Princeton University

2011-2012

The Program in American Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies presented
The Lapidus Family Fund Lecture in American Jewish Studies

Mr. Wyrick's Tablets: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments

Jenna Weissman Joselit
Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History
Director of the Program in Judaic Studies
The George Washington University

March 29, 2012
4:30 p.m.
East Pyne 010

Course offered Spring 2012

338/JDS 336/HIS 450 The Invention of the Promised Land: American Jewish History

2010-2011

The Lapidus Family Fund Lecture in American Jewish Studies

Filming the Judeo-Christian Synthesis:  Biblical Epics and Cold War Culture

Julian Levinson

Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of English, The University of Michigan

Wednesday, February 23, 4:30 p.m.

East Pyne 010

Julian Levinson’s work focuses on various dimensions of the encounter between Jews and American culture, including the influence of Transcendentalism on American Jewish literature, the representation of the Holocaust in Hollywood film, and the place of Jewish studies in the contemporary multicultural academy. His book,

Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture

(Indiana University Press, 2008) was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish Studies.

See below for the video of the conference.

2009-2010

The 2009-2010 Lapidus Lecture was delivered on 
Tuesday May 4, 2010, 4:30 p.m. East Pyne 010

Professor William E. Forbath
Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin
 
"Hebrew" Immigrants and Their "Jewish" Advocates: Jews, Law, and Identity Politics in the Progressive Era

Cosponsored with the Program in Judaic Studies

William Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Research at the School of Law and is also Professor of History at UT, Austin.  He teaches constitutional law and legal and  constitutional history.  He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement and about seventy articles on legal and constitutional history and theory.  He has two books in progress: Courting the State: Law and the Making of the Modern American State and Social and Economic Rights in the  American Grain.  He is on the boards of several scholarly journals and public interest organizations.

You can view the lecture by clicking here.

In the Fall 2009 semester, Rabbi Lance Sussman taught America in Judaism, AMS 323/JDS 323/REL 394.  The seminar examined the Americanization of Judaism beginning with earliest transplanted Iberian concepts of Judaism in the "new world" to the transformation of Jewish religious life in the United States.  Special attention was paid to Jewish theology, the rabbinate, gender, denominationalism and the polity of the American synagogue.

Rabbi Sussman also presented a workshop as part of our fall 2009 workshop series.

Monday, November 9, 12 p.m., Dickinson 210
Tolstoy's Rabbi,  American Progressivism and Jewish Agriculture:  A First Look at Dr. Joseph Krauskopf and the Founding of the National Farm School
Rabbi Lance Sussman, Visiting Professor of Religion and Senior Rabbi, Congregation Keneseth Israel
Cosponsored with the Program in Judaic Studies

2008-2009

The 2008-2009 Lapidus lecture was held on Monday, December 1, 2008 in the James M. Stewart '32 Theater, 185 Nassauu Street.  Josh Kun, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, Department of American Studies & Ethnicity, USC, gave a lecture entitled "And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: Music, Memory, and the Politics of Jewish-American History."  He is the author of multiple publications including Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press). He received his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley and worked closely with the late Michael Rogin, as well as Leon Litwack and the late Larry Levine. He was recently awarded a Casden Grant for his research on African American and Jewish American popular music culture. The project he is working on will take the form of a musical anthology, and it is tentatively titled “Go Down Moses: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations.” Click here for more information about Josh Kun.  Professor Kun also delivered a noon workshop on the same day.

In the fall 2008-2009 semester, Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit taught Growing Up Jewish in America (AMS/JDS 334).  And in Spring 2009, Professor Esther Schor taught American Jewish Writers (ENG/AMS/JDS 365).

2007-2008 

The 2008 Lapidus lecture was held on February 20, 2008, with Jonathan Sarna delivering a lecture on "The Democratization of American Judaism" in McCormick 101 at 4:30 p.m.  Jonathan Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and director of its Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program.  He also chairs the Academic Advisory and Editorial Board of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and is chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.  Author or editor of more than twenty books on American Jewish history and life, his most recent book, American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press), won the 2004 "Jewish Book of the Year Award" from the Jewish Book Council.  Professor Sarna also presented a workshop on "The Mystical World of Colonial American Jews" at 12 noon on February 20 in Chancellor Green 105.  Professor Sarna also acted as an advisor and contributor to the newly premiered PBS series, The Jewish Americans.

In the spring 2008 semester, Professor Suzanne Last Stone, of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, taught a course on Jewish Law and American Legal Theory, AMS/JDS 322. 

2006-2007

In February 2007, Leon Wieseltier presented the inaugural lecture, titled “Of What Use is History to American Jewish History?”