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NOVEMBER E-NEWS

This month’s newsletter features a recap (with video) of the annual Meyerhoff Lecture, along with recent publications, a blog highlight, staff news, and a reminder about the upcoming Josephine Cohen Memorial Lecture featuring philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

MEYERHOFF LECTURE

The 21st Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture was given by David B. Ruderman, Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, former Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center. In this lecture, Ruderman returned to the topic of the role played by science and the study of nature in Jewish culture from the Middle Ages to the early Enlightenment, more than two decades after his seminal Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe was published. That book touched off a spate of studies asking how Jews processed and participated in the scientific and medical culture of their day, spawning an entire field of academic research exemplified by this year’s fellowship theme. In this lecture, Ruderman talked about the origins of his deep interest in the topic, including a stint at the library of the National Institutes of Health that inspired him to look for the first time into Jewish attendance at early modern medical schools. He highlighted central questions in this area, including whether natural philosophy and empirical science were considered alien to Judaism as a religion of revelation, expanding on his initial conclusions and showing how recent scholarship has treated the theme in new ways. Click on the thumbnail above to watch Ruderman’s lecture in full.

Looking Back

In 1997, UCLA’s Saul Friedländer gave the first Meyerhoff Lecture on the challenges of historical writing in the context of the Holocaust.

Click here for a full overview of past Meyerhoff Lecture titles and speakers.

BOOKSHELF

Alessandro Guetta, author of Les Juifs d'Italie à la Renaissance, was a fellow in ’98–’99 (Poetry and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Jewry) and presented at the first-ever Penn Virtual Seminar in Manuscript Studies as the 2017 SIMS-Katz Fellow.

Jonathan Hess's Deborah and Her Sisters appeared in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series published by the Katz Center in association with Penn Press.

Lennart Lehmhaus, editor of Collecting Recipes: Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue, is the Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Fellow at the Katz Center this year.

Alumni, do you have a publication or other achievement that you'd like to share? Contact us so that we can feature you in an upcoming newsletter.

BLOG

Current Ella Darivoff fellow Yulia Egorova wrote on our blog about a genetic test being used as proof of Jewish descent, eliminating the need for conversion where Jewishness is in dispute. Read her perspective here.

CONGRATULATIONS

Sam Cardillo, Administrator of Finances and Facilities at the Katz Center, received 2017’s Silver SAS Staff Recognition Award recognizing outstanding initiative, innovation, and completion of special projects. This is the second-highest award given by the Dean across Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, and is well deserved, as colleagues and fellows alike will already know. We wish him a hearty congratulations.

COMING UP

Next week, former MacArthur fellow and recipient of the National Humanities Medal Rebecca Newberger Goldstein will deliver a talk at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center as part of the Center’s public program series. Space is limited; c lick to RSVP.

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