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“What is Zionism’s Role in North American Jewish Life Today?”
A Public Dialogue
Featuring
Rabbi Deborah Waxman, President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
and
Susan Herbst, President of the University of Connecticut
April 23, 2015
7:00-8:30 pm
Dodd Center Konover Auditorium
On April 23, 2015, the State of Israel will be marking the 67th anniversary of its establishment. The anniversary comes at a particularly complex and challenging moment in the history of Israel and in the evolving history of the relationship between Jews living in Israel and in the Diaspora. At this pivotal time, and in the immediate aftermath of an especially fraught Israeli national election that has placed news strains on US-Israel relations, we invite you to join us in a conversation between UConn President Susan Herbst and the President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Rabbi Waxman and President Herbst will discuss some of the most pressing challenges facing the contemporary American Jewish community: post-Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish community; the importance for American Jewish communities to articulate visions for themselves that may affirm Zionism but also imagine a vital Jewish life in North America; the meaning of—and possible responses to—the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism; the nature of responsible political, religious, and civil discourse, especially concerning deeply held difference.
About Our Speaker
Rabbi Deborah Waxman is the first woman rabbi to head a Jewish congregational union and lead a Jewish seminary. She graduated cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University, where she was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She received rabbinical ordination and a Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters from RRC in 1999. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and received a Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowship to support her graduate work. She earned a Ph.D. in American Jewish History from Temple University in May 2010; her dissertation was titled “Faith and Ethnicity in American Judaism: Reconstructionism as Ideology and Institution, 1935–1959.”