The 2013 Adam Cherrick Lecture

The Passover Haggadah and the Jewish Imagination - by David M. Stern, PhD

David M. Stern, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature, University of Pennsylvania, was selected as the speaker for the 2013 Adam Cherrick Lecture.  Professor Stern will give the talk titled The Passover Haggadah and the Jewish Imagination on March 3, 2013 at 4:30pm.

How is the Haggadah different from all other Jewish books? This talk will take a somewhat different route to explaining the specialness of the Haggadah by looking at the different physical shapes that this book has taken from its beginnings up to the great illuminated Haggadot of the Middle Ages and its many versions in the contemporary world today. Through images of different Haggadot, we will see how this book is not only a great religious text of Judaism but also an extraordinary monument to Jewish creativity and the workings of the Jewish imagination.

David Stern, (Ph.D. Harvard University) is currently working on a book entitled “The Jewish Library: Four Jewish Classics and the Jewish Experience” which traces the history of the physical forms of the Talmud, the Rabbinic Bible, the Prayerbook, and the Passover Haggadah, and the ways in which those forms have shaped the meaning and significance of these classic Jewish books.  He has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

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