Lunchtime Lecture: Leora Batnitzky on Religion in German-Jewish History

Part 3 of LBI's 70th Anniversary Lecture Series

On July 30 at 12:00 PM EDT, Leora Batnitzky will discuss religion in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

This lecture series will take place online.

About the Speaker:

Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). She is currently completing a book on Ecclesiastes: A Biography, forthcoming in Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. She is also working on two other books, the first a comparative study of conversion controversies in Israel and India, tentatively titled “What is Religious Freedom? The Case of Conversion in Israel and India,” and the second on the Jewish apostate and Catholic saint Edith Stein, tentatively titled “The Continued Relevance of Edith Stein for Jewish and Christian Self-Understanding.”

She is the co-editor, with Steven Weitzman and Eve Krakowski, of The Princeton Companion to Jewish Studies, which will be published by Princeton University this fall. She is co-editor of several other volumes, including The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (De Gruyter, 2014), Institutionalizing Rights and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and an anthology Jewish Legal Theories (Brandies Library of Modern Jewish Thought, 2018). Along with Vivian Liska and Ilana Pardes, she is co-director of the International Center for Bible, Culture, and Modernity.