Please join the Wagner College Chai Society for its fourth annual Jewish Culture Series, co-sponsored by the Staten Island Jewish Community Center.
The kick-off lecture, “Making the Jewish Spiritual and Making the Spiritual Jewish,” will be delivered by Columbia University Professor Ari Goldman on Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. at the Staten Island JCC, 1466 Manor Road (adjacent to Susan Wagner High School), Staten Island.
The second lecture, “Becoming a Spiritual Synagogue in a Post-Ethnic Era,” will be given by Rabbi Dr. Lawrence Hoffman on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 8 p.m. in Wagner College’s Spiro Hall, Room 5. The college is located on Howard Avenue at Campus Road in the Grymes Hill neighborhood of Staten Island.
Both lectures are free and open to the public. For more information about the Jewish Culture Series, contact Rabbi Dr. Abraham Unger, 718-390-3297, abe.unger@wagner.edu.
ARI L. GOLDMAN, one of the nation's leading religion journalists, is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of three books, including the best-selling The Search for God at Harvard.
Professor Goldman came to Columbia in 1993 after spending 20 years at the New York Times, most of it as a religion writer. At Columbia, Professor Goldman is the director of the Scripps Howard Program in Religion, Journalism and the Spiritual Life.
In addition to the New York Times, his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, the Forward, the New York Jewish Week and the Jerusalem Post. He currently writes the twice-monthly “On Religion” column for the New York Daily News.
Professor Goldman was born in Hartford, Conn., and was educated at Yeshiva University, Columbia and Harvard. In addition to “The Search for God at Harvard” (1991), he is author of “Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today” (2000) and a memoir, “Living a Year of Kaddish” (2003).
At Columbia, he teaches the popular “Covering Religion” seminar that in recent years has taken students to Israel, Jordan, Russia, Ukraine and India. Through his teaching and his travels, he has taught a whole generation of religion writers. His students have gone on to cover religion at such newspapers as the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Raleigh News & Observer.
Professor Goldman has been a Fulbright Professor in Israel, a Skirball Fellow at Oxford University in England and a scholar-in-residence at Stern College for Women. He serves on the boards of several organizations, including the Jewish Book Council, the Covenant Foundation and Congregation Ramath Orah, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Professor Goldman lives in New York City with his wife, Shira Dicker, and their three children, Adam, Emma and Judah.
To contact him, please e-mail alg18@columbia.edu.
RABBI DR. LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN was ordained in 1969, received his Ph.D. in 1973, and has taught since then at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. From 1984 to 1987, he directed its School of Sacred Music as well. In 2003, he was named the first Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual. He currently teaches classes in liturgy, ritual, theology and synagogue leadership.
For 30 years, he has combined research, classroom teaching, and a passion for the spiritual renewal of North American Judaism; and is widely known for his lectures at synagogues nationally.
Rabbi Hoffman has written or edited 30 books, including “My People’s Prayer Book” (Jewish Lights Publishing), a 10-volume edition of the Siddur with modern commentaries, which was named a National Jewish Book Award winner for 2007; and a follow-up Passover Haggadah that appeared in February 2008. His recent book, “Rethinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life” (2007), is widely used by congregations of all denominations engaged in transformational synagogue change, and his “Art of Public Prayer,” published originally for Catholic churches in America (Pastoral Press, 1988), is now used more broadly (Skylight Paths, 1999) by churches and synagogues of all sorts as a guide to liturgical renewal.
His articles, both popular and scholarly, have been published in eight languages on four continents. They include contributions to various encyclopedias and journals, including “The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion,” “The Oxford Dictionary of Religion” and “The Encyclopedia of Judaism.” He syndicates a regular column which appears, among other places, in Jewish Week and Jewish Times.
For many years, Rabbi Hoffman served as visiting professor of the University of Notre Dame, and has given lectures at such places as the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the University of Southern California and the Yale Divinity School.
In 1990, Hoffman was selected by the United States Navy as a member of a three-person design team charged with developing a continuing education course on worship for Navy chaplains. In 1994, he co-founded “Synagogue 2000” (now called Synagogue 3000), a trans-denominational project to envision and implement the ideal synagogue “as moral and spiritual center” for the 21st century. He is a past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, the professional and academic organization for liturgists, and in January 2004 received that organization’s annual Berakhah Award for outstanding lifetime contributions to his field.
