Lecture: Lilith’s Comeback in Contemporary Feminist Spiritualities

What a glorious career did Lilith had in thousands of years! Alas, always as a negative and dark image… However, in the last decades, in the feminist spirituality she's actually admired. So, what does she represent for the contemporary feminist spirituality? Not one thing, but rather different things. The lecture presents a research, that was also published in an Article. See below links to relevant items. The lecture took place at a panel on "New Religious Movements" at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Israeli Association for the Study of Religion, dedicated to the Scriptures (their nature and place in religions). The conference was conducted at Bar Ilan University on March 11th-12th, 2018. This conference's session took place in English. For the conference's program in English.

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A lecture: Lilith’s Image in Contemporary Feminist Spirituality and its Meanings

"Lilith sets inspiration fo women and men in the contemporary femenist spirituality, a sourse of theological/thealogical imagination, and an image for mimicry." This lecture, on Lilith's Image in Contemporary Feminist Spirituality, took part inSchocken Institute for Jewish Research's workshop on Feminine Spiritual Leadership. The research was awarded a scholarship from the Institute. The research project on Lilith includes more articles and lectures.

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Doctoral Dissertation: The New Age Culture in Israel (A Methodological Introduction and the “Conceptual Network”)

The doctoral dissertation was written in the Program of Interdisciplinary Studies of Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar-Ilan University, with the supervision of Prof. Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Adiel Schremer (Bar Ilan University). The work is written in Hebrew, but entails a long abstract and detailed contents in English. It holds over 450 pages, in two volumes, and was approved in 2006. It was a pioneer big work in the area of the Alternative Spirituality in Israel, and served many dozens of researches that followed. The work surveys the phenomena and trends of New Age culture in Israel, and deals with an array of methodological issues concerning the New Age studies. It offers a model of cultural interpratation - "the ideational/conceptual network". This work was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Idel (Department of Jewish Tought), Hebrew University, and the supervision of Prof. Adiel Schremer, (Department of Jewish History), Bar-Ilan University.

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Research Article: “The Temptation of Legitimacy – Lilith’s Adoption and Adaption in Contemporary Feminist Spirituality”

This article surveys the many and various manifestations of Lilith's image in the femenist spirituality in the last decades, in the Jewish world and beyond. The article examines the values and messages embodies in the adoption and adaptation of this figure, and reveals their contradictory character - in many fields. Finally, the conclusion is that Lilith's figure constitutes an instrument to establish legitimation. The article is about 7,600 words, in English. In addition to this article, there are more items - an article and lectures that present the research project on Lilith. See links below. "I cannot remember now how I had even heard of Lilith, but I borrowed her tale because it fit my contemporary need." from: Judith Plaskow (ed. Donna Berman), The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, p. 86.

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A lecture on New Age elements in mainstream advertisments in Israel, in a conference at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

The lecture took part in a conference titled "Political, Sociological and Historical Aspects of New Age in Israel", in a panel dedicated to "The New Age and the Israeli Arena: Education, Consumerism and Political Act", chaired by Boaz Huss, and with the participation of Dalit Simchai.

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Lecture: Thinking of the New Age as an “Ideational Network”

The (Hebrew, about 20 min.) lecture took place at the 8th Israeli Conference for the Study of Contemporary Spiritualities' plenum, at the University of Haifa (December 2015). The lecture presented the model of "the Ideational Network", that was Ruah-Midbar's doctoral dissertation's fruit (see link below). Ruah-Midbar Shapiro was also the co-chair of this conference, and actually the initiator and founder of the series of ICSCS. This lecture opened the final session of the conference, that was on "Spirituality Now - Israel 2016: Conceptualizations, Major Trends, and Central Issues". The session's chair was Boaz Huss.

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