Upcoming events

In Behind Ancient Bars, law professor and rabbinical student Hadar Aviram challenges the conventional assumption that incarceration is an artifact of modernity by looking back to depictions of detention and confinement in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on her experience as a leading voice against mass incarceration, she finds connections between antiquity and the contemporary understanding of incarceration that encompasses not just the prison itself but also pretrial/immigration detention, bail, electronic monitoring, parole, and post-release supervision. Infusing ancient biblical stories with fresh life through modern punishment theories, Aviram shows how incarceration has much to teach us about government, the experience of people in confinement, and the strength and resilience of the human spirit across millennia. Location: YouTube Live Stream & Shalhevet Beit Midrash (Rooftop Classroom)  

In On Courage, former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer offers a deeply reported manual for how ordinary people defy authoritarianism. Written with Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and built on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across five continents, the book expands their acclaimed New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” into a practical case that even under repressive conditions, each of us holds power to help defeat autocrats — at a moment when nearly three out of four people on earth live under authoritarian rule, the highest rate since the late 1970s. Fields-Meyer joins Rabbi Sharon Brous to discuss the people at the heart of the book — a Hong Kong student who risked everything for democracy, a Caracas mother who broke with the movement that raised her, Americans who faced serious risk for dissenting in their own workplaces — and what our tradition asks of us as the walls of history close in. Location: YouTube Live Stream & Shalhevet Beit Midrash (Rooftop Classroom)  

In The Wanderers, immigration journalist Daniela Gerson and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history that has long sat at the margins of Holocaust memory: how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s genocide at the brutal hands of Stalin. Deported east into exile, rather than murdered in occupied Poland, they endured a survival purchased at devastating cost — one that has rarely been told as a central story of the war. What Gerson finds in that record is finally a story about the enduring power of hope and love. Gerson joins Rabbi Sharon Brous to discuss what surfaced in her own family’s history, why this chapter has remained so little known, and what a story of exile and unexpected love asks of us now. Location: YouTube Live Stream & Shalhevet Beit Midrash (Rooftop Classroom)