Sunday 15 October 2023

Preacher: Rabbi Mark Solomon
                    Co-chair of the London Society of Jews and Christians

Rabbi Mark Solomon is originally from Sydney, Australia, but began his rabbinic studies at a Hasidic yeshiva in rival Melbourne. After a stint in Israel, he did an Arts Hons. degree at Sydney University, with a dissertation on baroque religious poetry. He completed rabbinic studies at the Orthodox Jews' College, London, in 1991, and the same year began teaching at the Progressive Leo Baeck College, where he has grown old and grey, lecturing in Talmud, Biblical Exegesis, Rabbinic Theology, Medieval philosophy (the topic of his MA dissertation), Kabbalah and Hasidism. He has served as rabbi for one Orthodox synagogue and several Liberal ones, and is currently part-time minister of Edinburgh and Leicester Liberal communities. He is Interfaith Consultant for Liberal Judaism and chairs its Beit Din (rabbinic court) overseeing conversions. He is also a cantor and enjoys singing Gilbert and Sullivan, Yiddish songs and for Burns night suppers. He lives in North London with his partner, the actor Lobo Chan, who hates Gilbert and Sullivan.

Sunday 5 November 2023

Preacher: Dr Tobias Cremer
                 Junior Research Fellow in Religion and the 
                 Frontier Challenges at Pembroke College Oxford

Tobias Cremer is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and an Associate Member of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the relationship between religion, secularisation and the rise of right-wing identity politics. Tobias holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Cambridge, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a McCloy Fellow, an MPhil in Politics and International Studies from Cambridge University, and a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Sciences Po Paris. Among his most recent books are The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West (Cambridge University Press 2023) and Faith, Nationalism and the Future of Liberal Democracy (co-authored, Notre Dame University Press 2021).