Lecture: Ilana Pardes on Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale

Join us for a lecture from Ilana Pardes, with responses by Karina Hogan and Anne Hoffman.

The biblical Ruth has inspired numerous readers from diverse cultural backgrounds across many centuries. In this insightful volume, Ilana Pardes invites us to marvel at the ever-changing perspectives on Ruth’s foreignness. She explores the rabbis’ lauding of Ruth as an exemplary convert and the Zohar’s insistence that Ruth’s Moabite background is vital to her redemptive powers. In moving to early modern French art, she looks at pastoral paintings in which Ruth becomes a local gleaner, holding sheaves in her hands. Pardes concludes with contemporary adaptations in literature, photography, and film in which Ruth is admired for being a paradigmatic migrant woman. Ruth’s afterlives not only reveal much about their own times but also shine new light on this remarkable ancient tale and point to its enduring significance. In our own era of widespread migration and dislocation, Ruth remains as relevant as ever.

About the Speakers
Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. This fall, she will be a visiting professor at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the nexus of the Bible, literature, and culture, as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics, and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville’s Bibles (University of California, 2008), Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (University of Washington Press, 2013), and The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Karina Martin Hogan has been a member of the theology department at Fordham University since 2005. Prior to that, she taught for two years at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Swarthmore College and a  Master of Arts degree and doctorate from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Most of her research has been on the deuterocanonical or noncanonical literature of early Judaism. She has a particular interest in wisdom literature and apocalyptic literature. Recently, however, her research has focused on the book of Ruth in the Old Testament, approaching it from feminist and contextual perspectives. She is currently the associate chair of the theology department for the Lincoln Center campus.