The Sally & Ralph Duchin Campus Lecture Series

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The Sally & Ralph Duchin Campus Lecture Series Monday, November 20, 2017 | 4 pm | U of A Hillel 1245 E. 2nd St. | Free & Open to the Public For more information call (520) 626-5758 or visit us at us at www.judaic.arizona.edu Photo-illustration: Joseph Smith and the Angel - LDS.org; Kabbalist - Cover from Pardes Rimonim, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero 1548, Tzfat, Israel; close up of kabbalistic text - The Kabbalah Centre, multiple sources; close up of golden plates - Deseret News. Used in compliance with 17 U.S.C. § 106. Since the path-breaking work of the cultural historian Carl Schorske in 1979, much atten- tion has been given to the culture of Vienna around 1900, and how it was one of the main sources of modernism in all the arts and culture. Though Schorske did discuss the rise of antisemitism and the founding of the modern Zionist movement by the Viennese Theodor Herzl, he viewed the culture as one shaped by the political and social upheavals of the time, rather than by religion or ethnicity. In the years since, several historians, notably Steven Beller, have given greater emphasis to the Jewish element, some even claiming that the culture was fundamentally Jewish. This lecture will examine various aspects of the culture and discuss the issue of “Jewishness” and how it is defined in the light of this culture. Prof. Thomas Dr. Thomas Kovach is Professor of German Studies and an affiliated faculty in the Center Kovach for Judaic Studies. A main focus of his teaching at The University of Arizona has been in University of Arizona German-Jewish Studies — both the writings of German Jews, and the ways in which Jews and Judaism have been portrayed in German texts from 1500 to the present. His research interests range widely over German and Comparative Literature from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The Sally & Ralph Duchin Campus Lecture Series is made possible by the generous support of Sally and Ralph Duchin..

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Interpreting Diagrams from the Sefer Yetsirah and Its Commentaries 1
NOTES 1 Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: Interpreting Diagrams from the Sefer Yetsirah and Its Commentaries 1. The most notorious example of these practices is the popularizing work of Aryeh Kaplan. His critical editions of the SY and the Sefer ha Bahir are some of the most widely read in the field because they provide the texts in Hebrew and English with comprehensive and useful appendices. However, these works are deeply problematic because they dehistoricize the tradi- tion by adding later diagrams to earlier works. For example, in his edition of the SY he appends eighteenth-century diagrams to later versions of this tenth-century text. Popularizers of kabbalah such as Michael Berg of the Kabbalah Centre treat the Zohar as a second-century rabbinic tract without acknowledging textual evidence to the contrary. See his introduction to the Centre’s translation of the Zohar: P. S. Berg. The Essential Zohar. New York: Random House, 2002. 2. For a variety of reasons, kabbalistic works were transmitted in manuscript form long after other works, such as the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and their commentaries were widely available in print. This is true in large part because kabbalistic treatises were “private” works, transmitted from teacher to student. Kabbalistic manuscripts were also traditionally transmitted in manuscript form because of their provenance. The Maghreb and other parts of North Africa were important centers of later mystical activity, and print technology came quite late to these regions, with manuscript culture persisting well into the nineteenth, and even into the mid- twentieth century in some regions.
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Kabbalah, and the Popular Culture Industry
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Maybe It's Not So Weird, After All Page 1 of 7 Jewishjournal.Com 12/7
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Kabbalah in a Surprising Place: Joseph Smith’S Engagement with Jewish Mysticism
The Sally & Ralph Duchin Campus Lecture Series Kabbalah in a Surprising Place: Joseph Smith’s Engagement with Jewish Mysticism Thursday*, November 9, 2017 | 4 pm | U of A Hillel 1245 E. 2nd St. | Free & Open to the Public For more information call (520) 626-5758 or visit us at us at www.judaic.arizona.edu Photo-illustration: Joseph Smith and the Angel - LDS.org; Kabbalist - Cover from Pardes Rimonim, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero 1548, Tzfat, Israel; close up of kabbalistic text - The Kabbalah Centre, multiple sources; close up of golden plates - Deseret News. Used in compliance with 17 U.S.C. § 106. A surprising feature of the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah is the degree to which it came to influence 19th century religious thinkers in Europe and North America. This talk will describe one important example of this phenomenon - the impact of Kabbal- ah on Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Dr. Hartley Lachter is an Associate Professor at Lehigh University, where he is the chair of the Religion Studies Department and director of the Berman Center for Jewish Studies. His research focuses on the relationship between medieval Kabbalah, Jewish historical ex- perience, and Jewish-Christian relations. He also works on the role of medieval Kabbalah Prof. Hartley in some modern and contemporary religious thinkers. He is the author of, Kabbalistic Rev- Lachter olution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain, published by Rutgers University Press. Director, Berman Center for Jewish *Please note: Sally & Ralph Duchin Campus Lecture Series events are Studies , Lehigh University typically held on Monday afternoons.
