Elisha Russ-Fishbane
Old Age as a Paradigm and Ideal in Medieval Jewish Culture
Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 7pm
Taft Center, 1 Edwards, UC Uptown Campus
Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, is a historian of the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic world and a scholar of medieval Jewish culture, including the legacies of Maimonides in later Jewish life and thought. His first book on the movement of Jewish-Sufi pietism in medieval Egypt, entitled Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Circle (Oxford University Press, 2015), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize by the American Academy for Jewish Research. His second book, Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022), is a study of aging in the Jewish communities of the medieval Mediterranean and Near East and of old age as a paradigm and ideal in medieval Jewish culture. He is currently at work on a book on the many ways in which Islam features in the medieval Jewish imagination both among the Jews of the Islamic world and of Christian Europe.