1) A Field Guide to Haredi Society
2) The Case of the Ugly Bride: The Kotzker Rebbe and the Way of Truth
3) The Hero Who Wasn't: The Mei HaShiloach on “Doubt"
4) Shining Darkness & Pitch-Black Light:
Reading the Plagues with the Slonimer Rebbe
5) My [Father’s] Name is Asher Lev: Reflections on Art and “Ultra-orthodoxy”
The landscape of so-called ultra-Orthodoxy is richer and more diverse than it first seems. Its various sects and parties represent a spectrum at least as nuanced and varied as the spectrum of non-Orthodox Jewry, both ideologically and theologically. What is appealing about Hassidism is, in fact, its theological radicalism. The third generation of the Hassidic movement produced some of the most radical thinkers the Jewish world has ever known. Each rebbe— each charismatic, popular leader—had his particular "way," and each was sometimes extreme, often startling, and always strikingly postmodern in his theological formulations. A glimpse behind the curtain at the world of the rebbes, a world that often, surprisingly, subverts the world of the rabbis and which certainly stands in contrast to the "secular world" beyond the borders of the various communities. Learn how the speaker made his way from one world to the other, and what it might mean to be "at home" in both.
This offering can be structured as a 3, 4, or 5 part lecture series.