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Volume 27, No.4, May-June 2008
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Giller on Garb, 'The Chosen Will Become Herds: Studies in Twentieth-Century Kabbalah'
H-Judaic Giller on Garb, 'The Chosen Will Become Herds: Studies in Twentieth-Century Kabbalah' Review published on Thursday, December 17, 2009 Jonathan Garb. The Chosen Will Become Herds: Studies in Twentieth-Century Kabbalah. Translated by Yaffah Berkovits-Murciano. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xi + 218 pp. $50.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-300-12394-4. Reviewed by Pinchas Giller (American Jewish University) Published on H-Judaic (December, 2009) Commissioned by Jason Kalman Once and Future Trends in Contemporary Kabbalah It is a truism of the latter-day interest in Kabbalah that there is a dichotomy between the academy and the kabbalistic “street” in Israel and the Diaspora. Sometimes it seems that fairly serious students of Kabbalah, at least in the Diaspora, could not find their way around a bookstore in Machaneh Yehudah, the public market of Jerusalem, which seethes with popular Kabbalah. The enmity is mutual; many were the times that I heard “Professor” hurled as an epithet in the kabbalistic seminaries of Machaneh Yehudah. So contemporary scholars, such as Boaz Huss (“The New Age of Kabbalah,” published in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies [2007]), Jody Myers (Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America [2007]), Jonathan Meir (“New Discoveries Concerning R. Judah Leib Ashlag,” published in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts [2009]), and Jonathan Garb, are performing an important scholarly task by investigating the substantial literature and history of contemporary trends in Kabbalah. Garb’sThe Chosen Will Become Herds is an important contribution to the field, with different emphases than other works of the genre.
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Curriculum Vita
CURRICULUM VITA Jody Elizabeth Myers Department of Religious Studies California State University Northridge, CA 91330-8316 phone: (818) 677-3007 E-mail address: [email protected] September 7, 2018 Education 1985 Ph.D., History, University of California, Los Angeles 1977 M.A., History, University of California, Los Angeles 1975 B.A., cum laude, History, Brandeis University Teaching and Administration 1986- Department of Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge. Present rank: Professor. 1986- Coordinator, Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program, California State University, Northridge. 2002-2005 Adjunct Faculty, Academy for Jewish Religion, Los Angeles, California Publications From The Garden of Eden to the Industrialized Farm: Food in Jewish Traditions, co- edited with Aaron S. Gross and Jordan D. Rosenblum (New York University Press, forthcoming). “Kabbalah in the Modern Era,” in Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. VIII: The Modern World, 1815 – c. 2000, eds. Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels (Cambridge University Press, 2017). “Kabbalah Centre: Marketing and Meaning,” for Controversial New Religions, Second Edition, eds. James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (Oxford University Press, 2014). “Educational Travel and Student Learning,” in AJS News: The Travel Issue (July 2014). “Purity, Charity, Community: The Power of Kashrut in an Orthodox Jewish Neighborhood,” in Reconstructing Jewish Identity in Pre- and Post-Holocaust Literature and Culture, Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich and Małgorzata Pakier, eds. (Peter Lang, 2012). “Jewish Service-Learning Partnerships between Hillel and the Public University: A Case Study,” co-authored with Renée Cohen Goodwin, Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Vol. 87, (Winter/Spring 2012). “Kabbalah at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” in Jewish Mysticism: New Insights and Scholarship, Frederick E.
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