CJS | The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies

In conjunction with Berkeley Rep's presentation of Tony Kushner's groundbreaking play Angels in America, the GTU is cohosting "Angelology: A Live Panel on Millenarianism" on Monday, May 14 at 6:30pm in Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre. The panel will explore the questions “Why do angels appear to people? What forecasts the end of the world?” through Jewish and Mormon lenses.

Maeera Schreiber, University of Utah

Guest Lecture: "Holy Envy: Writing in the Judeo-Christian Borderzone"

Maeera Schreiber's project explores the contentious relationship between poetry and religion, to show how poetry flourishes in the Judeo-Christian borderzone, and works to understand the aesthetic, theological and psychodynamic fallout characteristic of this place of in-betweenness. 

Join the GTU for the First Annual Borsch-Rast Lecture, where Daniel Boyarin and Judith Butler will join Borsch-Rast Book Prize winner Naomi Seidman, to share perspectives on Seidman's award-winning book, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature.

The event will be held in the chapel at Pacific School of Religion, with a reception to follow in the Bade Museum at PSR.

If you can't join us in person, watch live streaming video of the event. 

The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, the Disability Studies Occasional Lecture Series and the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the GTU present a lecture by Julia Watts Belser, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies,Georgetown University and CJS alum.

This lecture is based on original, rare documentary films presenting Jewish communities in Poland, shortly before their annihilation by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust.

Some months before the outbreak of World War II, two famous Jewish-Polish film producers, the brothers Shaul and Yitzhak Goskind from Warsaw, produced six short films about the most important Jewish communities in six big Polish cities: Warsaw, Lvov (Lemberg), Cracow (Krakow), Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok and Lodz. 

Jeffrey Shandler will discuss his recent work, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. His work  delves into the possibilities, challenges, and unique findings in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which currently holds nearly 54,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Dr. Shandler serves as the Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.

The sukkah commemorates the agrarian past of the Jewish people as well as the forty years of wandering in the desert and living in tents. Please come and help build this structure, which will stand for eight days. During this time all are welcome to enter, shake the lulav and etrog (for a fertile and fruitful year), have a meal, meditate, converse with friends and colleagues and reflect on the permanence of impermanence. Pizza provided. There may be dancing.