2015 Hershdorfer Kantrowitz Brettler Lecture Series: new dates!

1. SOURCES OF THE ZOHAR IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2. DIVISIONS OF THE ZOHAR (chart) 3. PARASHAT/ZOHAR SECTIONS (chart) 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5. RECOMMENDATIONS 6. Zohar I 51b-52a - translated from the French of Jean de Pauly 7. TRANSLATIONS COMPARED 8. KABBALAH BETWEEN THE ZOHAR AND SAFED - sources in English

2024

Course Description: Israeli history is fraught with stories of war and violence. Since the founding of the State in 1948, Israel has gone through eight recognized ‘conventional’ wars, numerous smaller-scale military campaigns, and two intifadas (Palestinian uprisings). Moreover, the origins of the rivalry between Zionists and the indigenous Palestinian population predate 1948 and was apparent already during the mandatory period. The triple aim of this course is (a) to chart the ensuing seven decades of enmity, warfare, mediation, and negotiations, (b) to locate their origins in pre-1948 Palestine, and (c) to examine the ways in which these constant conflicts shaped not only the lives of many residents of Israel and Palestine but also had a major impact on Israeli society and culture. Considering conflicting views and debates, we will compare and contrast different narrations and interpretations. These include, on the one hand, those who argue that militarism and the military have become a way of life for Israelis, who turned their state into a modern Sparta, and, on the other hand, others who marvel at how Israel has been able to maintain a vibrant civil society, democratic institutions, and a culture which cherishes open debate, satire, and a spirit of free thinking and criticism. For that reason, we will progress in two parallel tracks: first, we will survey the key processes, events, and personalities and provide a historical overview of the main wars and cycles of violence from pre-statehood years to the present. Second, we will examine and assess the extent to which Israeli history could be narrated in separation from the chronicles of the Israeli-Arab conflict and to expose students to key features in Israeli culture and society that developed in response to violence and as part of a constant negotiation between the military and the civil sphere. At the end of the course, students will have a clear idea of the complexity of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a sense of how this conflict has marked the development of Israeli culture and society, as well as examples of the success and failures of the attempts to maintain an open civil society and the rule of law under extreme conditions.

May 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s Independence, as well as the 1948 War in Palestine/Israel. The war, which broke out in November 1947 in the wake of the UN General Assembly Resolution in favor of partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab states, was exceptionally cruel, leaving deep scars in both communities. To this day, it signifies different things for each side – a creation of a new, sovereign Israeli state for the Jews, and displacement, together with loss of land and home for the Palestinians. Indeed, even the different names used to mark the violent events and their aftermath – “Atzmaut” (Hebrew for Independence) and “Nakba” (Arabic for “Disaster” or “Catastrophe”) – capture this dissonance. The overall aim of the course is to explore the local, regional, and global contexts that produced the cataclysm of 1948, and to delve into the consequences and unresolved political, social, and cultural questions it left behind. To accomplish this overall aim, the students taking the class will be asked to engage in two connected, yet distinct types of scholarly inquiry: First, the course will introduce students to the major developments leading up to the war, the key personalities, events and various stages of the war, and some of the major historiographical debates which emerged in the last two decades. Second, switching from history to memory and “memory activism,” the course will analyze the way in which the war was narrated and remembered by Israelis and Palestinians, and the way in which this memory changed over the years. The course wishes not to avoid dealing with a controversial topic, but to do so in a scholarly and academic manner. It will provide a room for showcasing different narratives, historiographies and modes of interpretation, in a conscious attempt to go beyond political partisanship insofar as the topic permits. The timing is also auspicious. The class will run in tandem with multiple special events that will take place during the spring semester, and we intend to take advantage of this unique opportunity. Hence the class’s format is somewhat unconventional: first, in addition to the traditional class discussions, students will be also required to attend the movie series Cinema and the Memory of the 1948 War that will run parallel to the class during this semester (see dates below); second, students will be required to attend the one day conference entitled Nakba, Past & Present, that will take place on Friday, April 13 2017, at the Elliott School’s Institute for Middle East Studies.

Arabic and Semitic Linguistics Contextualized, A Festschrift for Jan Retsö, ed. L. Edzard, Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden, pp. 430-447, 2015

Jewish Quarterly Review 83 (1993), 331 347, 1993

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The Museum's rare collection of photographs and drawings by Alois Breyer (1885–1948) of East-European wooden synagogues destroyed in WWII, in a dialogue with two leading modern artists showing how geometric abstraction transforms the language, narrative and beauty of the synagogues into a modern and contemporary idiom

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