23 Jul
Latest

A Queer Gentile in the Beit Midrash

As I was shown into the interfaith spiritual center of the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel to my first Beit Midrash (house of learning), I had no idea what I was getting into. Initially drawn in by the title of "Various Positions: Sex, Superstition and Deviant Behavior in the Talmud,” I still had plenty of reasons to doubt whether this program was for me. Rattling around in my mind was the obvious question: What was I—an atheist, non-Jewish, gay man, with no knowledge of Hebrew or Aramaic—doing at a reading of sacred Jewish texts normally reserved exclusively for straight male observant Jews? If I had been born a woman I would have fit precisely the radical bill—totally inverting the intended audience of Talmudic texts. But this was no ordinary Beit Midrash. Our instructor, Rabbi Benay Lappe, is...

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29 May
Culture, History, Latest

Spinoza, the Modern-Day Radical

You probably already know that 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was radical for his time—from his notorious excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community at age 23 to his proclamation of “the end of Jewish politics,” in his 1677 Theological-Political Treatise, which was written in Latin rather than vernacular Dutch to avoid censorship by Dutch authorities. But University of Chicago political scientist Julie Cooper recently extended Spinoza’s rebel status into the present, defending the radical implications of his thought for Jewish identity and politics today at a lecture held earlier this month at the University of Chicago. Spinoza remains, to this day, one of the most radical thinkers in Western philosophy and political theory. Condemning the religious superstition and government censorship of his time, Spinoza issued one of the earliest philosophical calls for complete freedom of thought and...

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