Jewish University for a Day

Mara Benjamin is assistant professor of Religion at St. Olaf College.  She holds a Diploma in Jewish Studies from Oxford University (1996), and received her doctorate from Stanford University (2005). Areas of scholarly and teaching interest include Jewish textual traditions and practices, including biblical, rabbinic, and contemporary hermeneutics; modern European Jewish history and thought; and feminist theology. Mara’s first book, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009), examines the theological and political stakes of the endeavor to reinvigorate Jewish intellectual and social responses to the Bible, focusing on the work of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929).  Her current book project examines Jewish and feminist concepts of the obligated self and is entitled Parental Obligation, Power, and Care in Jewish Theological Perspective.

Benjamin Gampel, author and teacher, specializes in the Jews of the medieval and early modern world. He received his PhD from Columbia University and is the Eli and Dinah Field Professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Gampel edited Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World (Columbia University Press; New Ed, 1998), which is an account of the international conference held in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Castile and Aragon. At present, he is writing a book on the pogroms and forced conversions of 1391 in the Iberian Peninsula and the effects of those events on the course of Jewish history.

Stephen Garfinkel is associate provost and an assistant professor of Bible at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also serves as chair of the Council on Graduate Studies in Religion. Dr. Garfinkel received a master's degree and rabbinic ordination from JTS and a PhD in Middle East Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.  Dr. Garfinkel's current research is focused on early popular perceptions of Moses as a divine figure. His essays published during the past few years include "Clearing Peshat and Derash" (in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, edited by Magne Sæbø); and "The Man Moses, the Leader Moses" (in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, edited by Jack Wertheimer).

Alex P. Jassen is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He previously taught at the University of Minnesota, where he was the recipient of the university’s prestigious McKnight Land-Grant Fellowship. Dr. Jassen holds a B.A. in Jewish Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He has published widely on the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Judaism and is a member of the international editorial team responsible for publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the author of Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism (Brill, 2007) as well as many articles in leading journals. He is the co-editor of Scripture, Violence, and Textual Practice in Early Judaism and Christianity (Brill, 2010) and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ancient Judaism (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). He served as academic advisor for The Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Dr. Jassen is currently working on a book on religious violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Judaism.

Alex Lubet is Morse Alumni/Graduate & Professional Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota, with additional appointments in Jewish Studies, American Studies, and Cognitive Sciences.  He holds degrees from the University of Iowa (M. A. and Ph. D.).  His research interests are disability issues in music, religion, and education, and American popular music, in particular Bob Dylan.  He is also a composer, multi-instrumentalist, storyteller, and theatre artist, whose works have received over 500 performances on 6 continents.  Lubet is the author of Music, Disability, and Society (Temple University Press, 2011).  One chapter considers the Halachic concept of kol isha from a disability perspective, along with the edicts against music under Islamic Sharia law as a disabling practice, under the Taliban.   Lubet is also contributing editor of Richard Wagner for the New Millennium:  Essays in Music and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), a collection that brings together musicologists and Jewish studies scholars to consider the legacy of the great composer and notorious anti-Semite.

Earl Schwartz is on the religion faculty and directs the social justice program at Hamline University. He is the author of Moral Development: A Practical Guide for Jewish Teachers, and co-author with Rabbi Barry Cytron of When Life Is In the Balance: Life and Death Decisions in the Light of Jewish Tradition, as well as numerous articles on Jewish Law, history and education. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law and Religion since 1996.

Shana Sippy teaches in the Religion department at Carleton College and has degrees from Columbia and Harvard. She specializes in articulations and representations of religious and cultural identity. Her work focuses on the making of Jewish and Hindu selves and communities in modernity, as well as the intersection of religious traditions with colonialism, social movements and globalization. She combines textual analysis with anthropological work on ritual, education, nationalism, and gender. Her current project focuses on the religious, cultural and political alliances between Jews and Hindus, Israel and India. Other projects have examined the adoption and re-visioning and re-interpretation of Jewish rituals and prayers in both traditional and progressive contexts.

Wendy Zierler is associate professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She received her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She is currently studying for an MFA degree in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Zierler was a research fellow in the English Department of Hong Kong University. She has also been a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing, a Feminist Haggadah commentary in My People's Haggadah, To Speak her Heart, an illustrated anthology of Jewish women's prayers and poems, and The Selected Writings of Hava Shapiro, a collaboration with HUC-JIR colleague Carole Balin.