Recording of lectures hosted at the Oxford University Chabad Society during Academic Year 2023-2024

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Summer term 2024

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Professor Peter Hacker

'Oxford Anti-Semitism and the War in Gaza'

P.M.S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and Emeritus Fellow and former Tutorial Fellow in philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford. He holds an Honorary Professorship at University College, London at the UCL Institute of Neurology at Queen’s Square and has held British Academy and Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships and visiting chairs in North America. Together with M.R. Bennett, he has written extensively on cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of 24 books, editor of 4 books, and author of 172 papers. In his works in the last decade and a half he has dedicated his energies to a tetralogy on human nature. Born in London in 1939, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at The Queen's College, Oxford from 1960-63, elected to a graduate studentship at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he remained from 1963-65, writing a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of H. L. A. Hart on the subject of 'Rules and Duties.'

 

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Seminar in honour of 30 years since the Rebbe's passing - 6 lectures

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Dr. Elnatan Chen

'Hebrew Grammar – Not What You Thought'

 

Dr. Elnatan Chen, an expert in Biblical Hebrew and medieval grammarians. He edits the works of the earliest great grammarians such as Rabbi Judah Hayyuj and Rabbi Jonah Ibn Janah, in their original Arabic and in translation. Postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Professor Oded Yisraeli

'R. Moses Isserles as Kabbalist'

Oded Yisraeli is a professor at the Dept. of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He was for 14 years the Rabbi of Kibbutz Migdal Oz and for many years taught Talmud and Jewish Thought in Yeshivot and colleges. His main research area is medieval and early modern Kabbalah. His last book is ‘Rabbi Moses b. Nachman: An Intellectual Biography’, Magness Press 2022 (forthcoming in English by Stanford University Press).

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Dr Marci Freedman

‘Mapping Medieval Jewish Travel to the Holy Land’

Marci Freedman completed her PhD at the University of Manchester (2016), and held the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University (2018-2020). A scholar of textual and intellectual history with interests in Jewish travel narratives, pilgrimage, and the exchange of ideas between cultures, she is the author of the forthcoming An Introduction to the Jewish Diaspora in the Global Middle Ages. Other publications include “Teaching Benjamin ofTudela’s Book of Travels in the Jewish Middle Ages” (2022) and “So Many Tall Tales: Constantijn L’Empereur’s Polemical Reading of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels” (2020).

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Jonathan Gabay

'Jewish Ethics and AI'

Jonathan Gabay is a respected figure in the world of communications, public relations and branding. Blending informed analysis of the tactics of political influence both ancient and modern, he confronts the weaponization of AI and deep-fakes that don’t just disrupt but threaten democracy itself. Jonathan is known for his depth of understanding of human psychology and applying this knowledge to create powerful political brands and campaigns. Recently made a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Jonathan’s seventeen books have worked to reveal the hidden forces shaping our choices as consumers and citizens. In his 2015 book Soul Traders Jonathan explored the long history of political and commercial propaganda and manipulation. His latest work, due 2024, Digital Marketing and AI Psychology.

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​ Professor Ritchie Robertson

‘Franz Kafka and Judaism’

Ritchie Robertson is the former Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language and Literature, Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He is interested in a wide range of authors and topics in the period from 1750 onwards, notably Kafka; Heine; Schiller; Austrian literature; and the Enlightenment as an international movement. He is convenor of the monograph series Germanic Literatures, published by Legenda. His New History of the Enlightenment is due out from Penguin Books in March 2020. He is author of The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939 (Oxford: OUP, 1999), as well as numerous other works. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985); The 'Jewish Problem' in German Literature 1749-1939 (1999); and most recently The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790 (2020).

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Dr. Meindert Peters

'Franz Kafka: the making of an icon'

Dr. Peters is co-curator of Kafka: Making of an Icon, a major exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford. His first monograph-length project explored embodied responses in German modernist literature and thought, and the existential implications of the training and re-shaping of such responses. 

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Dr. Naftali Loewenthal

'Franz Kafka, Jiri Langer and Imagined Jewish Imagery in Kafka's Writings'

Naftali Loewenthal is Lecturer (Teaching) at the Dept of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL. He is author of Communicating the Infinite: the Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago, 1990) and Hasidism beyond Modernity, Studies in Habad Thought and History (Littmann Library).

