By Melissa Hunter
Assistant Editor
On Thursday, January 25, David Myer, Distinguished Professor of History and holder of the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, will present “American Shtetl: My Path in Studying Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Municipality in Suburban New York” as part of the University of Cincinnati’s Jennie L. and Jacob Lichter Series. Organized by the Department of Judaic Studies, the community is invited to attend this 3-part series made possible by the Jacob and Jennie L. Lichter Fund of the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati. Endowed in 1981, The Lichter Lecture Series is the department’s major event each academic year. It enables the university to “bring to UC close to a hundred of the best and the brightest in the various fields of Jewish thought and learning.” The lectures focus on a different theme every year, and three leading scholars or intellectuals are invited to address the theme from different angles. According to the Department of Judaic Studies website, lectures have included Yehuda Amichai, Yahuda Bauer, David Biale, Norman Golb, Paula Hyman, Amos Oz, Rabbi Dr. W. Gunther Plaut, Jonathan D. Sarna, Lawrence H. Schiffman, Sasson Somekh, Norman A. Stillman, James Tabor, Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, Jack Wertheimer, A.B. Yehoshua and Ronald W. Zweig.
Some of the themes of past Lichter Lecture Series have included: ‘Eco-Judaism: New Jewish Approaches to the Environment’; ‘Foodaism: Do Jews Make Food or Does Food Make Jews?’; ‘The Politics of Freedom’; ‘Portraits of Israel: Society and Culture’; ‘Jewish Women in a changing Society’; ‘Heritage of Spanish Jews’; ‘Holocaust and Rebirth’; ‘From Spain to America: The Legacy of Spanish Jewry, 1492-1992’; ‘Voices of Hebrew Literature’; ‘Antisemitism: Modern Realities and Contemporary’; ‘American Judaism: Present and Future’; ‘Religion in American Society’; ‘Biblical Archeology’; ‘The Jews of France’; ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’; ‘The Menorah’; ‘Jews and War in the 20th Century’; ‘Maimonides Medicine and Ethics’; and ‘Jews and Muslims’; ‘Jewish Neighborhood, Jewish City’; ‘The Eichmann Trial: Fifty Years Later’; and “Are the Dead Sea Scrolls Dead?”
“Jews and Democracy” is the topic of the 2023-2024 Lichter Lecture Series, and it explores Jewish encounters with democracy. “Democracy” derives from ancient Greek meaning “rule of the people.”
The first in the series was a lecture by Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College Shaul Magid, entitled “Meir Kahane, Liberalism, and Radicalism in America” on Thursday, November 2, 2023. The series continued with a lecture by Michigan State University Professor of Political Science Yael Aronoff on “Israel’s Democracy in Crisis” on Monday, November 13, 2023. Myer’s will be the final lecture and will be held at 7:00 p.m. at the UC College of Law, Room 140, UC Uptown Campus, 2925 Campus Green Dr.
