Courtesy of University of Cincinnati Department of Judaic Studies
Dr. Russ-Fishbane
Submitted by University of Cincinnati Department of Judaic Studies
For the third and final presentation for 2024–2025 Lichter Lecture Series on “Understanding Jews and Judaism Through Ages,” Dr. Elisha Russ-Fishbane will be lecturing on “Old Age as a Paradigm and Ideal in Medieval Jewish Culture.” Dr. Russ-Fishbane, Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, is a historian of the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic world and a scholar of medieval Jewish culture, including the legacies of Maimonides in later Jewish life and thought. His first book on the movement of Jewish-Sufi pietism in medieval Egypt, entitled “Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Circle” (Oxford University Press, 2015), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize by the American Academy for Jewish Research. His second book, “Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture” (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022), is a study of aging in the Jewish communities of the medieval Mediterranean and Near East and of old age as a paradigm and ideal in medieval Jewish culture. He is currently at work on a book on the many ways in which Islam features in the medieval Jewish imagination both among the Jews of the Islamic world and of Christian Europe. This year’s series has sought to understand and center stages of life whose lived Jewish experience tends to be neglected. Russ-Fishbane’s topic completes and complements the previous presentations by Laura Yares about the inner life of Jewish Sunday school children and Shira Kohn about religious and non-religious dimensions of Jewish sororities.
The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 30, 2024, 7:00 p.m. at the Taft Center, 1 Edwards, UC Uptown Campus. The Department of Judaic Studies will offer a limited number of prepaid parking tickets and registration for the event is available.
