Spring Lectures Focus on Cultural Judaism

The Center for Cultural Judaism in New York is co-sponsoring a spring lecture series with the Tulane Jewish Studies Program on the Tulane uptown campus, featuring eight speakers on topics ranging from "Obama and Israel" to Russian Zionism to Hebrew literature.

On Monday (Feb. 22), the topic will be "The Jewish Question as the Arab Question: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz" in a lecture by David Myers of the University of California–Los Angeles. The event will be in the Lavin-Bernick Center Race Room at 7 p.m. Myers, who has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, also will speak on "Satmar Hasidism" on Tuesday (Feb. 23) at 10 a.m. in the same room at the LBC.

"Obama and Israel" will be the lecture topic on March 2 at 7:30 p.m. in the LBC Stibbs Conference Room. The guest lecturer will be Mitchell Bard, executive director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and a foreign policy analyst who lectures frequently on U.S.-Middle East policy. Bard also is director of the Jewish Virtual Library, the world's most comprehensive online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture. All the lectures are free of charge and open to all.

Other lectures scheduled this semester are:

• March 11, 4 p.m. – "Jewish Conceptions of Self and Other in Early 15th-Century Spain" by David Goldstein, rabbi emeritus of Touro Synagogue in New Orleans and associate director of Jewish studies at Tulane. He is an expert on the Jews of Spain.
• March 20, 8 p.m. – "A Conversation on Cultural Judaism" by Felix Posen and David Biale. Posen, chair of the Posen Foundation, is a leader in the efforts to promote Jewish education for secular Jews. Biale is professor and chair of history at the University of California–Davis.
• April 1, 4 p.m. – "Emplacing Contemporary Hebrew Literature" by Karen Grumberg, assistant professor of near-eastern studies at the University of Texas–Austin, where she specializes in Hebrew literature.
• April 6, 4 p.m. – "Louis Zukofsky and the Problem of Being a Jewish Poet in America" by Barry Ahearn, professor of English at Tulane.
• April 8, 4 p.m. – "The Byron Strug Memorial Lecture: the Holocaust in German-Occupied Soviet Territory and the Response by Soviet Jewish Intellectuals" by Joshua Rubenstein, northeast regional director of Amnesty International and an associate at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
• April 13, 4 p.m. – "Hans Kohn — Jewish Nationalist" by Adi Gordon, visiting assistant professor at Tulane. Gordon is an expert on German-Jewish relations.
• April 20, 4 p.m. – "Why Russian Zionism is a Worthy Topic of Study" by Brian Horowitz, who holds the Sizeler Family Chair of Jewish Studies and is a professor of Russian at Tulane.