Join the Jewish Federation of St. Louis for the next event in the Sh’ma: Listen! Speaker Series on Tuesday January 31 at 7:30 pm with Rabbi Marc Rosenstein.

Rabbi Marc Rosenstein will be presenting “Toward a Vision of a Jewish State.” What could an ideal Jewish state look like? Rabbi Marc brings unique experience with some impressive initiatives to bring Arabs and Jews together that serve as a foundation for his perspectives. “Israeli and Diaspora Jews often express disappointment or even anger at Israel’s deficiencies – somehow, it is never democratic enough, or Jewish enough. It’s easy to complain. The real challenge is, if we had a magic wand, just what would our ideal Jewish state look like? That’s where the discussion needs to start.”

Rabbi Marc Rosenstein, a Chicago native, made Aliyah in 1990, settling with his family in the Shorashim, a small community in the Galilee where he served for 20 years as the director of the Galilee Foundation for Value Education, an NGO employing the methods of informal education to generate social change (Eng.Makom-Bagalil.org.il). He began the now-famous Galilee Circus in which young Jews and Arabs come together to learn, practice and perform circus arts; this remarkable circus has a rich relationship with St Louis’s own Circus Harmony. From 2009 to 2015, he served as the director of the Israel Rabbinical Program of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Since 2000, he has written a column on life in Israel, “Galilee Diary,” on the website of the Union for Reform Judaism.

The event will take place at the Jewish Federation of St. Louis Kopolow Building. For further information or to RSVP, please contact Barbara Levin at BLevin@JFedSTL.org or 314-442-3752. You can also learn more about the Sh’ma: Listen! Speaker Series and apply for your organization’s speaker to be featured at JFedSTL.org/SpeakerSeries.

This event is co-sponsored by Sh’ma: Listen! Speaker Series and the Center for Jewish LearningSh’ma: Listen! is made possible through the generous support of the Lubin-Green Foundation, a supporting foundation of Jewish Federation of St. Louis, and Hank Webber and Chris Jacobs.