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On Nov. 11 and 12 in San Francisco, a group of local artists will display the forbidden fruits of their yearlong labors of Jewish text study.

The Jewish News of Northern California

Almost immediately after learning that the unique Jewish adult education center HaMaqom would be closing, Rachel and David Biale — Jewish educators with links to the Berkeley institution since its founding in the 1970s — knew they had to do something. “Lehrhaus has been what I would call the crown jewel of the Bay Area Jewish community for 47 years,” David Biale said, referring to the center’s former name for 45 of those years (it was changed to HaMaqom | The Place in 2019). “It fulfills a very important need in the community. To see it disappear feels just wrong.” Founded as Le...

February 25 @ 12:00 pm Free UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies presents a conversation among Yeshiva U. professor Rabbi Richard Hidary, GTU professor Deena Aranoff and scholar Charlotte Fonrobert, author of  “Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender.” Free, with registration.Event Website

Thanks to a $750,000 endowment gift from Taube Philanthropies, Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union will establish a new chair position at its Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies. Sam Shonkoff, who is currently GTU’s assistant professor of Jewish studies at the Dinner Center, will be the first to hold the Taube Family Chair position. A Berkeley native, Shonkoff joined the theological school in June 2019 from Oberlin College, where he was a visiting assistant professor. Shonkoff teaches Jewish religious thought and modern Jewish cultures, and his current research focuses on “the...