What: A Lecture-Discussion
When: Public Reception: 6 to 6:30PM. Event: 6:30 to 8:00PM
Where: The New Jewish Academy ~a center for teacher training and human sciences research~
Address: Walnut Street Minyan, 858 Walnut Street, Newton, MA 02459
Who: Avi Bernstein-Nahar, PhD, Academy Founder and President
DESCRIPTION
We are living through a great unraveling: our politics, economics, and even social way of life are changing faster than ever, and not necessarily for the good.
In times like these, we look toward the visionaries among us – those who can look past the present wreckage to envision what comes after.
In keeping with our traditions, we draw our understanding of the present from our prophets and philosophers. In Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) we find someone who aspired to both.
For our ability to discover Cohen’s work, we have to thank a little known émigré couple, who labored in relative obscurity in the 1960s to bring us one of the true treasures of Jewish philosophy, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, first published in German in 1919.
It could easily have been otherwise. Despite the fact that by the turn of the last century, Cohen was the most prominent Jewish philosopher in Germany, he and his work were in almost total eclipse by the time Hitler came to power.
According to Bernstein-Nahar, “Cohen is a figure in Jewish history who, intellectually and spiritually, is every bit the equal of Moses Mendelssohn, and whose name, I would not hesitate to mention in the same breath as Moses Maimonides himself. However, after World War I, the market for Cohen’s books collapsed. Interested readers became scarce and his books failed to attract English translators even as the center of Jewry began to shift to America. Furthermore, liberal, prophetic, philosophic religion, for which Cohen was the most well-known advocate in the Jewish community, lost serious credibility in light of Europe’s catastrophic self-destruction, and the complicity of intellectuals like Cohen in the devastating and senseless war.”
On Sunday, July 19, Avi Bernstein-Nahar will present “The Couple Who Saved the Judaism of the Prophets and Why Hearing their Story Could Change Your Life.”
In the course of the evening he will explain why you’ve never heard of Cohen’s tour de force of prophetic Judaism, and why we owe such a deep debt of thanks to Fanny and Simon Kaplan for bringing this book to an English language readership.
The evening’s lecture will also focus on the dramatic events that make the Kaplans’ accomplishment so astonishing: their involvement in the Russian Revolution, their flight West and their confrontation with the Nazi regime, the decimation of European Jewry, the tragic loss of their friends and loved ones, the eclipse of progressive politics and philosophy in post War Europe, and the couples narrow escape to Annapolis.
Good fortune, daring, and dumb luck combined to aid them in their journey. As a result and because of their appetite for a magnificent intellectual challenge, the chief source text for prophetic Judaism once more became available, ripe on the vine and ready to be considered by a new audience, desperate to bridge the present moment.
Avi Bernstein-Nahar is the founder and president of The New Jewish Academy ~a center for teacher, training and human sciences research, chief education officer for 36 Learning Matters, and a visiting scholar in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.