The pressure to produce scholarship that’s relevant and publicly engaged comes as a welcome reproach and corrective to the elitism and insulation of academia. Yet, what is the cost of such a product-driven mindset with its embeddedness in market ideologies and neoliberal deliverables? How do the logics that subsidize this “Western” enterprise marginalize divergent voices and sideline alternative methods? Turning to the rabbis of late antiquity and early modern Spinoza, opens us to seeing our particular academic enterprises and, more broadly still, the state of being human, differently. This dares us to consider: what might it mean to think in the absence of teleology, anthropocentrism, and their supremacist rationales?

Register for the Zoom stream here: https://myumi.ch/y99w4

Gilah Kletenik, a scholar of philosophy and Jewish thought, is Postdoctoral Associate at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. Rafe Neis, an historian of ancient Judaism and rabbinic literature, is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies. They come together to talk about teleology, scholarship, being human, and the possibilities for meaning-making. Their discussion will be moderated by Scott Spector, Director, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and Rudolf Mrazek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies.