Justin Jaron Lewis

• RLGN 1424 - Religion and Sexuality
• RLGN 2140 - Introduction to Judaism
• RLGN 2160 - Hebrew Bible (Tanakh / "Old Testament")
• RLGN 2072 - Storytelling and Religion
• RLGN 2200 - Atheism
• RLGN 3824 - Kabbalah: Magic, Mythology, Mysticism

Winnipeg has been my home since 2008. My teaching focus is Jewish Studies, with courses including Great Jewish Books, Contemporary Judaism, and Zionism: Religious Perspectives; I have expanded into teaching courses on world religions and non-religion. Previously I was a congregational rabbi in Kingston, Ontario, and director of Jewish Studies at Queen's University. Before that I made a living as a freelance storyteller and Jewish educator. Storytelling remains at the heart of my research and teaching.

• Maggid (Jewish storytelling and teaching), Jewish Spirit Maggid Training Program, 2010
• PhD (Post-Biblical Hebrew Language and Literature), University of Toronto, 2003
• Rabbi (Judaism and pastoral training), Academy for Jewish Religion (New York), 2001

Research interests

• Storytelling, especially in Hasidic Judaism
• Aspects of Winnipeg's Jewish history
• Religion, gender, and sexuality
• Yeshayahu Leibowitz's challenging religious thought
• Hinduism and Judaism 

Research summary

I learn from my students and welcome them as collaborators. My research revolves around oral storytelling and its written echoes, especially in Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, and Yiddish. Theories about stories interest me less than stories themselves, and I subscribe to Wendy Doniger's teaching that a story is best understood through another story. Juxtaposing images and ideas in unexpected ways delights me. Thus, one article I am working on compares frightening images of the feminine divine in Kabbalah and in Indian ritual theatre. A book in progress will look at Hasidic stories told in recent years, including in Yiddish-language internet forums, from a variety of perspectives, including those of student co-authors.

Books

• Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)/
• Many Pious Women (edition and translation of a Yiddish text from Renaissance Italy; introductory essays by Harry Fox; De Gruyter, 2011).

Online

• Winnipeg Jewish Renewal Oral History Project (interviews with people who knew the late Rabbi Zalman Schachter, founding figure of the Jewish Renewal Movement, during his years in Winnipeg, mid-1950s to mid-1970s).
• Thoughts on Death (Menakhem Oldendorf, 1504) (text and preliminary translation of an Early Yiddish text previously known only in manuscript).

Selected recent articles

• The Leibowitzer Rebbe: Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Hasidism. Modern Judaism 43:3 (2023).
• Semen and the Self in a Teaching and Prayer. In Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body (2023).
• Nahman of Bratslav. In Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 20 (2022).
• Meanings of Shekhinah in Tosher Ḥasidism. In From Something to Nothing: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary Canadian Jewish Studies (2019).
• The Divine Feminine in Contemporary Judaism. In Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (2018).
• Performing the past in Hasidic tales. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, volume 16 (2017).
• Enemies Within: Canaanite Nations and Spiritual Struggle in Hasidism. In Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof: Poetry, Prophecy and Justice in Hebrew Scripture (2017).

• Storytelling and Jewish teaching in congregations, Jewish events, and interfaith gatherings in Winnipeg and beyond.
• Currently cataloguing and studying the book collection of Chevra Mishnayes synagogue in Winnipeg, once a centre of Jewish study.