Department of Religious Studies

Graduate student, Brian Hillman, presented his paper “The Vilna Gaon’s Legacy in Kabbalah and Scholarship” at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference. In January, Brian presented his paper “Lion Taming: R. Yitzhak Isaac Ḥaver’s Kabbalistic Defense of The Jewish Canon” at the Faculty-Graduate workshop in the Jewish Studies program at Indiana University. Both papers are from Brian’s dissertation “Textual Authority and Jewish Modernity: The Case of the Lithuanian Mithnagdim” which provides a new approach to the study of European Judaism in the nineteenth century.