Naomi Seidman

Recently, Naomi Seidman, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, traveled to Warsaw in commemoration of the uprising and the publication of her father's diary into Polish. Upon her return, the j profiled the important work her father did. An excerpt follows:

“My father was the archivist of the pre-war Warsaw Jewish community,” Seidman said in an interview. “He wrote in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, and was a Ph.D. of Jewish history.”

Naomi Seidman, Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies, received an invitation to Warsaw by Anna Cialowicz, the Polish translator of Hillel Seidman's “Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto.” Hillel was a Jewish historian, Yiddish journalist, and community activist, in addition to being Naomi's late father. The diary will be published in Poland this spring, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt of World War II.

Participants for the Center for Jewish Studies' and Center for Islamic Studies' annual Madrasa-Midrasha Day of Learning gathered at Easton Hall o

Distinguished Faculty Lecture, November 8, 2012

James Noel, H. Eugene Farlough, Jr. Chair of African American Christianity and Professor of American Religion, San Francisco Theological School.

Respondent: Naomi Seidman, Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union.

Rev. Dr. James Noel, the H. Eugene Farlough, Jr. Chair of African American Christianity and Professor of American Religion at SFTS, will deliver this year's Distinguished Faculty Lecture on November 8. His lecture is entitled “Black Religion in the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution: Excavating the ‘Sublime.’”

It was standing room only in Easton Hall for the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies' lively November 29 conference “Formations of Orthodoxy,” which explored Orthodox Jewish cultural formations in interwar Poland and post-Holocaust America.
The evening ended with a keynote talk by Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland.

Literary critics and theologians often talk about "interpretive communities" and "capable readers." Who has the ability--and even the right--to interpret a text, especially a sacred text that bears authority in a particular religious tradition?

Last month I participated in a weeklong interreligious Theology Conference at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem along with Naomi Seidman (Director, Center for Jewish Studies), Munir Jiwa (Director, Center for Islamic Studies), and Nargis Virani (visiting faculty, Center for Islamic Studies). The theme of the conference was “What makes a good person?” Small groups involving participants from all three traditions studied key sacred texts together, working both in the original languages and in English translation.