Lehman Lecture Speaker – Rabbi Marc Rosenstein

Jewish power: Ideal, Idol, or Illusion

Exploring the ambivalent and evolving Jewish relationship to power and powerlessness, individual and collective, from the Bible to the present.

Marc Rosenstein grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. He received a BA in
biochemistry from Harvard College, rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and a PhD from the Hebrew University.

He served as a pulpit rabbi in Port Washington, N.Y., as principal of the Solomon
Schechter Secondary School in Chicago, and then of Akiba Hebrew Academy in
Philadelphia. In 1990 he made aliyah with his wife Tami and three children, to
Moshav Shorashim in the Galilee. There he directed a small NGO engaged in
educational tourism and Arab-Jewish cooperation. From 2009 until 2015 he also
served as director of the Israel Rabbinical Program at Hebrew Union College in
Jerusalem.

The Jewish Publication Society published his books Turning Points in Jewish
History in 2018 and Contested Utopia: Jewish Dreams and Israeli Realities in
2021.