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Steven Pinker, Nancy Cartwright to Present at Shalem Conference on Mind and Reality
April 7, 2011 | 3 Nisan 5771
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Steven Pinker, Nancy Cartwright to Present at Shalem Conference on Mind and Reality
The Shalem Center's Institute of Philosophy, Political Theory, and Religion is seeking submissions for an international conference entitled "Psycho-Ontology," which will investigate the relationship between human cognition and the structure of reality. The conference will take place in Jerusalem from December 11 – 15, 2011. It is being organized by Shalem Provost and Senior Fellow Yoram Hazony together with Jesse Prinz, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Invited speakers who will be appearing include renowned philosophers, psychologists, and linguists such as Lera Boroditsky (Stanford), Nancy Cartwright (LSE/UC San Diego), Eli Hirsch (Brandeis), Steven Horst (Wesleyan), Ray Jackendoff (Tufts), Steven Pinker (Harvard), and Amie Thomasson (Miami). Click here to read the conference announcement.
Shalem Board Chairman Yair Shamir Profiled in The Economist
Shalem's Chairman of the Board, Yair Shamir, was recently profiled in The Economist. The son of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, he served as a senior officer in the Israeli Air Force, and has subsequently become a leader in Israel's business community. He is currently the head of the Catalyst investment firm and chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). In addition, Shamir has been active in public service in a variety of educational initiatives. The article explains Shamir's history with El Al, guiding the national airline through privatization, and describes the extraordinary turnaround he has engineered at IAI. Click here to read the full article at The Economist online.
Martin Kramer in Panel Discussion on U.S. Policy at Herzliya Conference
Martin Kramer, the President-designate of Shalem College, participated in a panel discussion at the 2011 Herzliya conference. The conference, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya in February, is Israel's center stage for the articulation of national policy by its most prominent leaders. Kramer participated in a panel entitled "Dilemmas in US Policy: Stability vs. Democracy." Kramer argued that while the US continues to assert that the status quo in the Middle East is unsustainable, "it would be useful if President Obama declared just once that it is Iran's aggressive ambitions that aren't sustainable because he'll thwart them. Do that and the risk of changing the status quo in this region might be reduced or even be lifted." Click here for video of Kramer's initial presentation; click here for full video of the conference at the conference website.
Erez Eshel, a Leading Innovator in Israeli Education, Joins Shalem
The Shalem Center is delighted to announce the hiring of Erez Eshel as Vice President of Student Affairs. For a decade and a half, Eshel played a central role in founding over a dozen pre-military preparatory academies across Israel. Students in these programs defer army service to devote a year or two to in-depth study of the humanities, and of Jewish and Zionist history and thought, as well as leadership training and community service. For ten years, Eshel served as Director of the Ein Prat Israeli Academy for Leadership, the country's flagship preparatory academy, which serves a co-educational population that includes students representing a broad spectrum of religious, socioeconomic, and geographical backgrounds. Click here to read more about Eshel and his work.
Budget Cuts Could Cost Israel Its Prominence as Center for Jewish Studies
A recent YNet article alerted readers to a report to the Israeli Council of Higher Education, which exposes a drastic decline in the allocation of budgets to research and teaching of Jewish thought in Israeli universities. "As a Jewish and democratic state, Israel cannot maintain its cultural, intellectual, and moral prosperity if it neglects the origins of Judaism and Jewish tradition, and therefore the Council of Higher Education and the universities must nurture fields that enrich the spiritual culture of the Jewish people," the report read. Click here to read the full article at YNet; click here to read coverage of this story at The Chronicle of Higher Education online.
Mandel Foundation Gift to Hebrew U: "Step Toward Restoration of Humanities to Rightful Place"
The Mandel Foundation recently announced a major donation to the Hebrew University in order to establish the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Mount Scopus campus of the University. The grant includes $18 million for a new building on campus to house the graduate program as well as a $2.5 million renewable endowment awarded every year for at least 15 years. The new school will serve as a center for research and teaching of the humanities that will offer interdisciplinary studies in the humanities towards masters and doctoral degrees. "This gift is transformative and signifies a major step towards the restoration of the humanities to their rightful place within higher education," said Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson, president of the Hebrew University. "Perhaps more than any other discipline, the humanities stress creativity, critical thinking, and honest deliberation. For centuries it has formed the foundation of any well-rounded education." Click here to read more about the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University website; click here to read the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the story.
New Bi-Partisan Commission to Bring Humanities to Forefront of US Public Agenda
The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences has been established by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in an effort to place the humanities and social sciences on equal footing with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics on the US public agenda. The commission's 41 members represent a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds, including artists, academics, and key players in both the public and private sectors. Click here to read the full article at the Inside Higher Ed newsletter online.
Dean of Leading Business School Urges Integration of Humanities into Business Programs
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, the dean of IE Business School in Madrid, recently wrote an article in Business Week arguing that the study of the humanities helps create better managers. According to Ozoño, "Making humanities a core part of all degrees will cement the learning experience and develop open-minded and well-rounded graduates….Indeed, it is time to bring all the benefits of classical education to business schools." Click here to read the full article at Business Week online.
