On Tuesday evening November 10, 2020, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, IJS Executive Director, interviewed Rabbi Dr. Art Green at a live public event sponsored by IJS, to an audience of more than 500 people. This is a full recording of their conversation.
Art Green is one of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s founding teachers. He is also the founding dean and current director of the Rabbinical School and Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Hebrew College, as well as Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is both a historian of Jewish religion and a theologian; his work seeks to form a bridge between these two distinct fields of endeavor.
Educated at Brandeis University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he received rabbinic ordination, Art studied with such important teachers as Alexander Altmann, Nahum Glatzer, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory. He has taught Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, and theology to generations of students at the University of Pennsylvania, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (where he served as both Dean and President), Brandeis, and now at Hebrew College. He was the founder of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1968 and remains a leading independent figure in the Jewish Renewal movement.
Art is author, editor, and translator of more than twenty books. Among his scholarly works are Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. Art is also well known for his translations and interpretations of Hasidic teachings, including: Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from Around the Maggid’s Table (2013). Among his most recent works are the two-volume A New Hasidim (JPS, 2019), co-edited with Ariel Evan Mayse and a complete translation of the Hasidic classic The Light of the Eyes (Stanford, 2020).
Art’s most recent book is Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love (Yale, 2020).