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Holocaust survivor John Dobai

John Dobai, 89, lived through World War Two as a child in Nazi-occupied Budapest, Hungary.  In 1944, Germany invaded Hungary, quickly introduced harsh antisemitic policies and Mr. Dobai's father was sent to a forced labour camp. All Jewish people in Budapest were forced to live in ghettos, wear yellow stars of David on their clothes and could not go to school. As the Soviets neared the country, the Nazis and Hungarian fascists commenced a brutal campaign of killings against the 60,000 Jews living in the "international ghetto" of safehouses. Mr Dobai's grandparents were two of 45,000 Jewish people who were massacred by gunshot and drowning in the Danube river, and two aunts and a cousin, who was just 17, were also killed. He and his parents were saved when the Soviets took control of the city before the killings were complete.

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Pre-Passover Seminar 2024

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Dr. Naftali Loewenthal

'Wicked sons (and Daughters) in Jewish thought'

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Dr. Israel Sandman

'Personal Liberation: Basic dynamics'

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Rabbi Professor David Golonkin

'What can we learn from illuminated Haggadot?'

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Professor Shalom Sabar

'The Sarajevo Haggadah'

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Professor Chaim Saiman

‘The Fifth Question: When Do We Eat?’

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Hilary, 2024

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Daniel Revach

'Seven.Ten: a poetry project for the victims of the 7th of October'

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Rabbi Yaron Nisenholz

 

'Purim and the Reacceptance of the Torah'

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Rabbi Shabtai Rappoprt

 

'Torah and science'

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Rabbi David Samson

'Philosophy of first Chief Rabbi of British mandate Palestine, Rabbi Kook'

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Dr. Isaac Herskowitz

'Being human during war: self reflections'

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Professor Martin Goodman

'Herod the Great and his sons' 

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Isaac Meyers memorial lecture

 

 

 

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Screenwriter of the film 'Golda' - Nicholas Martin

 

'Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War'

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Rabbi Chaim Miller

 

'Vision to Art: Mystical Inspiration and the Creative Process'

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Professor Edith Elkind 

 

'Social choices: how to select a committee fairly? '

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Professor Colin Mayer CBE

 

' Capitalism and Crises: How to fix them'

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Professor Saul Smilansky

' What is Crazy Ethics and why does it matter?'

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Michaelmas 2023

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Professor Susanne Marten-Finnes

'The Emergence of a Sephardic Community in late 16th-Century Poland'

Susanne is a Professor of Applied Linguistics (Emerita) at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Portsmouth. Her academic career began with a PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where Susanne became interested in the study of literary activities and periodical culture at the centres of Jewish scholarship in Central and Eastern Europe. 

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Professor Zoe Waxman

'Testimony as a Response to Mass Atrocity'

Prof. Waxman has been awarded the title of Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She was educated at the universities of York, Warwick, and Oxford and was previously a lecturer in history at Mansfield College, Oxford, and then lecturer and fellow in Holocaust Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely on gender, genocide, and the history of ideas. Her most recent book was Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017). Her next book will be Motherhood: A Holocaust History.

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Yossi Klein Halevi

'Israel at war and what October 7 means to the future of the Jewish people'

 

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Perl Grunzweig memorial lecture

 

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Prof. Oren Gazal

'Incarceration Rates in Israel and Judges' Biases'

Oren Gazal-Ayal served as the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa, currently, he is a visiting fellow at All-Souls College at the University of Oxford. He heads the Center for the Study of Crime, Law, and Society at the University. He serves as the vice chair of the public committee for the prevention of false convictions and as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Minister of Justice for Criminal Procedure and Evidence Law. He is also the former president of the Israeli Law and Economics Association.

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Pre-Chanukah Seminar in Jewish Studies - Yom Limmud 

Rabbi Eli Brackman

'The basic mitzvah of Chanukah: A study in the manuscript of the Talmud at the Bodleian Library (Opp. Add. fol. 23)'

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Dr. Ros Abramsky

'The four dimensions of heaven'

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Ari Deller (Philosophy, Oxford)

 

'Arguments about the existence of G‑d' 

 

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Elan Traum (English, Oxford)

'Jewish responses to attempts of assimilation'

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Giovani Truong (Yiddish, MSt, Oxford)

'Yiddish literature on Chanukah'

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Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman

'Demystifying Jewish Mysticism: Finding Light in Darkness'

Avraham Arieh Trugman has over forty-five years of experience in the field of Jewish education. He was a founding member of Moshav Meor Modiim in 1976, where he served as the Director of the Center of Jewish Education, which ran yearly programs for over 5,000 participants from over 25 countries. In 1988, Rabbi Trugman and his wife took the position of Regional Directors of NCSY in Denver, Colorado. The Trugmans returned to Israel in 1995 and are now the Directors of Ohr Chadash: New Horizons in Jewish Experience, a dynamic program they created that has run programs for tens of thousands of participants. Their website, You-tube channel, SoundCloud, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram groups and Facebook have gotten millions of visits. Rabbi Trugman has written twenty-one books and produced nine music discs of original music. 

