Possibility and Peril: Jews and the Russian Revolution

Nov 24, 2025 By David Fishman | Public Event video | Video Lecture

The Russian Revolution promised liberation and equality, but for Jews its legacy was far more complex. Dr. David Fishman examined the Jewish socialist movement known as the Bund, the revolutionary role of figures like Leon Trotsky, and Lenin’s complex position on the “Jewish question.” Through images and historical context, we’ll consider how the Revolution promised liberation even as it imposed new constraints, and how radical politics reshaped Jewish identity and community in the Soviet era.

Finding Our Way (and God’s) in the World

Nov 21, 2025 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Toledot

What do you make of our matriarch Rebecca? Certainly she is the boldest and most independent of the mothers. When as a girl she sees a stranger at the well, she rushes to water his caravan of thirsty camels, and then invites him to stay at her house. When offered the chance to travel with this man back to a distant land and a mysterious husband, she volunteers without hesitation. When her pregnancy becomes difficult, she seeks out God and challenges God with the bold question, “Why do I need this?” When her husband seems ready to bless the wrong son, she quickly conspires to rearrange the action so that Jacob will receive the primary blessing. In all of these actions, Rebecca is seen as a woman of strength and decisiveness.

Progress, Regress, and Transformation: Hermann Cohen’s Ezekiel as a Revolutionary Prophet

Nov 17, 2025 By Shira Billet

The prophet-priest Ezekiel prophesied, after the Babylonian exile, about the restoration of the temple and the sacrificial rite. In the Nineteenth-century, both Christian Bible critics and liberal Jewish scholars held negative views of Ezekiel, especially compared to Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos, who famously prophesied against temple sacrifice, in favor of ethical obligations to the vulnerable.

Death and Dignity

Nov 14, 2025 By Gordon Tucker | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah

Parashat Hayyei Sarah begins with the death of the matriarch Sarah. Interestingly, it is the first time that a death enters into the Torah’s narrative. In all of the genealogies from Adam and Eve through the lives of Abraham and Sarah, deaths were matter-of-factly recorded with the simple word וימת. And of course, there was the global death and destruction during the Flood. But the death of Sarah is the first one that generates a story, and a template, as it were, for how to deal with death—burial, eulogizing, mourning, and the subsequent continuation of life.

Rachel Cohn – Senior Sermon (RS ’26)

Nov 14, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Hayyei Sarah

Hayyei Sarah All Class of 2026 Senior Sermons

Peshat: The Reinvention of Reading During the Twelfth Century Renaissance

Nov 10, 2025 By Robert Harris | Public Event video | Video Lecture

Dr. Robert Harris, Professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages, JTS

Beginning in the 9th century in the Arabic-speaking Sephardic world and continuing through the 12th century in northern France, Jewish scholars introduced a new approach to reading the Bible. Alongside the traditional Rabbinic midrashim that had guided Jewish understanding for generations, they began writing plain-sense commentaries known as peshat. Reading the Bible was never the same!

Recasting Lot’s Wife

Nov 7, 2025 By Rabbi Ayelet Cohen | Commentary | Vayera

In difficult times it’s natural to want to look back. Our memories can have a way of blurring the edges, so we remember things the way we have categorized them in our minds, without the details that don’t fit our story. If we’re remembering warmly, we may blur out the parts of the story that don’t hold up; if it’s a bitter memory we may leave out the parts that included kindness or helpfulness.

Before the Print Revolution: Manuscripts and the World They Made

Nov 3, 2025 By Marcus Mordecai Schwartz | Public Event video | Video Lecture

Before the print revolution transformed how Jews accessed and spread knowledge, handwritten manuscripts shaped Jewish intellectual and spiritual life. In this session, Dr. Mordecai Schwartz explores the quiet revolutions embedded in manuscript culture—from scribal innovation to marginal commentary—and what they reveal about continuity, creativity, and change before Gutenberg. This session will highlight pieces on display at the Grolier Club of NYC in the exhibit, “Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library,” which features over 100 manuscript and book offerings from The Library.

Zachary Bernstein-Rothberg – Senior Sermon (RS ’26)

Nov 3, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Vayera

Reflecting on Ibn Ezra’s reading of the Akedah, Zachary Bernstein-Rothberg reimagines Abraham and Isaac’s journey as a model for healing and solidarity, urging us to walk together through pain and renewal.

Claiming Our Ancestors: The Case of Terah

Oct 31, 2025 By Eliezer B. Diamond z”l | Commentary | Lekh Lekha

For all of us, there is no going without leaving; and so it was for Abraham: “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and the house of your father to the land that I shall show you” (Gen. 12:1) [emphasis added]. And when we leave places, we leave people as well. When Abraham departed for Canaan he left behind, among others, his father Terah. And it was always thus: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother” (2:24).

