Soup'er Study -- Winter 2022-23!
Please join us for one, two or all three speakers.
Dinner at 6:00 p.m. ($12/person)
Speaker at 6:45 p.m.
Monday, December 19, 2022
Cantor Richard Cohn
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Wonder of Music
In his essay, "The Vocation of the Cantor," published in
The Insecurity of Freedom (1966), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel posits, "The only language that seems to be compatible with the wonder and mystery of being is the language of music." We'll explore the conceptual basis of this assertion and listen to musical selections from Jewish sources in support of Heschel's claim. We'll also devote attention to the interpretation of text as a central tenet of Heschel's thinking about the musical language of prayer.
Monday, January 16, 2023
Author Brad Snyder
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Marking of the Liberal Establishment
The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter―Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice―is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court’s principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true..
Organized around presidential administrations and major political and world events, this definitive biography chronicles Frankfurter’s impact on American life. As a young government lawyer, he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Holmes. As a Harvard law professor, he earned fame as a civil libertarian, Zionist, and New Deal power broker. As a justice, he hired the first African American law clerk and helped the Court achieve unanimity in outlawing racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education.
Monday, February 20
Dr. David Barak Gorodetsky
Israel and American-Jewry: Religion, Peoplehood and Politics
In this talk we explore the past, present and future of the Israel and American-Jewry relationship. Israel and North America serve as the two leading centers of Jewish demography, identity and existence, representing the two major Jewish responses to modernity – Zionism as a form of modern nationalism on the one hand, and integration into a liberal western society on the other. Their relations respond to this initial divide, while at the same time fostering a sense of collective Jewish peoplehood, based on culture, identity and a sense of a shared history and fate.
