Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies (WIJS) at Young Israel of New Rochelle is proud to present Dr. Beth A. Berkowitz on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 @ 8:15 pm (ET) on Zoom. Dr. Berkowitz will be the fourth speaker of the 2025-2026 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.
Berkowitz’s lecture is entitled, “What Do Animals Teach Us about Families? Four Biblical Laws about Animal Parents and Children.” Families are sometimes tragically separated by war and migration. But what about the animal families that are routinely separated by agriculture and development? What is the impact on them, on us, and on the planet? Moving beyond debates about the ethics of eating animals to focus instead on animals’ relationships with each other, the lecture will explore the four “animal family” laws of the Torah alongside their rabbinic interpreters from ancient times to today.
Dr. Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and What Animals Teach Us about Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, forthcoming 2026). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include animal studies, Jewish difference, rabbinic legal authority, and Bible reception history.
All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Please visit https://www.yinr.org/wijs.html to view the complete WIJS 2025-26 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list, or for Zoom information, please call 914-636-2215 or email: wijs@yinr.org. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.
