RABBI DAVID WOLPE TWENTY-THREE CENTURIES OF ANTISEMITISM

Few people ever admit that they hate Jews just because they are Jews: They hate Jews because they are supposedly too powerful or too pushy, because they are progressive or greedy capitalists, because they’re too insular or too bent on assimilation, because they killed Christ, practice ritual murder, are in league with Satan and cherish Israel as their homeland.

It has been this way for millennia. Antisemitism thrives both in countries with large Jewish populations and in places where there are no Jews at all, in times of chaos and in moments of calm, across religions, ethnicities and space.

Rabbi David Wolpe returns to The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center to discuss how this hatred is too irrational to be tamed by analysis or lassoed by reason. Rather, it is the wild, irrational eruption of the world’s dark collective unconscious.

Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School, Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and inaugural Rabbinic Fellow for the ADL, David Wolpe was named The Most Influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews by The Jerusalem Post. He has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the American Jewish University, Hunter College and UCLA. He wrote a weekly column in the New York Jewish Week for almost 25 years, a weekly Torah column for The Jerusalem Post and is the author of eight books, including the national bestseller Making Loss Matter. Rabbi Wolpe has been published and profiled in dozens of magazines and newspapers, has been featured on every major television network and is a speaker much in demand across the world.