The Yerushah Lecture

The annual Yerushah Lecture in the Faculty of Divinity was established with a benefaction from the Righteous Persons Foundation, created by Steven Spielberg from the proceeds of his 1993 film Schindler’s List. "Yerushah" is the Hebrew word for "heritage". The Yerushah Lecture is devoted to Jewish heritage in all its aspects, with an emphasis on the transmission of Jewish identity and values across the generations.

Thursday 22 February at 5 p.m.

2024 Yerushah Lecture 

Qohelet: A New Reading and a New Seeing
Professor Menachem Fisch and Debra Band

The Cambridge Faculty of Divinity is pleased to announce that the 2024 Yerushah Lecture will take place at 5 p.m. on Thursday 22 February, in the Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, West Road.  Professor Menachem Fisch (Tel Aviv University) and Debra Band will speak on ‘Qohelet: A New Reading and a New Seeing.’ All are welcome, and refreshments will be served following the lecture. 

The two speakers will be on drawing on their analysis from their recent book on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Baylor University Press, 2023). 

Menachem Fisch is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, TAU codirector of the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and senior fellow of the Goethe University Frankfurt’s Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. He is author of The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism (with Y. Benbaji) (Notre Dame, 2011), Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (Chicago, 2017), and Covenant of Confrontation: A Study of Non-Submissive Religiosity in Rabbinic Literature (Hebrew) (Bar-Ilan, 2019). 

Debra Band draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts and the Jewish textual tradition in her acclaimed illuminated manuscripts. She is the author and illuminator of The Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden (JPS, 2005), I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms (with Arnold J. Band) (JPS, 2007), Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah (with Arnold J. Band) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2012), and Kabbalat Shabbat: The Grand Unification (with Raymond P. Scheindlin) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2016), among other works. Her paintings have been widely exhibited across the United States and Canada.  

The annual Yerushah Lecture in the Faculty of Divinity was established with a benefaction from the Righteous Persons Foundation, created by Steven Spielberg from the proceeds of his 1993 film Schindler’s List. ‘Yerushah’ is the Hebrew word for ‘heritage’. The Yerushah Lecture is devoted to Jewish heritage in all its aspects, with an emphasis on the transmission of Jewish identity and values across the generations. 

Previous Lectures:

• 2022: Professor Ilana Pardes, ‘Changing Perspectives on the Song of Songs: Literal and Allegorical Loves.’
• 2021: Professor Martin Goodman, ‘Mission and toleration in Judaism.’
• 2019: Michael Rosen, ‘So They Call You Pisher!’: An exploration of a secular Jewish identity.
• 2017: Dr Diana Lipton, 'Legacy, Prognostication and Jews'.
• 2016: Nicholas de Lange, 'The poetry of Judaism: Translating a precious heritage'.
• 2015: Leon Rosselson, 'That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority'.
• 2014: George Steiner, 'The Roots of Darkness'.
• 2013, Antony Lerman, 'The revival of Jewish culture in Europe: real or imagined?'
• 2012, Norbert Samuelson, 'Light and Enlightenment: A Brief Comparative History of the Correlations Between Scientific and Rabbinic Conceptions of Light'.
• 2011: Robert Gibbs, 'Saved in Translation: Law and Love in German Jewish Thought'.
• 2010: David Novak, 'Was Spinoza the First Zionist?'
• 2008: Julia Neuberger, ‘On Being Jewish’.
• 2007: Marc Saperstein, 'Ploughshares into swords: marshalling the Jewish heritage in times of war'.
• 2006: Oliver Letwin MP, in conversation with Canon Robert Reiss.
• 2004: Robert Winston, 'Judaism and Science'.
• 2003: Daniel Snowman, 'The Hitler emigrés: the cultural impact on Britain of refugees from Nazism'.
• 2002: Claudia Roden, in conversation with Nick Lander, 'We are what we eat: Jewish identity and Jewish food'.
• 2001: Daniel Libeskind in conversation with Nicholas de Lange.
• 1999: Peter Ochs, 'Tradition, modernity, and the future of Jewish thought.'
• 1998: Stanislaw Krajewski, 'The revival of Jewish life in Poland'.
• 1997: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 'Judaism - From Survival to Heritage'.