"...one of the most consistently interesting observers of Israeli religious life.”
- Yehudah Mirsky on Tomer Persico

After kiddush lunch, Dr. Tomer Persico will discuss the chronological development of a Jewish renaissance in Israel since the 1980's, note its characteristics, pause on a few of the groups involved, discuss the social causes, and present inherent tensions with Halakha.

Dr. Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and teaches at the Department for Comparative Religion in Tel-Aviv University. He is also the Academic Director of Programs and a teacher at ALMA: the Home for Hebrew Culture and taught for four years at the Secular Yeshiva. His dissertation, dealing with techniques of meditation in the Jewish tradition, and analyzing the cultural transformations leading to the observed shifts in meditative emphasis through the generations, will be published as a book by Tel Aviv University Press. His fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish Renewal, forms of secularization and trends of secularization and religiosity in Israel. He is an activist for freedom of religion in Israel, writes the most popular blog in Hebrew on religion, and has written hundreds articles on these subjects for the popular media.

This event is sponsored by Shaare Zedek's David, Ursula, and Adina Michaeli Memorial Education Fund in support of Israel programming.