Berman Center to host London symposium

In step with Lehigh’s goal of broadening its international footprint and enhancing educational and cultural opportunities, the Berman Center for Jewish Studies is hosting a symposium at the British Library on Medieval Jewish Life in Word and Image.

The Center’s new director, Hartley Lachter, said scholars from Israel, Great Britain and the United States will explore possibilities for collaboration in Jewish studies when they gather for two days, March 9-10, in London.

“I’m excited to have this opportunity,” said Lachter, whose scholarship focuses on medieval Kabbalah.

“This gathering will be the first of many that the Berman Center will host in coming years, bringing together top scholars from around the world in order to broker international exchange and collaboration in all areas of the field of Jewish Studies.”

Lachter, who is also associate professor of Religion Studies and the Philip and Muriel Berman Chair in Jewish Studies at Lehigh, joined the university in August. Prior to that, he served as associate professor of religion studies and as director of Jewish Studies at Muhlenberg College.

“The opportunities that Lehigh affords me are wonderful,” says Lachter, who will become chair of the Religion Studies department on July 1.

The Berman Center was established 30 years ago to foster learning about Jewish culture and religion. In addition to its own courses and its public programs, the center partners with academic departments and programs to sponsor events.

The symposium in London is one several programs by the Berman Center this year. Others include:

• The Benjamin and Judaism Conference on Thursday and Friday, March 5-6, in Room 200 of the Linderman Library. Michael Jennings, the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University, will give the keynote address at 4:10 p.m. Thursday on Toward the Apokatastatic Will: Patristics and Esoteric Judaism in Walter Benjamin’s Late Theological Politics. Presentations of papers and discussions will be from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday.
• Kirya Joel: A Hasidic Shtetl in Suburban New York, with David N. Myers, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 16, at the Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College. Myers is a professor and Robert N. Burr Department Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• Little Failure: A Reading & Conversation with Gary Shteyngart, at 6 p.m. Monday, April 27, at the Wood Dining Room, Iacocca Tower at Lehigh. A reception and book signing will follow. Shteyngart’s memoir Little Failure was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.

In a new initiative, the Berman Center will provide bus service to events for Lehigh, Lafayette and Muhlenberg students.

“I really want to make it possible for a large number of people to be able to enjoy these free public events,” Lachter says.

In his scholarship on medieval Kabbalah, Lachter emphasizes the relationship between Jewish historical experience and the development of Kabbalistic discourses. He explores how medieval Jewish-Christian debates, along with disruptive moments of violence and forced conversion, shaped Jewish mystical literature and served as a form of cultural resistance for some pre-modern Jews.

He has authored a new book, Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain, which examines an important period in Kabbalah history, from the 1270s to the early 1300s.

“These [Kabbalistic] texts…articulate a vision of Jewish identity that appealed to many Jews in that time period, imagining Jewish life as the thing that literally holds the cosmos together,” he says. “And this vision of Jewish religious practice as a powerful element in the fabric of the universe was something that appealed to a lot of Jews who were facing very difficult historical circumstances….”

Lachter’s research addresses the broader question of how claims to Jewish secret knowledge played a role in the construction of Jewish identities.

“In many cases what we see is that the development of Kabbalah in the late 13th century initiated a real paradigm shift in how Jews understood themselves and in what ways they understood the practice of Judaism as being relevant and powerful.”

Lachter earned his doctorate in medieval Jewish mysticism at New York University, and his master’s in the history of Hebrew Bible interpretation and bachelor’s in Jewish Studies and philosophy from McGill University. He has presented his work nationally and internationally and published in Jewish Quarterly Review and Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy and other journals.

He and his wife, Jessica Cooperman, a professor of Religion Studies and director of the Jewish Studies program at Muhlenberg College, reside in Allentown. The couple has two daughters, Zoe and Mollie.