Author and Translator Raymond P. Scheindlin will present his new translation of Vulture in a Cage, and discuss its original author, Solomon Ibn Gabirol who is one of the most celebrated Andalusian-Hebrew poets and philosophers of the 11th century. Weighty poems of praise, lament, and complaint sit alongside devotional poetry, love poetry, descriptive meditations on nature, and epigrams. Obsessed with the impediments of the body and the material world, Ibn Gabirol ambitiously dreamed of breaking through corporeal constraints and launching his soul into the realm of the intellect. Ibn Gabirol created a style that was in conflict with the esthetics of his age but that feels quite at home in our own.

Raymond P. Scheindlin is a renowned expert on Hebrew literature in its Golden Age and a master translator of biblical and medieval Hebrew poetry. A professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary and director of JTS’s Shalom Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, Dr. Scheindlin has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1988) and a fellow of the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library (2005-2006). He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Jewish Quarterly Review and Near Eastern Literatures. He received the Cultural Achievement Award of the National Society for Jewish Culture in 2004.