On Tuesday, September 29 at 7:30 p.m., the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies will present “People of the (Printed/Digital) Book: Printing and the Birth of the Jewish Bookshelf,” by Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot. This is the first of the Center’s online series of fall events.
The invention of the printing press is one of the seminal events in the course of human history. But how did printing — and with it the sudden availability of the printed word — change pre-modern Jewish texts and readers’ experiences of them? Rabbi Skloot, this year’s Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Scholar-in-Residence, will explore these questions as well as the implications of digitization for Jewish books and their readers.
Rabbi Skloot teaches at Hebrew Union College in New York, where he is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History.
"I very much look forward to the two days in which Dr. Skloot will be with us," says Dr. Ellen Umansky, Bennett Center director. "His talk on the effects of printing, both on the texts themselves and on the readers' experiences of them, should be particularly eye-opening. As should his discussion of digital printing as a new, and very different, way of reading texts."
The Schnurmacher Scholar-in-Residence Program is made possible by the generosity of the Adolf and Ruth Schnurmacher Foundation. Besides this lecture, Rabbi Skloot will teach in two of Dr. Umansky’s classes and will facilitate a discussion with University faculty, administrators, and staff on “The Sabbath Upon Which Our Lives Depend: The Theology of COVID and Religious Liberty.”
The September 29 lecture will be held online and is free and open to the public. Register at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms for a program link.
