Tate Lecture Series

THE ALICE TATE LECTURES IN JUDAIC STUDIES

The Department of Religious Studies hosted the the Alice L. Tate Lectures in Judaic Studies annually until 2022, when the associated position moved to the Department of Philosophy. The lecture series was made possible by the generous endowment of Alice L. Tate who also endowed the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professorship in Judaic Studies at UNC Charlotte.

Alice L. Tate was born in 1916 into the prominent families of Robert Lindsay Tate and Lois Holt Tate. Both the Tate and the Holt families had built up the textile industry in North Carolina in the early to mid 1800s. Alice Tate moved to New York in 1937 to study opera, and remained there until her death in 1987. Throughout her life, she created several trust funds to support UNC Charlotte such as scholarships for African-American students; an endowed professorship in African-American and African Studies; a Judaica and Hebraica Library Fund; a Judaic Studies Endowment Fund to support the Isaac Swift Professorship in Judaic Studies; and symposia Japan and Japanese culture. She also provided financial and moral support to civil rights causes throughout her life.

Alice Lindsay Tate died in New York City on May 2, 1987 and was buried in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Vist the J. Murrey Atkins Library Archives website to learn more about her life, and about the Alice Tate Special Collections holdings of over 10,000 items, including 895 photographs, 40 vinyl disc sound recordings, 5 reel-to-reel sound recordings, and 7 cassette sound recordings!

Here is a roster of past lecturers with their affiliations and topics. Some speakers gave one lecture on campus and another at the Jewish Community Center.

  • 2022 Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut, “Jewish Diversity and Jews of Color”
  • 2019 Eva Mroczek, University of California, Davis, “Out of the Cave: Manucript Discovery and New Biblical Pasts”
  • 2018 Sara Imhoff, Indiana University, Bloomington, “Jesse Sampter, Zionist ‘Cripple’: Changing How we See Religion and Disability”
  • 2017 Annette Yoshiko Reed, New York University, “The Apocalypse and Jewish Afterlives”
  • 2016 Carol Meyers, Duke University, “Holy Land Archaeology: Where the Past Meets the Present”
  • 2013 Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, “The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus”
  • 2012 Jonathan Boyarin, UNC Chapel Hill, “Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side”
  • 2011 Rebecca Alpert, Temple University, “Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball”
  • 2010 Nora Rubel, University of Rochester, “Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination”
  • 2009 Jonathan Z. Smith, University of Chicago, “When the Chips are Down: A Symposium with Jonathan Z. Smith”
  • 2008 Peter Ochs, University of Virginia, “A Tent of Meeting for Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptural Reasoners” and “Scriptural Reasoning: Shared Jewish-Christian-Muslim Study”
  • 2007 Michael E. Stone, Hebrew University Jerusalem, “The Other Messiah: A Priestly Messiah from Levi in Ancient Jewish Sources” and “Was There a Jewish Bible Before 70 CE?”
  • 2006 Marc Bregman, UNC Greensboro, “Midrash as Visualization: The Art of the Agedah” and “Non-Biblical Scrolls: New Evidence of the Earliest Post-Biblical Writings”
  • 2005 Nancy A Harrowitz, Boston University, “The Writing of the Holocaust: Reading Primo Levi” and “Primo Levi and the Science of Writing”
  • 2002 Lenn E. Goodman, Vanderbilt University, “Do Jews and Muslims Worship the Same God?” and “Creative Interactions Between Jewish and Islamic Philosophy”
  • 2001 Igor Dukhan, Belarussian State University, Minsk, “Jewish Avant-garde Art versus Russian and Soviet Art” and “Time in Jewish Avant-garde Art”
  • 2000 Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College, “From Warsaw to Selma: A Daughter’s Reflections on Abraham Joshua Heschel” and “When Jesus was an Aryan: Protestant Theology in Nazi Germany”
  • 1999 Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University, “Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition” and “One Culture, of the Commonalities and Differences Between the Arts and Sciences”
  • 1998 Michael S. Berger, Emory University, “Who is a Jew and Israel Today” and The State of Israel and Jewish Messianism”
  • 1997 David Biale, Graduate Theological Union, “Multiculturalism and the Jews” and “Blood and Belief in Medieval Jewish-Christian Relations”