This semester, we’ll be reading Tablets Shattered, by Joshua Leifer. We’ll talk Jewish identity, politics, history, and the future of Jewish life in America over BBQ as we read this contemporary take in a supportive community.

Meetings on Wednesdays, 6:45-8 p.m.

“Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.

Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews.

As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.”

How do competing visions of Zionism align and differ? Both today and throughout history, what beliefs, values, and challenges have shaped Zionism and its proponents?

Meetings on Thursdays, 5-6:30 p.m.

Didn’t have the opportunity for a Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah or B’nai Mitzvah when you were 12 or 13 years old? Had one then but feel like you would benefit more from the experience now?
Join the B Mitzvah cohort at Hillel! Over the course of the semester, you’ll meet every other week as a group with the entire B Mitzvah cohort to learn the fundamental prayers and blessings for a B Mitzvah and to explore your Torah portion.  You will also meet with Rav Maya one-on-one to supplement this material with your personal learning goals so you can come away from this experience feeling empowered as a Jewish adult as you take this important next step in your Jewish journey.  We will have a B Mitzvah ceremony and celebration for all cohort members, their friends and families on May 2nd at Berkeley Hillel.

Meetings bi-weekly, exact time TBD. Email Rav Maya if you’re interested.

This is a fellowship for graduating Seniors.  We gather 10 times during the year for some learning together in thinking about culminating their time at Cal.  Email Rabbi Adam for more information or to join this fellowship.

Dates and times TBD

*This is a full-year fellowship