Please join us as the Center for Judaic & Middle Eastern Studies @ UConn-Stamford presents the first lecture in its Fall 2016 LUNCH AND LEARN series:
THE MARIA & ISHIER JACOBSON LECTURE
Was Equality for the Jews Central to the French Revolution? A Contrarian Analysis
- Dr. David Sorkin, Professor of Modern Jewish History, Yale University
Thursday, September 22nd, 12 noon - 1:30 pm , UConn-Stamford in the Auditorium (Room 109)
Lunch will be provided and the program is free for the UConn community, but advance registration is requested. Please register by calling (203) 251-9525 or emailing stamfordjudaicstudies@uconn.edu.
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David Sorkin joined the Yale History faculty in 2014. He is interested in finding new approaches to the intersection of Jewish and European history since the 16th century. He previously taught at Brown (1983-86), Oxford (1986-92), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1992-2011) and the City University of New York-Graduate Center (2011-14).
Sorkin has published several prominent works on Jewish studies. He first examined the formation of Jewish culture in the German states, which he came to understand as a “subculture.” The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987) won the Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Literary Award for History. In a commissioned study of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought -- Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) -- he emphasized the neglected Hebrew works. In the Sherman Lectures delivered at Manchester University (UK) he used comparison to remove the “Haskalah” (Jewish Enlightenment) from its conventional parochial setting. Those lectures were published as The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000). In his most recent book he crossed confessional boundaries and national borders to reconceive the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008), was featured in a New York Times’ “Beliefs” column (October 11, 2008, A21). He is currently writing a history of Jewish emancipation in Europe (tentative title: “Interminable Emancipation: European Jews and the Search for Equality, 1550-2000”).
He is the co-editor of three volumes. Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998) studies how individual Jews and families experienced major historical changes. New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001) emerged from the first international conference devoted to the subject. “What History Tells”: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004) is a tribute to his undergraduate teacher and mentor. He also served as Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), which won the National Jewish Book Award.
For more information, contact: CJMES at stamfordjudaicstudies@uconn.edu