Since the Second Vatican Council, Jews and Christians have engaged in dialogue with one another in ways which seem very new. Yet this is not the first time these two groups encountered one another as equals. In the religious pluralism that defined Sassanian Iraq (224-651 CE), Jews and Christians founded institutions which would guide the religious lives of both communities. The Talmudic academies and the Christian Schools of this period had much in common–pointing to a shared religious landscape and suggesting a framework for interreligious understanding today.
About the Presenter: Dr. Noah Bickart was appointed in 2022 as the inaugural holder of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Chair in Jewish Studies. He holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. After a brief stint in the Jazz recording industry in New York, he studied Talmud at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Returning to America, he enrolled at the Harvard Divinity School, earning a MA in Hebrew Bible in 2003. The Following year he entered Rabbinical School at The Jewish Theological Seminary as a Wexner Graduate Fellow. After being ordained as a Conservative Rabbi in 2008, he remained at JTS for Doctoral work and received his PhD in 2015. After directing the Prozdor High School, directing the Eisenfeld/Duker Beit Midrash, and teaching Talmud in the Rabbinical School for a few years, he became Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program of Judaic Studies at Yale University. In the Fall of 2018, he moved to University heights to join the faculty of the Theology and Religious Studies department at John Carroll University.
This program will be recorded and posted to YouTube. It will not be live-streamed.