Stanford University Press to Publish Book by Daniel Gordis and David Ellenson
Stanford University Press will publish a book co-authored by Shalem Senior Vice President Daniel Gordis and Hebrew Union College President David Ellenson. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policy-Making in 19th and 20th Century Orthodox Responsa examines a wide array of legal opinions written by nineteenth and twentieth century Orthodox rabbis in Europe, the United States, and Israel on what constitutes legitimate conversion to Judaism. The authors argue that these rabbis were not only rendering legal opinions on conversion, but were creating public policy for a Jewish society that was experiencing an unprecedented societal shift in status and identity as a result of interactions with non-Jewish neighbors. Click here to read more about Daniel Gordis; click here to read more about David Ellenson.
Martin Kramer Quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education on Arab Rulers' Donations to Middle Eastern Studies Departments
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently sought Shalem College President-designate Martin Kramer's opinion for an article on how the current political turmoil in the Middle East has brought new attention to concerns about university donations from foreign sources. In 2001, Kramer wrote Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, under the auspices of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which documents decades of poor scholarship on the part of Middle East studies departments at American universities. In the CHE article, Kramer contends that: "Before, it was talked about as the corrupting effect of 'oil money,' now you have people, perhaps coming from a different perspective, who are saying that it is 'blood money.'" Click here to read the full Chronicle of Higher Education article.
Yoram Hazony Published in Merkur, Germany's Foremost Intellectual Journal
Shalem Provost Yoram Hazony's essay, "Israel Through European Eyes," was recently published in Merkur, one of the most prestigious cultural magazines in Germany. Merkur has been described by an authoritative source on the German media as the "main body of the cultural elite intelligentsia of the country." The essay first appeared in July 2010 as one of Hazony's Jersusalem Letters and requests have been received to translate it into Russian and Polish, as well. Click here to read the original essay at the Jerusalem Letters website; click here to read more about Merkur.
Azure: "The Zionist Imperative"
Marla Braverman's editorial in the latest issue of Azure critiques the view in certain North American Jewish circles that one's Jewishness and one's support for the State of Israel are mutually exclusive. Showing that the Jewish tradition delineates clearly the obligation of collective solidarity, frequently placing it above individual interest and conviction, Braverman argues that North American Jews' support for their Israeli brethren is ultimately about neither sentiment nor self-interest, but rather the recognition that all Jewish communities are in fact components of a single—vibrant, dynamic, unstable, but all the same, single—Jewish super-community. Click here to read the full editorial at Azure online.
Shalem Fellow Ofir Haivry and Minister of Education Gideon Sa'ar Speak at Jerusalem Event
In February, Shalem Director of Studies' Ofir Haivry joined Israeli Minister of Education Gideon Sa'ar and Cabinet Secretary Tzvi Hauser at an evening seminar entitled "Between Political and Ideational Leadership," hosted by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. The event marked the 100th birthday of Zvi Shiloah, an Israeli journalist, Knesset member, and public intellectual, who participated in many of the defining moments of the State of Israel's first 50 years. Click here to read more about Haivry and his work.
Shalem's Rimon Program: A Truly Meaningful Experience
Shalem’s Rimon Leadership program for outstanding Israeli high school students held its final seminar, entitled “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things,” in late February. Students were asked to choose from a list of humanities-related topics covered at Rimon and prepare a talk about their favorite. As part of the the seminar, students and lecturers exchanged roles, with Academic Directors Rona Yona and Ido Hevroni playing the audience to each student’s presentation. Students also had an opportunity to relive their formative experiences from the last three years in an “Experience Room,” where each student recorded his or her thoughts and memories. "I’m so proud and happy to have been part of this program," wrote one of the students. "Thanks for the most meaningful experience I’ve ever had." A graduation ceremony will be held in June at the Menachem Begin Center. Click here to read more about Shalem's Rimon program for outstanding high school students.
Shalem Alumni Make their Mark on The Wall Street Journal
In March, Shalem alumni Bari Weiss and David Feith published an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled "The Dictator's Wife Wears Louboutins," which criticizes a Vogue magazine article featuring Syria's first lady Asma al-Assad. Weiss and Feith, both assistant editorial features editors at WSJ, lament the lack of journalistic integrity inherent in discussing the shopping habits of the first lady of Syria without ever mentioning the current political upheaval in the region. Weiss is an alumna of Shalem's first summer intern program in 2005, and Feith participated in the program in 2007. Click here to read the full article at The Wall Street Journal online.
The following web addresses provide an easy to access directory of all Shalem Center sites:
The Shalem Center: www.shalemcenter.com
Azure: www.azure.org.il
Techelet: www.techelet.org.il
Bible and Philosophy: www.bibleandphilosophy.org
Yoram Hazony: www.yoramhazony.org
Martin Kramer: www.martinkramer.org
Daniel Gordis: www.danielgordis.org
We want to hear from you. Please send comments and questions to e-news@shalem.org.il. To receive the Shalem E-Newsletter in Hebrew, send an e-mail to heb-news@shalem.org.il. Technical note: Because various e-mail programs handle links differently, broken links sometimes occur. If this happens, you may need to copy and paste both parts of the URL (address) into your Web browser.
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