Richard Sacks

The Gerson D. Cohen Institute for Adult Jewish Learning

CSAIR, Bronx NY

Thursday January 9, 2020 at 8:00pm

Taub Room (enter at 475 W. 250th St.)

The Gerson D. Cohen Institute for Adult Jewish Learning 2019-20 Catalogue

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Many of the greatest poets in the English-speaking world have taken on the often excruciating challenges confronting us all when we wrestle with biblical texts. This one-session course, taught by Professor Richard Sacks, who spent four decades at Columbia University teaching ancient texts such as the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf and Genesis, will focus on closely reading two such poems -- Emily Dickinson's "The first Day's Night had come" and Wiliam Butler Yeats' "The Sorrow of Love" -- both midrash-like in their seeming contemplations of Genesis' creation story, especially the creation of Eve.