Daniel Lasker '71 to lecture on Jewish Karaites movement

Professor Daniel J. Lasker, a Brandeis alum who serves as the Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, will deliver the lecture “Eastern European Karaites – A Case Study in Jewish Identity” on Oct. 15 at the Heller School.

Karaites are practitioners of Karaism, a Jewish movement that considers the Tanakh, the Hebrew name for the Old Testament, to be the supreme legal authority in both Jewish religious law and theology.

Lasker, who received his B.A. and M.A. from Brandeis in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1976, will be spending the 2010-11 academic year as the Corcoran Visiting Chair at the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. Besides Karaism, his academic interests include Jewish theology and philosophy, Judaism and modern medicine, and Judeo-Christian debate.

The lecture, which is sponsored by the Tauber Center for the Study of European Jewry, will be held in Heller-Brown, room G1, from noon to 1:30 p.m. as part of Professor ChaeRan Freeze’s course, The Jews in Europe to 1791.

“One thing we try to do at the Tauber Institute is to organize visiting lecturers around courses being taught, so we have a chance to enhance the classroom experience,” Sylvia Fuks Fried, executive director of the Tauber Institute, said. “This is a wonderful opportunity for [Lasker] to share some of his writing and research with students.”

The lecture is free and open to the public.