Mendelson Convocation Center
The Jewish Theological Seminary
3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City

All lectures are free and open to the public. Reservations are not required, but encouraged. Please bring photo ID.

To make your reservations or for more information, contact Bobbi Raphael at boraphael-at-jtsa-dot-edu or (212) 280-6124.

Please bring your own lunch. Drinks and desserts will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

“Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America”

A Conference in Memory of Leah Levitz Fishbane, z”l (1974-2007)

Speakers (in order of presentation):

Dr. Eitan Fishbane, Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought, JTS
Dr. Jonathan Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, and Director, Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program, Brandeis University (Keynote Address)
Dr. Arthur Kiron, Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Lance J. Sussman, Senior Rabbi, Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania
Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, Irving Lehrman Research Associate Professor of American Jewish History, and Dean, Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies, JTS
Rabbi Sharon Brous, Spiritual Leader, IKAR, Los Angeles, California
Dr. Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor and Chair of American Studies, University of Minnesota
Dr. David Kaufman, Associate Professor of Contemporary American Jewish Studies, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Dr. Eugene Sheppard, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, and Associate Director, Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis University

Chancellor Arnold M. Eisen, JTS

This conference will explore aspects of religious and cultural renaissance among American Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with attention to how these historical models might be inspirational to the contemporary project of revival and renaissance in the Jewish community.

The conference theme is a tribute to the work and promise of Leah Levitz Fishbane, z”l (1974-2007), whose research was devoted to the early religious, creative, and social projects of the circle of American Jews who went on to found major American Jewish institutions, including The Jewish Theological Seminary, in their more mature years.

Sponsored by the Leah Levitz Fishbane Memorial Fund at JTS, The Jewish Theological Seminary, the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the Deanne & Arnold Kaplan Foundation.

Registration Fee: $36 ($10 for full-time students with ID).
Registration required by March 12—earlier registration encouraged.
For further information and to register, visit the conference page on the JTS website at www.jtsa.edu/x8011.xml. General inquiries can be directed to publicevents@jtsa.edu or (212) 280-6093.

When I met Heschel in his office at JTS one day in 1971, ostensibly to interview him but in fact to ask the questions which most concerned me, I asked him—with the chutzpah that only a twenty-year old could possibly muster—where he got the nerve to say, as he did in the first paragraph of God in Search of Man, that religion had declined not because it was refuted by modern science and philosophy but because it had become “irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” I went on to ask a few moments later how he could declare with such certainty that the war in Vietnam was wrong—and what good all his words of protest were doing anyway, what good words ever did. I needed to know how Heschel could make the tradition speak so forcefully to the crises of the day. “You doubt—that’s my problem,” he replied quietly. (I quote from the interview published under my byline in The Daily Pennsylvanian.) “My good friend, words count.” He dared to tell people how they should live, he said, because of “certain climactic moments of my own life, certain convictions and insights,” and because of “a tradition of wisdom which I feel has enriched me, has given me values.” That tradition, the source of Heschel’s insights and convictions, had given him, he said, not only a right but a duty to express them, to share them, and to try to have them guide human lives. His was no mere middle path between extremes, no mere balancing of tradition and modernity, but the Torah burning inside him, guiding his pen in his study and his feet at Selma, a life-giving path of meaning and community, intellect and passion, on which he, following his teachers, sought to lead us.

As to Conservative Movement politics, I think that Chancellor Eisen clearly sees JTS as leading the Conservative Movement but in coordination and cooperation with other institutions within the movement.  I remarked to a friend that it was a frum speech, in the sense that it was filled with theology and Torah, and I think that Chancellor Eisen represents that which I heard from someone years ago, Wissenschaft with a neshama (with the Yiddish intonation).