Disasters of Biblical Proportions: Reimagining the Ten Plagues in the Age of Covid and October 7 UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

The biblical story of the ten plagues, the series of disasters sent against Pharaoh and the Egyptian in order to compel them to free the Israelites, introduced into collective imagination a connection between disaster and justice. In this presentation, Steven Weitzman will explore how Jews, Christians and Muslims have reimagined the biblical story to make sense of the disasters and injustices of their own age, focusing on how the story has been reshaped in the wake of the traumatic events and protests that have unfolded since October 7, 2023.

Steven Weitzman serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Religious Studies. His previous academic roles include directing Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Recent publications include The Origin of the Jews: the Search for Roots in a Rootless Age; the coedited Princeton Companion to Jewish Studies; Disasters of Biblical Proportions: the Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World (the basis of this talk); and The Jews: a History, co-written with John Efron and Matthias Lehmann and now in its fourth edition.