Spring 2024
Fall 2023
The 2023 Israel-Hamas War:
A Historical Perspective
on Causes and Consequences
Tuesday November 21, 2023
a conversation with
Derek Penslar
William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History
Director, Center for Jewish Studies
and
Noah Feldman
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law
Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law
Wasserstein 1010 | 5-630pm
The Future of the Israeli Economy
Wednesday November 15, 2023
A Conversation with
Lawrence H. Summers
Moderated by Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis
Wasserstein 1010 | 7-830pm
Postponed
Event Archive
Spring 2023
| WEDNESDAY 02.01.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | The Politics of Expertise in Designing the Cable Car to Jerusalem’s Old City Guy Priver, SJD candidate at Harvard Law School An ambitious plan to build a cable car to the Old City in Jerusalem is now underway. Departing from the western commercial area of the city, it is designed to commute thousands of visitors every hour to Jewish Heritage Sites including the Western Wall. The ideological, political and distributional struggles surrounding the project are numerous. However, they become somehow veiled by the policy debates and the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to dismiss several petitions against the project, translating the controversy into a question of planning expertise. Analyzing this case study and others, my research explores the ways in which law shapes heritage preservation in the conflicted Old City and asks what is the role of international law in advancing a more inclusive and equitable approach in this field. |
| TUESDAY 02.07.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Litigating Palestinian Rights in the Israeli Supreme Court: Legitimation or Resistance? (co-sponsored with the Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School) Rabea Eghbariah, SJD candidate at Harvard Law School This talk explores cause lawyering and strategic litigation of Palestinian rights before the Israeli Supreme Court. It reflects on the fundamental question of bringing Palestinian cases before the Israeli Court: is it a strategy that ultimately contributes to legitimizing fundamentally unjust policies, or is it a medium of legal resistance? How does the Israeli Supreme Court respond to the legal claims of Palestinians? Are we witnessing a major change in the ideological composition and jurisprudence of the Court in recent years? What value and potential does bringing Palestinian rights cases before Israeli courts have? These questions will be explored from the perspective of a lawyer who led major Palestinian rights cases before the Court. |
| WEDNESDAY 02.08.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Protecting the Interests of Capital Market Investors in a Multicultural Society Nitzan Wulkan, Senior Prosecutor & Head of Financial Enforcement, Securities Department in the Tel Aviv District Attorney’s Office, Wexner Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-2023 Israel’s low-interest environment has created an incentive for “alternative investments” in online trading platforms and while these platforms raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli investors in the last decade, they did so based on false promises of imaginary interest rates. The initial lack of regulatory oversight in the field created fertile ground for criminal activity, including securities fraud, theft, and large-scale international money laundering offenses. In this lecture, I will discuss the comprehensive legal measures Israel has taken to address these problems and the unique challenges of creating and implementing effective financial enforcement in a multicultural society. |
| WEDNESDAY 02.15.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | A New Perspective on Israel’s Early Constitutional Debate Aviram Shahal, Visiting Research Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, SJD candidate at University of Michigan Law School In this lecture I examine how demographic concerns about the political power of the Arab minority population impacted Israel’s decision not to adopt a constitution in the early years of statehood. |
| WEDNESDAY 03.22.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | The Jewish Vow Between Story and Law, Bible and Mishnah Miryam Segal, 2022-2023 Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law at Harvard Law School The vow, or neder, is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, found in poetry and wisdom literature, stories and laws. Even sometime-readers of the Bible will have encountered it in the stories of Jacob, Hannah, and Jepthah; in Psalms and Proverbs, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The third century Mishnah devotes an entire tractate to it and stories and rules of vows appear in other tractates as well. But in those two important sources for Jewish law, neder‘s definitions are dramatically different. This talk will explore neder in between biblical law and the Mishnah, and between rules and stories, to try to capture some of the meaning–practical, political, theological–in each of these definitions and in this metamorphosis. |
| TUESDAY 03.28.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Resurrecting Jewish Endowments: A Journey into History via the Rabbinical Courts Rachel Shakargy, Senior Supervisor of Jewish Endowments, Gender Equality Committee of the Administration of the Rabbinical Courts, Wexner Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-2023 The Rabbinical Jewish endowments are properties dedicated to specific public causes by individuals over the past 250 years. Among these causes are hospitals, yeshivas, synagogues, and many welfare and social causes. With the skyrocketing property value increase, the assets are now worth many billions of dollars. In 2018 I was the first female who entered the Rabbinical Courts as a senior jurist appointed to serve as the Inspector of Rabbinical Endowments. In this lecture I explore the future of these endowments and how they will be apportioned. |
