Presented by Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot, Ph.D.
Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History,
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR)
Torah from Sinai? Not quite.
The texts that Jewish tradition considers sacred and eternal were created by people at different times and places, with their own ideas about what those texts should say.
We will explore this textual journey from the oral tradition of the early rabbis to the messy, inky printing houses of Renaissance Italy and Central Europe to the textual digitization by software engineers today.
With this context in mind, Rabbi Skloot will help us understand the relationship of a text’s material form to its content. For example, what does it mean to study a sacred text on a digital screen that was once an oral tradition copied by hand, and later a book printed on paper.
Join us to discuss such questions and context as we navigate through the history of Jewish text, the Jewish people’s ancient and enduring relationship with texts and the very idea of the Jewish texts.
Registration is no longer open. You can watch the recording of this program, and many other on our Program Recording Archive.
Thank you to David and Ellen Epstein for sponsoring this lecture!
Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot, Ph.D. is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).
He is a historian of Jewish culture and religious thought and the author of First Impressions: Sefer Ḥasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis University Press, 2023), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in 2023. He teaches courses on Jewish history, philosophy and theology, books and reading, and interfaith relations, and is a much sought-after lecturer and teacher at universities and synagogues across the US and internationally.
He earned his A.B. from Princeton, his rabbinical ordination from HUC-JIR, and his Ph.D. from Columbia.
Thank you to Andrew R. Ammerman for sponsoring our Spring 2024 program lineup.
He dedicates the semester’s learning in loving memory of Josephine and H. Max Ammerman, Stephen C. Ammerman, and Avi West.