In December 1966, Austro-Hungarian born Israeli author Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887–1970) received the Nobel Prize in literature—the only author writing in Hebrew to receive that distinguished honor. Rabbi Jeffrey Saks will trace how Agnon’s remarkable acceptance speech vividly expresses the intertwining of personal destiny, Jewish history, and the art of storytelling. Standing before the crowned heads of Europe, Agnon recounted his life, not merely as a biographical sketch but as a narrative shaped by the ...

Professor Rachel Elior’s writings have stimulated lively discussions among scholars in her areas of research. These include, among others, early Jewish mysticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Messianism, Hasidism, and the role of women in Jewish culture. In her talk for the Taubman Symposia, presented as an online webinar, she will speak about the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a way of understanding the deep oppositional diversity of Jewish culture in Late Antiquity. Her ...

Within the walls of the well-known Warsaw Ghetto uprising, another kind of resistance was mounted, not by combatants, but rather by a group of poets, artists, and historians known as the Oyneg Shabbes collective. Far less known than the Ghetto, that literary and artistic circle composed and ultimately buried thousands of documents attesting to the suffering under Nazi oppression. Among those documents, recovered after the war, was a manuscript of weekly sermons delivered during three ...