert on the history of Hasidism and known throughout the Jewish world as a brilliant and charismatic lecturer.
Today she will enthral us with a talk on Jacob Frank, a fascinating 18th century religious leader with messianic aspirations whose vision of a final Redemption took place not in the Holy Land, but in … Poland!
Stefan Reif , Emeritus Profesor of Medieval Hebrew Studies, is a founder director of the Taylor-Schechter Geniza Research Unit in Cambridge – which transformed the contents of a Cairo synagogue attic into a world-renowned collection of Geniza fragments, documenting a thousand years of medieval Jewish life. Stefan commutes between Israel and here and is another speaker returned from the first Cambridge Day Limmud by popular demand.
Stefan will trace how the early rabbis tried to keep Jerusalem close to Jewish hearts through liturgy – and how old and new ideas about Jerusalem competed with each other.
Daniel Reisel is a glorious contradiction: he read Theology at Cambridge, and then did a PhD in Neuroscience on the biological basis of memory. He is currently finishing a medical degree – while serving as Education Chair of the Jewish human rights group René Cassin and as a junior faculty member of the London School of Jewish Studies (LSJS). He has been a lively and popular Jewish adult educator for a decade and is passionate about mining our tradition for answers to contemporary problems in science and religion.
Daniel is going to take on one of the most challenging topics for religion today: how to deal with Darwin. The starting point will be the recent popular success of several books which have claimed that Darwinian evolution poses insurmountable challenges to religious life. In this session Daniel will take us to the heart of Darwin's idea, explore what is so dangerous about it, and see what our long tradition has to say about insurmountable challenges.
Jennie Rosenfeld is a young scholar from Jerusalem, who teaches in the modern orthodox community about the complex issues of sexual behaviour, from biology to moral crises; she is a Junior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and was named one of the "36 under 36" by the Jewish Week in 2008. Her forthcoming book will be hugely provocative and exciting: she uses traditional Talmudic and Hasidic sources to question traditional sexual expectations. Jennie has been invited back after leading a stimulating interactive discussion at the last Cambridge Day Limmud.
Jennie's presentation takes on one of the hottest of all contemporary topics. Orthodox Judaism forbids all forms of premarital sexual activity, but that doesn’t stop such activity from happening. How can Orthodox singles find religious meaning and growth even as they are involved in “sin”?
Pinchas Roth is a young scholar from Hebrew University, where he works on what our ancestors from the Middle Ages made of Jewish Law. Born in Melbourne, Australia, and raised in Jerusalem, Pinchas is better known in some circles as Manuscript Boy, author of the Hagahot blog. Come and hear what's up and coming in the world of Medieval Jewish excitements…
Pinchas will ask if Judaism thinks sex is a barrier to holiness. What happens when rabbis aren’t strict enough for the masses? And why do Hassidim walk to synagogue on Saturday morning carrying towels?
Miri Rubin is Professor of History at London – and probably best-known for her wonderful The Hollow Crown, the Penguin history of Britain in the Middle Ages, a "magnificently successful" book according to the Guardian. She is particularly interested in how religion and gender play a role in the middle ages, and for anyone interested in the this formative period of Jewish history, Miri's talk will be a must.
Her illustrated presentation will describe the challenges posed by Jews and Judaism to those who discussed, taught and disseminated Christian culture in the Middle Ages. Jews as trouble, in trouble again…
Marc Saperstein, Principal of Leo Baeck College, is a very distinguished Professor of Jewish History, with years as a lecturer and teacher in the USA behind him. If you ever thought sermons were boring, you need to hear Marc on the history of sermons and their role in times of war and peace in speaking to the Jewish Community. It will change how you hear the rabbi in shul…
Marc will explore the surprising position taken by American rabbis about the US involvement in the Second World War, and how they responded to the news from Europe.
Andrea Schatz has just arrived from Princeton to take up a lectureship in Jewish Studies at King’s College London. Her research asks what it means that Jews were always involved in shaping European modernity, and she is especially interested in how Jews used the Christian concept of the “Orient” when taking up issues of religion, culture, and visibility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Today Andrea, an inspiring teacher and thinker who exudes passion for her subject, will show us how Jewish authors of the Enlightenment looked ever eastward, creating new maps of the Diaspora, rethinking Europe, and reorienting themselves in the process.
Jeremy Schonfield lectures at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and at Leo Baeck College, London, specializing in Jewish liturgy and the festival cycle. He is author of the breath-takingly original Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer (2006), and is back at Cambridge Day Limmud by popular demand.
Today he thinks outside the box again, asking why there is no feast to celebrate Israel’s first entry into the promised land. Is this an accidental oversight, or an intentional omission? Is it possible that the rabbis were telling us that everyone might be better off without land?
Simon Sebag Montefiore If you have travelled on the London Underground in the last couple of years, you will have seen ads all over for Simon's wonderful book Young Stalin. He is a best-selling, prize-winning historian, who has brought the story of Russian Jewry to life. His novel Sashenka has just been published and he is currently researching a book on Jerusalem.
Simon will talk about fact and fiction with regard to Russia and the Jews, the perfect topic for a historian who writes novels on an area full of myths and painful truths.
Michael Turner In a region where heritage, religious sites and the past mean so much, Michael Turner leads the effort where it really counts. He is an architect who holds the UNESCO Chair in Urban Design and Conservation Studies at Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. But he comes to us because he is a member of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee currently focusing efforts on how Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians can discuss regional heritage together. He is also coordinating efforts in establishing a national archive for art, architecture and design in Israel. The great religious sites of Jerusalem have a history shared between nations and religions. Natural resources know no political boundaries. If heritage is shared, how can it be managed? What does "shared" mean in such a heated environment? What can "our" heritage mean?
This presentation will describe the work of UNESCO and EU funded projects between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. These projects are making history (in all senses), and in Jerusalem history is always a battleground.
Tamra Wright is Director of Academic Studies at the London School of Jewish Studies, a visiting lecturer at King's College London, and is currently giving the prestigious Stanton lectures at Cambridge University’s Divinity School. A specialist in contemporary Jewish thought, she has published on Levinas and Buber.
Today Tamra will build on her reputation for making difficult ideas clear as she engages with three of the most important Jewish thinkers of the 20th century to ask if Jewish ritual law helps or hinders us in our quest for connection with the Divine.
Froma Zeitlin is a well-known classical scholar and Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Another specialty, however, is the Holocaust. In addition to several published essays on Holocaust literature, she regularly teaches courses on texts and images of the Shoah that emphasize the central significance of cinema in the shaping, challenging, and transmission of popular memory. A spate of recent Holocaust films attests to the continuing fascination and engagement with the catastrophe of the “Final Solution.” Why is this so? What are both the risks and advantages of the visual medium? What do you see and how do you see it?
She will introduce some clips from important American and European films in an effort to address some of these issues. This should be a lively and provocative session.
