Faculty Seminars 2024-2025

Sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, the Department of Jewish Studies, and the Department of Religion

Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, St. Francis College

Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar

This faculty seminar will address the commonly held view that the main difference between Judaism and Christianity is that for Christians the messiah has already come, while Jews are still waiting for the messiah. Prof. Labendz's analysis of rabbinic literature shows that, in fact, both communities held an "already and not yet" view, where the eschaton (the "end") was already inaugurated at a certain point, but its consummation was yet to come. For Christians, that inauguration happened with Jesus, while for Jews it happened with the exodus from Egypt.

December 3, 2024, 10:30AM

Miller Hall (14 College Ave.), Room 105

Please RSVP to info@jewishstudies.rutgers.edu

Sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, the Department of Jewish Studies, the Department of History, and the Center for European Studies 

Michal Shapira, Department of History, Tel Aviv University;

Affiliated Visiting Scholar, Bildner Center, Spring 2025 

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 

10:30 AM–Noon; Lunch will be served. 

Miller Hall (14 College Ave.), Room 115 

RSVP by Wednesday, March 19, to info@jewishstudies.rutgers.edu.  

Scholars have thoroughly researched Sigmund Freud’s writings about male homosexuality, while overlooking his radical views on homosexuality in women. In this seminar, Professor Michal Shapira will examine one of Freud’s least-studied cases: that of Margarethe Csonka, a young Jewish lesbian whose identity was shaped as growing equality, urbanization, and modernization in 1920s Vienna afforded new opportunities to women and Jews. Csonka’s case will be situated within the broader contexts of medical and psychological discourse, Freud’s own writings, Jewish and gender history, and the urban and artistic landscape of modern Vienna. 

Shapira is the author of Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna (Routledge, 2023) and The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013).  

Sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, the Department of Jewish Studies, the Program in Global Medieval Studies, and the History Department

NAAMA COHEN HANEGBI

Department of History, Tel Aviv University

An enigmatic line in a Hebrew Castilian medical casebook notes that the doctor treated a pregnant woman suffering sorrow and loss. Taking this text as a point of departure, Prof. Cohen Hanegbi will analyze Hebrew, Latin, and vernacular sources to elucidate the medical, religious, and social contexts of mental health care for parturients in the late medieval Mediterranean.

In so doing, she will elucidate Jewish and Christian understandings of women's mental health before, during, and after childbirth.

April 8, 2025, 10:30am

Miller Hall (14 College Ave.), room 105

Please RSVP to info@jewishstudies.rutgers.edu

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