The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies presents

The First Annual Natalie Limonick Conference on Jewish Civilization

May 16-17 Royce 314

The Ethics of the Neighbor

The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies is pleased to announce the inaugural year of the newly endowed Natalie Limonick Symposium on Jewish Civilization. Each year, the symposium will take up an issue in Jewish Civilization of crucial historical and contemporary importance. This year, the topic will be the ethics of the neighbor. The concept of the neighbor that arises from the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Lev. 19:18) has generated a vast history of commentary in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These “People of the Book,” in this Islamic expression, are indeed “neighbors,” insofar as they embrace closely related narratives, texts, and figures. Yet this proximity has produced a history of conflict, including the exegetical and social struggles to define the ethics of the neighbor. The obligation to the neighbor implied by the passage in Leviticus has traditionally opened up a series of difficult questions: who counts as my “neighbor”? what kind of relationship to other people is implied by “love”? Indeed, what kind of subjectivity is involved in the “love of the self” on which this relationship is based? If questions such as these arise and take on their urgency originally in religious discourses, they do not remain exclusive to those discourses for long, but soon pass into a wide range of secular traditions of thought and literature. Neither brother nor stranger, the neighbor is that particular other who marks the ambiguous realm between family and polis, hence serves as a touchstone for an ethics not determined by the obligations of kinship or state. The neighbor is both too close to be entirely reified or abstracted and too distant to be fully identified with the subject’s set of intimates.

The conference will address the question of the ethics of the neighbor from several points of view, including religious, historical, political, and philosophical.

The first day of the conference, Sunday May 16 th, will feature talks on the figure of the neighbor in classical Jewish texts and the history of the state of Israel, as well as in the Jewish political tradition that has emerged in the relation of the two. Speakers will include Menachem Lorberbaum ( U. of Tel Aviv), Suzanne Last Stone ( Cardozo Law School), David Myers (UCLA) and Nomi Stoltzenberg (USC). That evening, a roundtable of presentations and discussions on the concept of the neighbor in Judaism and Christianity will be held with Rabbi Harold Schulweis (Temple Valley Beth Shalom) and Dr. Jack Miles (the Getty Center).

The second day of the conference, Monday May 17 th, will feature talks on the concept of the neighbor in Jewish philosophy, literature, and religious texts by Kenneth Reinhard (UCLA), Adam Zachary Newton (University of Texas), Michael Zank (Boston University), Dana Hollander (Macmaster University and UCLA), and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hebrew University and University of Chicago). In addition, a special lunchtime drash on Judaism and Christianity as neighbors will be lead by the distinguished Talmudic scholar and critical theorist Daniel Boyarin (UC Berkeley).

That evening, Jan Tomasz Gross, Professor of Politics and European Studies at New York University and the author of Neighbors: Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) and many other books, will present the keynote address.

It is commonly assumed in this country that American culture is secular or at the very least “non-denominational.” But this is to forget that the U.S. Constitution separates church and state not only to prevent the infiltration of religious ideology into government, but also in order to protect religion from governmental interference. The world we live in is both deeply religious (consciously or not), and increasingly ravaged by religious strife. Nevertheless, it is this very inextricability of religion and the social that perhaps offers the last chance of finding some rapprochement to the struggles that threaten to tear our world apart, from within and without. For, for better or worse, it is religion that provides our fundamental conceptions and vocabularies of authority, freedom, responsibility, the individual, the nation, and universalism – ideas whose value we indeed hold to be self-evident for democracy. It is our hope that the Natalie Limonick Symposium on Jewish Civilization and this year’s conference on “The Ethics of the Neighbor” will approach this set of difficult issues and imbrications with equanimity, modesty, and optimism.