Really looking forward to meeting this community!

Lectures in Jewish History and Thought. No hard questions, please.




Jewish History @ Avenue J, 7:00-8:00 pm. A community project of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences, 1602 Avenue J, Brooklyn NY 11230. Admission is free.

Please enjoy this week’s People of the Book column in the Five Towns Jewish Times! http://5tjt.com/milchamot-hashem/
Celebrating Hanukkah! We are scheduled to resume on Monday, December 14 at 7 pm with a presentation on Dona Gracia Nasi.

Lecture on Avraham ben HaRambam, an important Jewish leader and scholar of 13th century Egypt. Best known as the son of the illustrious Maimonides, Avraham Maimuni was a brilliant thinker whose descendants led the Jewish community of Egypt for nearly 200 years. Here’s the link to the Prezi: http://prezi.com/3apfvk1ctjkg/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

My son Alexander is once again running for Team Friendship in the Miami Marathon this January. Please enjoy this video that features his effort for this worthy cause, and support him at http://www.miami.teamfriendship.org/Alex!

By popular demand, I’ve set up a new playlist of my lectures that cater to students of the Jewish roots of Christianity and selected lectures on the experience of Jews living in Christian lands. Enjoy in good health!
Please enjoy this week’s column in the Five Towns Jewish Times, a discussion of the memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, a remarkable woman from 17th-century Germany.

Live in Boca Raton! Looking forward to speaking at the Chabad of West Boca. Click here to RSVP!

Please enjoy this week’s article in the Five Towns Jewish Times. http://5tjt.com/chofetz-chaim/

Lecture on Count Emicho and the Jews of Germany during the First Crusade (1096). Here’s a link to the Prezi.
Please enjoy this week’s column in the Five Towns Jewish Times! http://5tjt.com/the-kuzari/


Wrongly accused of espionage, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to Devil’s Island on the basis of remarkably tenuous evidence. May critics, including the famous writer Emile Zola, argued that Dreyfus was unfairly charged simply because he was a Jew in the French army. As evidence mounted that another officer was guilty, the Dreyfus Affair exposed……

Captured by the Romans, Josephus was a Jewish general who ultimately served as a military advisor to General Titus. Josephus recorded his first-hand observations of the destruction of the Temple, and went on to a brilliant literary career in Rome, describing Jews and Judaism to a wider audience. Who was Josephus–traitor to his people or……

Rembrandt is well-known for his depictions of Jewish subjects, both as contemporary portraits and as models for Christian biblical characters.

Photo: Aryeh Abramson looks out over Iroquois Falls, Ontario, Canada, where he spent the Sukkot vacation visiting his grandparents. Captured by the Roman General (and later Emperor) Vespasian while defending the Galilee, Josephus ultimately turned against his coreligionists and served as an advisor to the forces besieging Jerusalem during the first Roman-Jewish War. His first-hand……

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) was one of the greatest minds the Jewish people ever produced: philosopher, jurist, physician, and an extremely prolific writer who left us classics like The Guide for the Perplexed and the Mishneh Torah. For several years I have been in the habit of reviewing his Laws of Repentance in the weeks leading up to the……

Pope Gregory I (“the Great”) was one of the most influential Church leaders of the medieval period. His policy on the treatment of Jews in Christian Europe, known by the Latin phrase “Sicut Judaeis,” instituted an official if ambivalent position that lasted from the sixth century to the beginnings of the modern era.

Reeling from the humiliating defeat of the Crimean War, the Russian Empire decides its policy of forcibly conscripting Jewish boys into military service is counterproductive, and finally abandons the cruel decades-old policy of taking underage children into thirty-one years of military training and service.

To view the Prezi associated with this lecture, please click here. Excerpt from “The Jewish Diaspora: A Brief History” Henry Abramson 3. The Roman-Jewish Wars Our sources for the Roman-Jewish wars of the first and second centuries are more substantial than those of earlier periods, primarily because the importance of developments in this tiny……

Born in turbulent times, Christianity emerged from its intensely Jewish roots to become the official religion of the Roman Empire within a remarkably brief period of time. As a daughter religion to Judaism, however, dissent between the two faiths slowly dominated the discourse as Christianity became less of a Jewish movement, and more of a……

The summer of 1321 was plagued with rumors that Jews had entered into a conspiracy with lepers (some versions also included Muslims) to poison the wells of Europe, resulting in mass hysteria and mob violence. King Philip V was eventually able to quell the movement, but it resurfaced twenty years later in a much more……

In August of 1778, the non-Jewish writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote to his brother of a new literary project designed to further tolerance of Jews in German society. The result was Nathan the Wise, a sensation that was initially banned by the Church and heavily criticized by antisemites of the day.


