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As we commemorate Black History Month, Temple Emanu-El is honored to welcome
to our Friday night Shabbat service one of America’s leading voices in the
struggle for racial equity and social justice, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi,
MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award winner, #1 New York Times bestselling author and founder
of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
Weaving together law, history, ethics and science, Dr. Kendi poses
provocative questions about what an antiracist society might actually look
like and will discuss what we each need to do in order to move beyond
awareness of racism to the formation of the truly just and equitable society
we, as Jews, are commanded to create.
Tzedek, tzedek tirdof /
צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף
Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue
– Deuteronomy 16:20
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Nothing about the cosmos fails to excite the boundless enthusiasm of Neil deGrasse Tyson:
the atmosphere’s chemistry, Einstein lensing, dark energy, how galaxies
cluster — and even the questions we have yet to pose.
In hundreds of lectures, on television and in podcasts, he radiates the
wonderment he felt as a 9-year-old kid from the Bronx visiting the Hayden
Planetarium for the first time; he was so moved by the imprint of the night
sky that he felt called to astronomy by the universe. He’s been drinking in
the cosmos ever since and, with the images emerging from the Webb Space
Telescope, his thirst has barely been quenched. “As our area of knowledge
grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.”
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center is honored to welcome Neil
deGrasse Tyson to discuss The Cosmic Perspective. There is no view of the
world as emotionally potent as the one granted by a cosmic perspective. It’s
one that sees Earth as a planet in a vast empty universe. It profoundly
influences what we think and feel about science, culture, politics, and life
itself.
An astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American
Museum of Natural History, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is America’s most renowned
translator of science for popular culture. Author of 18 books, host of NOVA, Cosmos and documentary
films, he has received dozens of awards, including NASA’s Distinguished
Public Service Medal, and was selected as one of “The 10 Most Influential
People in Science” by Discover
magazine.
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The Nazis taught that Jews were untermenschen,
the Indians taught that the Dalit were “untouchable”
and Americans taught that Blacks were congenitally inferior. Such assumptions
have defined human history for millennia.
In her latest book, Caste,
Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson dives deep into the pillars that
underlie such systems, from divine will to heredity, putting human faces on
the power of human rankings. In selecting Caste
for her book club, Oprah Winfrey proclaimed it to be the most essential
volume she’d ever chosen. The
New York Times called it an “instant classic.” And it jumped to
the top of bestseller lists for months.
Upon the release of the paperback edition, Wilkerson joins us to discuss the
enduring potency of such hierarchies of human value including America’s
unacknowledged system of rigid, inherited social stratification and its
parallels in India and Nazi Germany, which mimicked America’s race laws in
its early approaches to the “Jewish Problem.”
The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism,
Wilkerson is the author of The
Warmth of Other Suns, named to Time’s
10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and to The New York Times Magazine’s Best Nonfiction
of All Time.
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