We often refer to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages as "the Rabbinic Period," on account of the massive literary production of the rabbis, including the two Talmuds and many midrashic works. But there is a wide-ranging and rich Jewish history known from Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources that is entirely ignored in rabbinic literature.These non-Jewish sources offer glimpses into Jewish history, but they are few and often hostile to Jews.

How can the historian separate real historical Jews from the symbolic Jews conjured out of Christian and Muslim theological prejudice? In this course, Fred Astren (San Francisco State University) takes up that question, telling stories the rabbis did not tell.

Who this is for:

• Readers interested in Jewish history beyond the rabbinic and Talmudic sources
• Anyone curious how Jews appear in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic historical sources
• Students of Late Antiquity, the early medieval world, or Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations

What you'll leave with:

• Familiarity with how Jews are depicted in Christian and Muslim historical writing
• Tools for evaluating historically biased or theologically motivated sources
• A sharper sense of the line between historical Jews and symbolic ones

Four Thursdays: October 29, November 5, 12, and 19, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Haberes buenos (good news): New Lehrhaus has a brand-new Ladino course! Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardim, grew out of the languages of fifteenth-century Iberia. For the next five centuries it developed apart from Spanish, in close contact with Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and the other languages of the Mediterranean and the Balkans.

This course will ground itself in Sephardic history and culture and will also get you speaking right away. We will primarily be learning the Istanbul dialect of Ladino, but you will learn to recognize other varieties.

What You’ll Learn:

• the socio-historical context of Ladino (where does it come from? who speaks it today?)
• the sounds of Ladino and pronunciation
• how to read Ladino in its contemporary Latin-based script
• greetings and introductions
• regular and irregular verbs in the present tense
• basic sentence construction
• simple conversation about everyday topics
• how to build an at-home Ladino "language nest"!

Bring Ladino into your daily life with our Ladino en Kaza (Ladino at Home) kits! Each boxed Ladino en Kaza (Ladino at Home) kit holds about 30 prompt cards that guide you through everyday activities in Ladino, from washing your hands to making breakfast. Kits are mailed to your home after you register.

Who this is for:

• Anyone interested in learning Ladino, exploring Sephardic history and culture, and beginning to speak and read this unique Judeo-Spanish language.
• No pre-existing knowledge of Spanish, Hebrew, or Judaism is required.

What you'll leave with:

• Basic Ladino reading, writing, and conversation skills, an understanding of the language’s history and varieties
• Tools for practicing Ladino at home with the Ladino en Kaza kit.

Six Sundays: November 1, 8, 15, and 22; December 6 and 13, 10–11:30am Pacific Time
Course will not meet Thanksgiving Week (November 29)

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Erich Gruen (UC Berkeley), has spent decades studying Jews in the Greco-Roman world, and much of his work questions popular assumptions about Jewish isolation, religious purity, and political resistance in antiquity. In four sessions he takes up some of the most debated episodes in ancient Jewish history.

Each session takes on a question that has divided scholars and puzzled general readers alike: Were Jews in antiquity accused of ritual murder, the charge later known as blood libel? Did they reject Greek mythology as incompatible with their traditions, or engage with it in surprising ways? And what is the history behind Hanukkah?

Who this is for

• Anyone curious about Jews in the ancient world
• Students of classical antiquity who want to go past the standard accounts
• Anyone who has wondered where Hanukkah comes from

What you'll leave with

• Answers to four contested questions about ancient Jewish history, and the evidence behind them
• A way of telling historical evidence apart from later myth-making

Four Sundays: November 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2–3:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

California has passed a law requiring state agencies that collect ancestry or ethnicity data to include a separate category for Jewish ancestry or ethnicity beginning in 2029. What changes when the state counts Jews as an ethnic group?

The panel brings together Ari Y. Kelman, director of the Berman Archive at Stanford; Keith Feldman, professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley; Aliya Saperstein, professor of sociology at Stanford; and David Bocarsly of Jewish California, who helped draft Senate Bill 1387. Asaf Elia-Shalev, editor in chief of J. The Jewish News of Northern California, moderates. After the panel, each table continues the conversation with a facilitator.

