Shana Penn

Minister Michałowski decorates Shana Penn with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. (Photo: Bartlomiej Banaszak)

The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union is prould to announce that Shana Penn, Visiting Scholar and Chair of CJS Advisory Committee, was decorated with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic, in Warsaw, on October 23, 2013. Penn is also Executive Director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture which supports the programming of CJS...

It was standing room only in Easton Hall for the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies' lively November 29 conference “Formations of Orthodoxy,” which explored Orthodox Jewish cultural formations in interwar Poland and post-Holocaust America.

Nathaniel Deutsch from UC Santa Cruz discussed the surprising role of ethnographical awareness in determining Orthodox observance in interwar Poland, while David Myers from UCLA introduced the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Kiryas Joel, in upstate New York, through an analysis of the expansion of Orthodox practice to the ...