Moshe Idel on Kabbalah and 20th Century Thought

An interactive videoconference presented by Centro Primo Levi and the Center for Jewish History and Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Thirteenth Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture

The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies is pleased to invite you to a panel discussion prompted by the publication of Moshe Idel’s new book, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. The book, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in association with the Katz Center, is part of the series Jewish Culture and Contexts. In this book, Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationship to Kabbalah in a cosmopolitan, mostly European context. The panelists are all current participants in the 2009–2010 Fellowship Program at the Katz Center titled Secularism and Its Discontents.

Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and member of the Israeli Academy for Sciences and Humanities. He is a world-renowned scholar of Jewish mystical and philosophical traditions.

Vivian Liska is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on Modern German Literature and Literary Theory.

David N. Myers is Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles and former Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. His fields of expertise are Modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history.

David Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. He studies Jewish intellectual history primarily in Early Modern Europe.

Galili Shahar is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Florida. His fields of research are German cultural history, philosophy and theatre, and German-Jewish and Israeli literature.

The annual Meyerhoff Lecture was established by the Joseph Meyerhoff Memorial Trusts to honor the generosity and service of Eleanor Meyerhoff Katz and the late Herbert D. Katz to Penn’s Department of History and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program Kutchin Faculty Seminar Series, the Department of History, the Department of Religious Studies, the Centro Primo Levi, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.