Join us for the Inaugural Lecture for the Taube Family Chair in Jewish Studies given by Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Sam Shonkoff. Dr. Shonkoff's talk is titled “Gender in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales.” The event will feature introductory words by GTU leadership and Shana Penn, Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies, as well as a response by Dr. Judith Plaskow, professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan College.
Sam Shonkoff is the Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the GTU, where he teaches on Jewish religious thought, modern Jewish cultures, and methods in theology, ethics, and the historical-cultural study of religions. His research focuses primarily on German-Jewish thought and Hasidism, as well as appropriations of Hasidic spirituality in relatively secular spheres. Shonkoff’s current book project investigates themes of embodiment in Martin Buber’s representations of Hasidism vis-à-vis the original sources. He is co-editor with Ariel Evan Mayse of Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community and Life in the Modern World (Brandeis University Press, 2020) and the editor of Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy (Brill, 2018). Prior to joining the GTU in 2018, Shonkoff taught at Oberlin College and the University of Chicago.
Judith Plaskow is professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. Co-founder and for many years co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, she is author or editor of several works in feminist theology, including Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 1972-2003, and Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology (coauthored with Carol P. Christ).
Shana Penn is Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies and a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies in Berkeley. Her award-winning book, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005) was published in Polish in 2014 as Sekret Solidarnosci (W.A.B. Publishers). She has a Master’s degree in European Studies from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Other books include Gender Politics and Everyday Life in Central and Eastern Europe, co-edited with Jill Massino (Palgrave, 2009) and chapters in Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women Writers, edited by Wendy Martin (Beacon Press, 1996), and the Routledge Handbook of Women in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, forthcoming 2021).
This event is online only