B'nai Israel Congregation

2:00 to 3:30 PM As the pandemic surged and forced us into our homes, many of us dreamed with new intensity of being elsewhere. For Jews throughout the ages, the promises and perils of travel have been central to shaping the individual and collective experience. Notions of home and homeland have been redefined by Jewish wandering. Drawing on literary, spiritual, and historical sources and responses, JTS scholars will explore what happens when Jews—whether by force or volun-tarily, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to an-other. You can view all of the sessions below.

The topic of rape appears a number of times in the Hebrew Bible. It is broached both explicitly and implicitly, reflected in a number of literary genres, including legal, narrative, poetic, and prophetic texts. The violent act of rape is nowhere condoned, and was a tragic fact of life in the biblical world (as it is in ours), yet it still found a place in our sacred texts. Why was this? What was the context? This lecture surveys biblical texts relating to rape in a number of these literary genres and attempts to classify the allusions to rape according to various literary, social, theological, and legal criteria.