Content
The Harris Center supports and presents various lectures, book talks, and other discussions on timely topics relating to Judaic Studies.
Book Launch: Fascist Legacies
Thursday, August 27, 2026
5:00 pm
Unity Room, Jackie Gaughan Multicultural Center
The world has changed since the 1930s, but human nature has not. What can we learn when comparing far-right populism in the United States to far-right populism elsewhere? How can we better understand the underlying ideas and ideologies that seem to transcend time and place? How can we best address them? How can we communicate what we have learned about these issues to those outside of academia? These are the central questions in the three-part conversation of Fascist Legacies.
2026 Krivosha Lecture
"Free Exercise's False Binary: Lessons from Jewish Law"
Zalman Rothschild
Assistant Professor of Law and the Horn Family Distinguished Research Scholar in Law and Religion
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
This lecture puts Jewish law in conversation with the ongoing debate over how the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment should be construed. A bedrock assumption in free exercise jurisprudence is that religion’s mandates are absolute. But religious norms do not always operate that way. Jewish law, for example, is often nonbinary and spectrum-based. It is an elaborate system of flexible standards and sliding-scale rules that enables religious practitioners to live under secular rule. Jewish law, then, allows us to reexamine a common assumption underlying free exercise jurisprudence. It also raises the question whether, in some instances at least, religious freedom itself incentivizes the reshaping of religion as unyielding where previously it was understood to be flexible.