Dr. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg is the Cornell Endowed Professor of Religion and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Rollins College.  Her fields of teaching and research include modern and contemporary Jewish thought, women and religion, and cross-cultural views of love and the body.  Dr. Greenberg is the author of Better than Wine: Love, Poetry and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig, and the recent 2 volume Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions. She has written numerous articles and essays in modern and contemporary Jewish thought and is presently completing her book on Judaism and the Imperative to Love: Defining the Human-Divine Interface

A native of Israel, Dr. Greenberg lectures nationally and internationally. She has been active at numerous scholarly societies and organizations such as the Parliament of the Worlds Religions, and the American Academy of Religion, where she serves as co-chair of the Comparative Study of Judaisms and Hinduisms Group. She is General Editor of Studies in Judaism Series for Peter Lang Academic Publishers. Dr. Greenberg is a recipient of numerous awards including the Cornell distinguished Faculty Award from Rollins College, the Templeton Course Prize in Science and Religion, and the Harvard University Pluralism Project grant.  She was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Jewish Studies at Oxford University, and most recently, taught at the university in Shanghai, China.

This lecture introduces notions of love and desire and offers an interpretation of selected poetry that depict passionate desire for the beloved while blurring the distinction of sensual and spiritual love.