Featured Story - Artist in Residence 2019/20 - Joshua Sobol
Artist in Residence Joshua Sobol
Artist in Residence Joshua Sobol
General Director: Roger Kornberg (Stanford University)
Directors:
Eran Meshorer (The Hebrew University)
Nissim Benvenisty (The Hebrew University)
Speakers: TBA
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Organizer:
Bernard M. Levinson (University of Minnesota)
Konrad Schmid (University of Zurich)
Baruch Schwartz (The Hebrew University)
The Pentateuch lies at the heart of western Humanities, and the question of the formation of the Pentateuch represents one of the foundational topics in the discipline of academic bibilical studies. Despite its importance to the discipline, recent scholarship on this question has become increasingly divided on fundamental questions like dating, the existence of literary sources, and the role of authors or editors in shaping the final document. In effect, three separate academic cultures have emerged, those of Israel, Europe and North America, each promoting its own model, and without sufficient intellectual exchange between scholars in the various communities regarding their own assumptions. Our research group was created to address this problem, to bring about greater dialogue among leading proponents of the different scholarly models, and to move towards a shared discourse.
Organizer:
Steven Fassberg (The Hebrew University)
Simon Hopkins (The Hebrew University)
Hezy Mutzafy (Tel Aviv University)
Aramaic is an endangered language, more precisely, a group of languages, that is on the verge of extinction. First attested in inscriptions from Upper Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and northern Israel at the beginning of the first millenium B.C.E., Aramaic has been spoken uninterruptedly up to the present. A century ago Kurdistan (Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish) and Iranian Azerbaijan were home to Jewish and Christian speakers of Aramaic, who had lived in these regions for over two millennia.
Aramaic is still spoken today in three villages near Damascus (Ma'lula, Bax'a, and Jubb'adin) by Christians as well as Muslims (who converted over the past centuries from Christianity). Persecution and massacres have severely shrunk the already small native Aramaic-speaking population, and the surviving speakers have fled their original habitat and settled elsewhere, where their speech has been heavily influenced and gradually supplanted by other languages. Today, as a result, competent native speakers of most dialects are both scarce and elderly, and few of them live in a community where Aramaic is still used freely. Within a generation or so, almost all dialects of vernacular Aramaic will disappear.
This unfortunate state of affairs requires immediate action, and the goals of the research group are:
(1) To refine further the existing classifications of Neo-Aramaic dialects
(2) To exchange already collected but hitherto unpublished data in an effort to elucidate grammatical, lexical, and etymological problems
(3) To reconstruct in greater detail the historical depth of the Neo-Aramaic dialects
(4) To record additional unstudied dialects of Jewish Neo-Aramaic speakers in Israel
Organizers:
Yuval Kalish (Tel Aviv University)
Amalya Oliver (The Hebrew University)
Organizational network research is based on sociological and strategy system theories coupled with advanced statistical and algebraic methods on the one hand, and qualitative case studies and egocentric approaches on the other. This area, while witnessing significant growth over the past several years, was mainly characterized by cross-sectional approaches (one-time measurements). The group will focus on areas that are, as yes, not well developed in the general network research fild, and specifically within the overall organizational network domain, i.e. naming patterns of organizational network processes. We have identified three main directions in organizational research - learning networks, temporary network systems and development of networks. Examples of complexities and tensions associated with processes within networks are those that exist between collaboration and competition, innovation and inertia, stability and fragility.
Organizers:
Maayan Davidov (The Hebrew University)
Ariel Knafo (The Hebrew University)
Organizers:
Peter Sarnak (Princeton University)
Shahar Mozes (The Hebrew University)
Elon Lindenstrauss (The Hebrew University)
Organizers:
Yael Bentor (The Hebrew University)
Meir Shahar (Tel Aviv University)
Organizers:
Oren Tal (Tel Aviv University)
Zeev Weiss (The Hebrew University)
Organizers:
Ariel Hirschfeld (The Hebrew University)
Alan Mintz (Jewish Theological Seminary)
Galicia, the subject of our Research Group, was an invented land, an artificial entity that acquired meaning over the course of its historical experience. Rather than being a land with a longstanding identity of its own, Galicia was created as a province of the Habsburg Monarchy as a product of the negotiations with Russia and Poland that led to the partition of Poland in 1772, and it ceased to exist as a political entity in 1918 with the defeat and dissolution of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and its incorporation into the new Poland.
The creation of Galicia and the incorporation of the Jewish communities of the Polish kresy (borderlands) into the new Austrian province meant enormous changes. Social and educational reforms issued from Vienna transformed aspects of Jewish life. Our research group aims not only to study the phenomenon of Galicia, but also to bring the disciplines of history and literature into dialogue.
Organizers:
Marcia Kupfer (Independent Scholar, Washington DC)
Katrin Kogman Appel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
The historical approach pursued by our interdisciplinary research team offers a corrective to the current scholarly trajectory. As we analyze the fundamental principles underlying visual modes of conceptualization, we will also investigate the cultural parameters that modulated diverse applications in Jewish and Christian societies. At issue are the specific ways in which visual schema function in religious and scientific discourses, how intellectual agendas and spiritual values across confessional and cultural divides might lead to analogous or different types of devices, and the impact of exchange or appropriation on the reception and circulation of particular solutions. The chronological, geographical, and civilizational scope of our collective enterprise is unprecedented.
Organizers:
Rami Reiner (Ben Gurion University)
Vered Noam (Tel Aviv University)
Our research group is a joint venture to explore the potential of research into the relations between the interpretive dimension and the development of Jewish tradition, from the first centuries CE up until the Middle Ages, against the broad background of similar problems and challenges with which scholars of other religious cultures (such as early Christianity, early Islam, and Hinduism) grapple. The group consists of four scholars of Jewish exegetical literature, one who is additionally an expert in jurisprudence at large, and three who are engaged in the research of law and exegesis in early Christianity, Islam and Hindu philosophy and literature. The group will examine the relationship between the exegetical and the legislative viewpoints in this wide scope of cultures and eras, both diachronically and synchronically, both as a literary and as an ideational phenomenon.
Professor Yitzhak Hen is a historian of the early medieval West.
His particular interest is in the intellectual and religious culture of the post-Roman Barbarian kingdoms of Western Europe. Part of his research is dedicated to the examination of early medieval manuscripts, and to the study of early medieval liturgy in its cultural, social and religious context.
Read more about Professor Hen here.
The 7th Advanced School in the Humanities on Historical Formations of Spatial Knowledge has been postponed due to the current situation. Subscribe to receive announcement of the next school.
Ruth Schor is currently a research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an associate researcher at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include theatre and performance, cultural history, modern drama and contemporary performance.