Almost immediately after learning that the unique Jewish adult education center HaMaqom would be closing, Rachel and David Biale Jewish educators with links to the Berkeley institution since its founding in the 1970s knew they had to do something.
“Lehrhaus has been what I would call the crown jewel of the Bay Area Jewish community for 47 years,” David Biale said, referring to the center’s former name for 45 of those years (it was changed to HaMaqom | The Place in 2019). “It fulfills a very important need in the community. To see it disappear feels just wrong.”
Founded as Lehrhaus Judaica in 1974, HaMaqom announced in a June 17 press release that it would be permanently shutting its doors at the end of the summer. Board president Lisa Douglass said at the time that the decision to dissolve the nonprofit had been “extraordinarily difficult,” adding that she believed it was “not the end [but] a new beginning for our programs, staff, and extraordinary educators.”
Fifty years ago, a radical Jewish sit-in brought the S F Federation to a halt
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Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of antisemitism. She also serves on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin and on the Board of Trustees of Trinity College.
Her numerous publications include
Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and “A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement,” which appeared in the
George Prochnik.
Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. pp. 336. $26.00 (Hardcover)
Heinrich Heine was the first Jew to become a cultural icon in Germany. While Moses Mendelssohn achieved fame as a philosopher in the German Enlightenment, Heine’s poetry was beloved by a much wider circle of the culture. His “Lorelei,” an ode to the personified siren of the Rhine was so iconic that the Nazis, who burned his books, had no choice but to preserve the poem but to label its author “unknown.” While Heine converted to Christianity in 1825 (part of a wave of such conversions by the first generation of German Jews to attend university or otherwise partake in German society), he never abandoned his identity as a Jew, even as he gave it a most idiosyncratic definition.
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