For the Public

Event Details

Rethinking Liberalism, Libertas (Freedom), and Self-Cultivation

  • Liberty Torch
  • Academic Year: 2026-2027
  • Recording Available?: No
  • Event Type: Bildner Center Public Events
  • Event Date: December 1, 2026
  • Start Time: 12:00 PM
  • End Time: 1:00 PM
  • Location: New Brunswick Theological Seminary, 35 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

The Toby and Herbert Stolzer Annual Lecture

Three distinguished scholars of the Enlightenment—Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum, Berlin), Helena Rosenblatt (CUNY Graduate Center), and David Sorkin (Yale University)—will join Professor Nancy Sinkoff, academic director of the Bildner Center, to reassess the values of the European Enlightenment and the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and their relevance for our present moment.

We are living in an unenlightened age—if by “enlightened” we mean respect for reason and science, confidence in the possibility of human progress, and the ability, even the obligation, to criticize our current social and political reality in the hope of making it better. There are myriad reasons why we have arrived at this moment. Rather than diagnose that process, however, this panel will reassess the relationship among Enlightenment liberalism, libertas (a concept of freedom rooted in Roman antiquity), and the ideal of self-cultivation.

The cultivation of virtue was central to the eighteenth-century German ideal of Bildung, which was closely connected to both the Prussian Enlightenment and the Haskalah. The panel will consider what happened to this ideal of self-cultivation as liberalism developed, and what its presence—or absence—means for contemporary Jewish communities and their relationship to liberalism.

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  • Susan Neiman
    Susan Neiman

    Susan Neiman became director of the Einstein Forum in 2000, after working as an associate professor of philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of ten books, translated into fifteen languages, including The Unity of Reason, Evil in Modern Thought, Moral Clarity, Why Grow Up?, Learning from the Germans, Left is not Woke, and Call it Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel.

    Helena Rosenblatt
    Helena Rosenblatt

    Helena Rosenblatt is Distinguished Professor of History, Political Science, and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Rousseau and Geneva from the First Discourse to the Social Contract, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion, and The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Her current project, for which she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, is an intellectual biography of Madame de Staël. 

    David Sorkin
    David Sorkin

    David Sorkin, Lucy G. Moses Professor of History at Yale University, first wrote about cultural history: The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840; Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment; The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought; and The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. He then turned to political history: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries; and The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews’ Campaign for Citizenship.