Co-sponsoring: The Birth of the Gentile

The Center is pleased to co-sponsor this event, hosted by UNC Religious Studies:

The Birth of the Gentile and its Critics: Five Years Later

with Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Department of Jewish Philosophy, Tel Aviv University

September 28th, 5:30pm, Murphey Hall, Room 112

When was the gentile invented? and why? Much scholarship has been devoted to Jewish relations with gentiles. But in all this effort one thing was taken for granted, the category itself. In our 2018 monograph Goy: Israel Others and the Birth of the Gentile, Adi Ophir and I offered a new narrative concerning the origins of the concept. In this paper, I present the central thesis of our book and address some of the criticisms that have arisen since its publication.

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, teaches rabbinic literature in the department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel-Aviv University. In 2013 he was elected to the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. He has written on Midrash and Mishnah, as well as on issues of self-formation and collective identity in Second-Temple Judaism and rabbinic literature. Among his publications are: Demonic Desires: YETZER HARA and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia 2011); Body and Soul in Ancient Judaism (Modan: Tel Aviv 2012); The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple Gender and Midrash (Brill: Leiden 2012); Goy: Israel’s Others and the Birth of the Gentile (with Adi Ophir) (OUP: Oxford 2018; won the Goshen-Goldstein prize for the best book in Jewish Philosophy for the years 2016-2018); Between Mishnah and Midrash: The Birth of Rabbinic Literature  (Open University 2019).

This lecture will be hosted by the Department of Religious Studies and is co-sponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies, and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament track of Duke’s Graduate Program in Religion

Also: lunch seminar with Ishay Rosen-Zvi on Sept 29th, for UNC and Duke faculty and grad students. Reservations required.