The final newsletter of the semester...
The final newsletter of the semester...
DECEMBER E-NEWS
The final newsletter of the semester features a fellow-authored blog post, a video of the Josephine Cohen Memorial Lecture, a recap of our annual LEAP program, highlights of recent publications, and a reminder about the upcoming December Symposium.
We wish all of our fellows, friends, and followers a happy and healthy new year! See you in 2018!

BLOG

Current fellow Daniel Langton authored a substantial blog post about Naftali Levy, the earliest known translator of Darwin into Hebrew. In his post, Langton notes the challenge of locating a copy of Levy’s Toldot Adam, or The Origin of Man, and the happy moment of coming upon the rare text in the Library at the Katz Center. Langton goes on to detail some surprising discoveries about the Jewish Darwinist, including Levy’s beliefs about the underlying reality of nature revealed by science as well as his remarkable conclusions about the future of man’s evolutionary trajectory; read Langton’s post here

JOSEPHINE COHEN MEMORIAL LECTURE

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, MacArthur Award and National Humanities Medal recipient, gave this year’s Josephine Cohen Memorial Lecture at Penn’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. In her talk, Goldstein discussed Albert Einstein’s lifelong interest in the seventeenth-century Jewish iconoclast Baruch Spinoza. Goldstein showed how the two thinkers shared much in common despite the vastly different time periods in which they both lived, and revealed the philosopher’s influence on the theoretical physicist’s thinking. In the process, Goldstein drew surprising interconnections among philosophy, physics, and religion. Click on the video still above to watch Goldstein’s lecture in full.

LEAP

This month the Katz Center welcomed a group of rabbis drawn from diverse American Jewish communities to learn from our fellows in the first of three such sessions organized by the Katz Center in partnership with Clal. The program, now in its third year, enlists influential voices in the Jewish world in the dissemination of Jewish studies scholarship beyond the academy. It also has the fortuitous effect of facilitating conversations across the academic/communal divide, to the mutual benefit of all participants. Read more about LEAP in this blog post by Anne Albert, the Katz Center’s Klatt Family Director for Public Programs.

BOOKSHELF

Check out these new books from current and past Katz Center fellows.
Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem was written by Julia Watts Belser (Georgetown University), a fellow at the Katz Center this year. 
Paul: The Pagans' Apostle was written by Paula Fredriksen (Boston University), a fellow in 20072008: Jewish and Other Imperial Cultures in Late Antiquity.
Judaism, Volume 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815 was edited by Jonathan Karp (SUNY Binghamton) and Adam Sutcliffe (King’s College London). Karp was a fellow in 20002001: Modern Jewry and the Arts as well as in 20082009: Jews, Commerce, and Culture. Sutcliffe was a fellow in 19981999 (2): Haskalah, Enlightenment, and European Society as well as in 20082009: Jews, Commerce, and Culture. Cambridge Press describes their text as “an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history."

COMING UP: DECEMBER SYMPOSIUM

Next week, the Katz Center will host its annual December Symposium, titled "Jews & the Natural World: Bodies, Animals, Evolution.” With speakers from across the globe and area scholars chairing and responding to panels in keeping with the year’s theme—Nature between Science and Religion—the symposium will explore the interconnected discourses with which Judaism both invents and interacts with nature. Open to the academic community, this day-long event will examine the conceptual and categorical challenges posed by eating animals in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the chains of logic that derive from evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, and much, much more. Visit us online to see the full program.
RSVP is required, and space is limited. Please reserve your spot by emailing Carrie Love at carrielo@upenn.edu before Wednesday, December 6. 
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