November 16, 2009

‘The Jewish Jesus’ is topic of this week’s Lavy Colloquium

The Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Program in Jewish Studies in the Krieger School is hosting several international scholars this week during its fifth annual Lavy Colloquium, which examines ideas related to Jewish civilization. This year’s topic is The Jewish Jesus, and the conference will take place Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 18 and 19, in the Smokler Center for Jewish Life, Homewood campus.

Presenters from different disciplines will discuss various images of Jesus in ancient, medieval and modern Judaism, and will focus on representations of Jesus in Jewish philosophy, literature, visual arts and culture.

The scholars will come from institutions near and far, including the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies in the Theology Department at Loyola University in Baltimore; Princeton University; the University of California, Berkeley; the Hebrew University and the Israel Museum, both in Jerusalem; Tel Aviv University; and the Ben Gurion University in Israel.

Speakers from Johns Hopkins include Yitzhak Melamed, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, and Neta Stahl, the organizer of the colloquium and an assistant professor of comparative and modern Hebrew literature in the Humanities Center. Melamed will discuss “Christ According to the Spirit: Spinoza, Jesus and the Infinite Intellect.” Stahl’s talk is titled “We Left Yeshu: On Three 20th-Century Hebrew Poets’ Longing for Jesus.”

The event is open to the public, though an RSVP is requested by e-mailing motterb @jhu.edu.