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Professor Drew Weissman

Nobel Prize Laureate for Medicine 2023

'The Covid vaccine was just the tip of the iceberg…the breathtaking potential of mRNA therapeutics'

Drew Weissman  M.D., Ph.D. is a professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He received his graduate degrees from Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Weissman, in collaboration with Dr. Katalin Karikó, discovered the ability of modified nucleosides in RNA to suppress activation of innate immune sensors and increase the translation of mRNA containing certain modified nucleosides. The nucleoside-modified mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccine platform Dr. Weissman’s lab created is used in the first 2 approved COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. They continue to develop other vaccines that induce potent antibody and T cell responses with mRNA–based vaccines. Dr. Weissman’s lab also develops methods to replace genetically deficient proteins, edit the genome, and specifically target cells and organs with mRNA-LNPs, including lung, heart, brain, CD4+ cells, all T cells, and bone marrow stem cells.

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Professor Robert A Harris 

'The Origin of Peshat'

Robert A. Harris is professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at The Jewish Theological Seminary, teaching courses in biblical literature and commentary, particularly medieval Jewish biblical exegesis. Dr. Harris is an expert in the history of medieval biblical exegesis. His most recent book is Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency: Commentaries on Amos, Jonah (with Selections from Isaiah and Ezekiel). TEAMS Commentary Series. Kalamazoo, MI:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. In 2004 he published a book in the Brown Judaic Studies series, Discerning Parallelism: A Study in Northern French Medieval Jewish Biblical Exegesis. In addition, he has published many articles and reviews in both American and Israeli journals. His dissertation (1997) was titled The Literary Hermeneutic of Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency.  He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled The Reinvention of Reading in the 12th Century Renaissance. Dr. Harris’s most recent publication is “Sexual Orientation in the Presentation of Joseph’s Character in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature,” AJS Review 43:1 (Spring, 2019)

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Dr. Joseph O'Hara (Oxford)

‘Hebrew Micrography: A uniquely Jewish art form?’

Dr Joseph O’Hara is a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. He works on the international project The history of the Jewish book in the Islamicate world (Oxford–LMU Munich) and is a member of Hebrew Palaeography Album, a major new initiative to produce a large-scale online repository of specimens of medieval Hebrew handwritings. He has presented on digital palaeography and also convenes the OCHJS Medieval Hebrew reading group.

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Dr. Richard Schwartz

' Maintaining Happiness During Disaster?'

Robert M. Schwartz, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and former assistant professor who did pioneering research on positive and negative emotions. In addition to scientific articles on positive psychology, he has published social and political commentaries in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jerusalem Post, Arutz Sheva, Christian Science Monitor, the American Thinker, and others

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Professor Sir Bernard Silverman FRS

'What is Modern Slavery and how can we act against it?'

Sir Bernard Silverman is a statistician whose research has ranged widely across many aspects and applications of statistics.  He gained his PhD from Cambridge in 1978, and has held senior academic posts at a number of universities.  He was Master of St Peter’s College from 2003 to 2009 and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office from 2010 to 2017, during which time his work played a pivotal role in the Modern Slavery Act 2015.   His current activities encompass geospatial and location data, the fight against modern slavery and child sexual violence, official statistics, security, and science and technology for policy, business and government.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society, and has won leading awards for his work.

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High Holidays Seminar 2023

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Avi B.

'What is the nature of Rosh Hashanah?'

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Rabbi Eli Brackman

'Maimonides on the sound of the Shofar'

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Professor Rabbi Efraim Kanarfogel

'The Literary Artistry of Rashi and the Tosafists in Their Piyyutim for the Eve of Rosh HaShanah'

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Dr. Naftali Loewenthal

University College London

'Teachings on repentance in Chabad thought'

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Dr. Israel Sandman

'The source of the Divine Kingship'

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Dr. Daniel Rand

'Teshuva: obligation or opportunity?'

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Prof. Rabbi Naftali Rothenberg

'Rosh Hashana: the day of the creation'

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