Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries
|
Panel Discussion
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries is a newly published volume that addresses the complicated issue of distinctive characteristics of Jewish religious life in Lithuania. Its authors and editors deal with the range of religious expressions, with the religious life of different sectors of the Jewish community of Lithuania, and with the dynamics of change in religious life in Lithuania over time. In this volume, Lithuania is more a historical and social concept than a geographical territory with clearly delineated borders and political identity. The authors deliberate how “Lithuanian” are the religious phenomena they discuss and what the historical agents understood as Lithuania in their given period, area, and historical circumstances.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion about this book with editors Shaul Stampfer and Lara Lempert and contributors Tzipora Weinberg and Daniel Reiser.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Shaul Stampfer is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written on the history of Jewish family structure, demography and migration of East European Jewry, the story of the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, and more recently on the history and meaning of falafel and bagels as Jewish foods. He is currently working on the settlement of Jews in 16th-century Poland as well as on the genetics of East European Jewry.
Lara Lempert has been a senior bibliographer at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania since 1995. She has been a lecturer at Vilnius University since 1993 and is the recipient of numerous academic scholarships. She is fluent in Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, English, Polish, has a reading knowledge of Yiddish and Ukrainian, and holds an M.A. in Philology and a Ph.D in history from Vilnius State University. She is now the director of the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library.
Tzipora Weinberg is a doctoral candidate in the Skirball Center for Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on Eastern European Jewish history in the 20th century and centers around the intellectual and religious experiences of Orthodox Jewish women within the communities of Poland, Galicia, and Lithuania. She has presented her findings at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Jewish Historical Institute, and the American Musicological Society, among other academic institutions.
Daniel Reiser heads the Department of Jewish Thought at Hertzog College. He specializes in Hasidic philosophy, modern mysticism, and theology in the Shoah. His latest books are Language of Truth in the Mother Tongue: The Yiddish Sermons of Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020); Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism (De Gruyter, 2018), and Sermons from the Years of Rage (Herzog College, The World Union of Jewish Studies and Yad Vashem, 2017).