Presented with J. and cosponsored by Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Berman Archive, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious how governments define and count Jewish identity
• Californians who want to know what SB 1387 does
• Anyone who would rather join a small-group conversation than listen to a lecture

What you'll leave with:

• A clear account of what SB 1387 changes in how California collects demographic data
• Several views on whether, and how, Jewishness works as an ethnic category

Monday, November 2, 5:30–7pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Founded in the Russian Empire in 1897, the Jewish Labor Bund became one of the most influential Jewish political movements in Eastern Europe. The Bund was secular, socialist, and rooted in the principle of doikayt, or “hereness”: the belief that Jews should fight for dignity and equality in the countries where they lived. It played a major role in Jewish political and cultural life before the Second World War. Most of its members were murdered in the Holocaust, and the movement itself was largely erased from popular memory.

What, if anything, does the Bund’s legacy offer American Jewish life today? In this four-session reading group, we’ll explore that question through Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, together with supplementary materials. We’ll consider the Bund’s history, its vision of solidarity and Jewish life in the diaspora, and why its ideas still provoke argument.

Who this is for:

• Readers interested in modern Jewish history and politics
• Anyone curious about Jewish socialism and secular Jewish culture
• Readers who enjoy discussing a new book in a group

What you'll leave with

• A grounding in the Bund’s history and its idea of doikayt
• A discussion of what, if anything, the Bund offers American Jewish life today

Four Fridays: November 6, 13, 20, December 4, 12–1pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Bukharian, Kavkazi (Mountain), and Georgian Jews have lived in Central Asia and the Caucasus for many centuries, and their histories touch the Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish worlds at once. This three-session course introduces each community in turn and explores the multilayered, millennia-old stories of these communities.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious about the Jewish communities of Central Asia and the Caucasus
• Readers interested in Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish identity

What you'll leave with:

• An introduction to the history of each community
• A sense of how they relate to the Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish worlds

Three Tuesdays: November 10, 17 and 24, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Join New Lehrhaus at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for Liberation, Bess Wohl’s play about feminism, memory, and social change. Set partly in 1970s Ohio, the play follows a group of women who meet in a recreation-center basement to imagine new possibilities for their lives. Decades later, the daughter of one of them returns to that history and its hopes, conflicts, and unanswered questions. The Berkeley Rep production, directed by Whitney White, comes to the Bay Area after an acclaimed Broadway run.

We’ll gather before the performance for a short introduction to the play and its historical context, then again afterward to talk about what we saw.

Who this is for:

• Theatergoers interested in women’s history and the women’s liberation movement
• Anyone who enjoys seeing a play with a group and talking about it afterward

What you'll leave with:

• Historical context for the women’s liberation movement before the curtain goes up
• A post-show conversation with fellow New Lehrhaus participants

Please note: Because this special program includes a discounted ticket to a Berkeley Rep performance, New Lehrhaus members will pay only the discounted cost of the theater ticket. Nonmembers will pay the full program fee of $72.

Tuesday, November 10, 6:30–10pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Twenty years ago, historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg published Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, a landmark study of the complicated political relationship between Black and Jewish Americans. Challenging both the nostalgic idea of a seamless Black-Jewish alliance and the notion that the relationship simply collapsed, Greenberg traced a history in which cooperation and conflict, shared political goals and competing interests, were intertwined from the beginning.

Two decades later, Greenberg returns to Troubling the Waters to ask what has changed, what has endured, and how the history looks from the vantage point of today. What can the past tell us about Black-Jewish relations now, and does the idea of a Black-Jewish alliance still help us understand the political relationship between the two communities?

Who this is for

• Anyone interested in the history of Black-Jewish relations in America, beyond the simplified alliance-or-collapse narrative
• Readers of Troubling the Waters looking to hear from the author directly, twenty years on
• Those thinking about coalition politics and how shared and competing interests shape relationships between communities over time

What you'll leave with

• Greenberg’s account of how cooperation and conflict between Black and Jewish Americans were intertwined from the start
• Her view of what has changed in twenty years, and whether the idea of an alliance still helps explain the present

Two Wednesdays: November 11 & 18, 6–7:30pm Pacific

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.