Our Golden Age: American Judaism, In Transition
Join the Robbins Collection and Research Center and the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law
and Israel Studies on Wednesday, April 3 in Room 110 at the Berkeley Law Building for the 2024
Robbins Lecture in Jewish Law, Thought, and Identity. The event will begin at 6:00pm with a
dinner to follow.
This year’s lecture will be given by Yehuda Kurtzer, President, Shalom Hartman Institute. Daniel
Levy, 2022–2023 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor and Associate Professor, Former Dean,
Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University
American Judaism is at an inflection point between the successes of the past and the anxieties
of the future. The political, economic, and ideological conditions of postwar liberalism in the
20th century enabled many Jews to flourish in America, and produced a coherent American
Judaism that intertwined American and Jewish values. Our changing world is testing this vitality
and coherence and forcing essential questions: Are liberalism, American Jewish values, and
Zionism compatible? How does American Judaism respond to the growing threats of
polarization and hyper-partisanship? Can “the Jewish community” survive as a collective
enterprise? Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, will consider the
calculations that produced the American Judaism that we have inherited, and offer a new
framework for how American Judaism might continue to thrive into the future.