A New Understanding of Betzelem Elohim: Biblical Text Through the Lens of Disability Studies
Aug 12, 2024 By Ora Horn Prouser | Public Event video | Video Lecture
One of the most important biblical principles is that we are created betzelem Elohim, in God’s image. While this idea has been used to assert value and dignity to each of us as individuals, it has also enabled us to expand our understanding of the Divine. Studying the Bible through the lens of Disability Studies has made this especially powerful.
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Rabbi, Will You Do Our Wedding? New Approaches to Working With Interfaith Couples
Aug 5, 2024
Together we will think about the the impact and limits of disapproval policies, the purpose and meaning of the Jewish wedding ceremony and how to shift the conversation to a pastoral and relational one with a couple. A conversation that transfers responsibility for these questions from the community back to the couple, empowering them to articulate their identities and authenticities and determine their relationship to the narratives, rituals, symbols and faith statements of Jewish tradition.
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Innovations in Ritual and Halakhah (Law) Around Jewish Divorce
Jul 22, 2024
What are the essential components of an egalitarian marriage ceremony and divorce? How can we ensure that the Conservative/Masorti movement’s ways of Jewish marriage and divorce reflect our spiritual values and ethical ideals? Rabbi Pamela Barmash, PhD and Rabbi Karen Weiss Medwed, PhD discussed the progress that has been achieved in this area and the challenges that remain.
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Zionism and Antisemitism on Campus and Beyond
Jul 15, 2024
With Dr. Michael Kay (Day School Leadership Training Institute ’08), Head of School, The Leffell School and Rabbi Jason Rubenstein (Rabbinical School ’11 and Kekst Graduate School ‘10), Executive Director, Harvard Hillel
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X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos who Helped Defeat the Nazis
Jul 8, 2024
In June 1942, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form a new commando unit made of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. This top-secret unit, trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis.
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Judaism Is About Love
Jul 1, 2024
In his new book Judaism is About Love, Rabbi Shai Held offers the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity. He sets out to contradict centuries of widespread misrepresentation that Christianity is the religion of love and Judaism the religion of law. Rabbi Held shows that love is foundational and constitutive of true Jewish faith, animating the singular Jewish perspective on injustice and protest, grace, family life, responsibilities to our neighbors and even our enemies, and chosenness.
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Religious Misconceptions: American Jews and the Politics of Abortion
Jun 24, 2024
We begin by tracing the history of how American Jews contributed to reproductive politics by developing first amendment-based arguments for abortion rights. We also discuss the ways in which reproductive politics transformed American Judaism. In particular, we look at the many rituals that Jewish feminist leaders developed to support people undergoing abortion care and galvanize activists working for reproductive rights.
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Jews in the American Political and Public Square
Jun 17, 2024
The extent of Jewish participation in the American political process far outweighs the relative number of Jews in the population. Yet the contemporary activism of Jews is consistent with a tradition of civic involvement from the earliest days of Jewish settlement in America. This webinar explored Jewish participation in the American political system. We briefly address the foundations of religious freedom in America through the nineteenth century, and then focus on the watershed politics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from labor strikes to landmark legal cases. In studying these issues, we plumb the depths of what it means to be a minority in a democratic society and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.
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