| WEDNESDAY 03.29.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Was the Revival of Meir Kahane through Itamar Ben Gvir Inevitable?: Thoughts on Zionism Today Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Historical inevitability is not a popular notion among scholars. Yet there is little debate that the rise of Israeli parliamentarian Itamar Ben Gvir and his far-right party has brought Meir Kahane, maligned Jewish militant and ousted Knesset member, back into focus. Is this an aberration or can we say it was predictable? How are Kahane and Ben Gvir similar, and how are they different? How much has changed in Israel today from the late 1980s when Kahane was removed from his post by a “Racism Law” supported by Knesset members, right and left? What does this far-right government say about the state of Zionism and the future of Israel as a democratic state? These are some of the questions that will be examined and discussed in this presentation. |
| FRIDAY 04.14.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Constitutional Crisis in Israel? a conversation with Noah Feldman and Raef Zreik ZOOM RECORDING |
| MONDAY 04.17.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Feeling like a Rabbi: Perspectives on State-Made Halakhah Nitsan Plitman, SJD candidate at Harvard Law School Although Israel does not have one official religion, it has constitutionally declared its devotion to Jewish values and proclaimed its nationality as Jewish. In this talk I propose that this constitutional structure, coupled with various other legal mechanisms, has led to a constant incorporation of pure halakhic materials into the state’s secular and democratic hands. I would like to explore the manners by which Halakhah is shaped and molded by the state and ask whether, in this process, state officials, parliamentarians, government members, and judges function just like Rabbis or Jewish decisors (Poskim); and whether, subsequently, the body of traditional Jewish law itself is being changed as it gains additional layers of Jewish law-making that become the presiding Religio-Secular ruling for the entirety of the state of Israel. |
| WEDNESDAY 04.19.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Israeli Law in the Age of Decolonization Rafi Stern, Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU Law School, JD-Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University 1948 saw the end of the British mandate for Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel, the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli War, and the Nakba. 1948 was also a pivotal moment in the formal end of the British Empire and the emergence of independent post-colonial states. This talk will examine how the nascent Israeli state adopted and adapted British mandatory law and what this can tell us about Israel’s place within and without the global processes of decolonization and the emergence of post-colonial states. |
| THURSDAY 04.20.2023 12:15-1:15pm Hauser 101 | Between Gender Equality and Religious Accommodation in Israel Today Yofi Tirosh, Associate Professor and Vice Dean at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law Israel’s constitutional documents define it as “a Jewish and democratic state.” One of the most challenging and contested aspects of this oxymoronic formula has always been gender equality. Recently, this tension has manifested in a new way, as sex segregation is practiced and normalized in public spaces such as academic studies, job training, the service sector, and leisure activities. Understood as a measure of religious accommodation or as an unpalatable yet necessary means to increase ultra-Orthodox participation in the labor and consumption markets, such re-introduction of sex as a relevant factor in public settings raises a new set of challenging questions about voluntariness, the legality of “separate but equal” in the context of sex, and the distinction between public and private in multicultural contexts. Prof. Tirosh will describe the dilemma from a socio-legal perspective, critically examining the dominant paradigms governing the discourse around sex segregation. |
Spring 2022
David Yosef “Training Sephardic dayanim (Jewish Religious Judges) in the State of Israel”
February 15, 2022
Leslie Ginsparg Klein “Bais Yaakov Education and Culture Across North America”
February 22, 2022
Nota Schiller “The Innovation of the Baal Teshuva Yeshiva”
March 1, 2022
Ari Marburger “Heter Iska 2.0”
March 8, 2022
Yael Landman “The Rabbis’ Four Bailees: From Cuneiform Law to Classical Judaism”
March 22, 2022
Shmuel Hain “‘The Law Follows the Lenient View in Mourning’: A Reconsideration of the Talmudic Evidence”
March 29, 2022
Idan Dershowitz “The Prehistory of Biblical Law”
April 5, 2022
Daniel Boyarin “Bad Faith: Why the Jews Aren’t a Religion”
May 4, 2022
Hannah Lebovits “From Shtetl Streets to Council Seats”
May 10, 2022
Esti Rosenberg “Torah Learning in an Israeli Beit Midrash for Women”
May 19, 2022
Edward Fram “The Inherent Problematics of Codifying Jewish Law”
June 1, 2022
Fall 2021
Avishay Ben-Sasson Gordis, “Militarism: The Israeli Case“
Oct 26, 2021
Event Recording: https://harvard.zoom.us/rec/share/myoEl7XmDjpXkqdncvOStUStRcsClaEr-A558rn9Mz_FgUN-hI5I61wdM3v_lTRg.YFvCnekco_e7jRYv
Yael Ronen and David Kretzmer, “The Occupation of Justice”
Nov 2, 2021
Event Recording: https://vimeo.com/642300765
Ari Bergmann, “Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevy and the Development of the Oral Tradition in ‘Dorot ha-Rishonim’”
Nov 3, 2021
Event Recording:https://vimeo.com/642120436
Shaul Magid, ‘To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest’: Meir Kahane and the Ethics of Violence”
Nov 10, 2021
Event Recording: https://vimeo.com/644490889
Tamar Menashe, “Between Rabbis and Lawyers: Jewish Litigants and Halakha at Germany’s Imperial Supreme Court”
Nov 17, 2021
Noya Rimalt, “Gender Segregation and Israel’s New Multicultural Legal Challenges”
Nov 23, 2021
Event Recording: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/652556232
Nomi Stolzenberg, “What Is (the) Law in Kiryas Joel?”
Dec 7, 2021
Event Recording: https://vimeo.com/654709253
Spring 2021
FALL 2020
Due to Covid, Spring 2020 events cancelled as of March 10, 2020
Fall 2019
Spring 2019
Fall 2018
Spring 2018
Fall 2017
2011-2017