Sara Birnbaum – Senior Sermon (RS ’26)

Oct 31, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Lekh Lekha

Lekh Lekha All Class of 2026 Senior Sermons

Revolutionizing Belonging: Disability Inclusion and the Future of Jewish Camp

Oct 27, 2025 By Abigail Uhrman | Public Event video | Video Lecture

Jewish summer camps are bright spots of innovation in disability inclusion—expanding access, investing in specialized staff, and reimagining what true belonging can look like. But the impact of these programs extends far beyond the individual camper with disabilities.

Species Purity and the Great Flood

Oct 24, 2025 By Daniel Nevins | Commentary | Noah

Omnicide is a dramatic move, on that we can all agree. But what causes the Creator to grow violently disgusted with the creatures that had just recently been praised as “good” and blessed with fertility? JTS Bible Professor Emeritus Alan Cooper has suggested that it was interspecies breeding of human women with divine creatures that angered God, and that it was Noah’s pure genealogy (“perfect in his generations”) that set him apart for salvation. The ancient Rabbis had a similar idea—it was crossbreeding between species that angered God and caused God to reboot with specimens that were still arranged “according to their families” (Gen. 8:19; see Midrash Tanhuma, Buber ed., Noah 11).

Noa Rubin – Senior Sermon (RS ’26)

Oct 23, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Noah

Noah All Class of 2026 Senior Sermons

Monotheism: Evolution or Revolution

Oct 20, 2025 By Benjamin D. Sommer | Public Event video | Video Lecture

Professor Benjamin Sommer discussed the debate among modern scholars about the origin of biblical monotheism: did this religious idea develop gradually among the ancient Israelites during the biblical period, or did it appear suddenly early in Israelite history? To what extent were the theological beliefs of the biblical authors radically innovative, and to what extent did they display continuity with the religions of the Israelites neighbors in Canaan, Babylonia, Assuria, and Egypt?

Making Meaning From Chaos

Oct 17, 2025 By Mychal Springer | Commentary | Bereishit

The opening words of B’reishit are exhilarating. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Each day, as God creates the world and everything in it, we are told that it is good. On the sixth day, when God creates people, we are told that it is very good. From the chaos comes order, goodness, and endless possibilities. But the parashah ends with the world on the verge of destruction: “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened”

Sarah Rockford – Senior Sermon (RS ’26)

Oct 16, 2025 By JTS Senior Sermon | Commentary | Senior Sermon | Bereishit

Bereshit All Class of 2026 Senior Sermons

Impermanence, Empathy, and the Shadow of Faith

Oct 10, 2025 By Yitz Landes | Commentary | Sukkot

It can feel odd that just as it begins to get chilly, and just after the long High Holiday prayers may have left us wanting to simply stay home, we must go outside to sit in the sukkah—an impermanent dwelling that brings us closer to the elements. And it may seem odd that precisely at this moment of impermanence, the Jewish tradition places extra significance on the welcoming in of guests—hakhnasat orhim. Why is it that that we must now enter a place of discomfort? And why is it that we must be extra careful to welcome in guests at this time? In order to answer these questions, we can turn to the representation of Sukkot and its rituals in the Jewish mystical tradition, beginning with the Zohar.

Our Very Life

Oct 3, 2025 By Lilly Kaufman | Commentary | Ha'azinu

At the end of his life, with Joshua by his side, Moses begins his great, thunderous poem, Ha’azinu, summoning the heavens and the earth as witnesses to his powerful, angry message, as God commanded him to do in the preceding parashah, Vayelekh. And yet, in a one-verse reshut, a prayerful, wishful intention, preceding the central portion of his sermonic poem, he says that he wants his words to land lightly: “May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass” (Deut. 32:2). Then suddenly, the central angry theme emerges, and he calls the people “unworthy of [God], crooked, perverse” (32:5), “dull and witless” (32:6).

When It’s Easier to Hide: Jonah, Antisemitism, and Moral Courage

Sep 29, 2025 By Shuly Rubin Schwartz | Public Event video | Video Lecture | Yom Kippur

As we prepare for the Days of Awe, the Book of Jonah calls us not only to repentance, but to responsibility—especially in a fractured and fearful world. In this session, Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz explored Jonah’s reluctance to engage, his desire to retreat, and God’s challenge to him—and to us. The Book of Jonah summons us to engage and build bridges—even with those who may seem distant or hostile. This session engaged what it means to be brave and morally grounded when it would be easier to turn away—and how, like Jonah, each of us has the power to make a difference.

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