The Lawrence Jewish Community Congregation (LJCC) will host a panel devoted to the topic “What Judaism Says about the Death Penalty and the Carceral State.”
The event will be held on Sunday, Dec. 8, beginning at 5 p.m.
Four panelists will participate: Dr. Samuel Brody, KU associate professor of religious studies; Rabbi Doug Alpert of Congregation Kol Ami; Kelson Bohnet, an attorney with the Kansas State Board of Indigents Defense; and Donna Schneweis, the chair of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty (KCADP).
Dr. Brody and Rabbi Alpert will offer reflections about what traditional Jewish sources say about the ethics of imprisonment and execution and speak to what contemporary Jews and others might learn from this body of thought today. Bohnet will offer a brief history of the death penalty and speak to how the legal processes associated with it operate today at a national level and in the state of Kansas. Schneweis will provide an activist’s perspective, discussing the collateral damage of capital punishment – its effects on the larger community – and offer information about how to get involved for those who wish to put an end to this public policy.
“This event is the final installment in our 2024 ‘Dying Well’ series,” LJCC Director Lara Giordano said. “This series was meant to approach death from a plurality of perspectives — spiritual, ritualistic, communal, practical. I thought that bringing a Jewish lens to the contemporary practice of capital punishment was an interesting way to explore ‘dying well’ through its inversion – which is to say, dying badly; dying at the hands of the state.
“The richness of Jewish tradition is a function of our perpetual revisitation of — our wrestling with — that tradition in new and different historical contexts,” Giordano continued. “I wanted to create a context where we could think Jewishly — think critically — about our own state policies in regards to corporal and capital punishment.”
The panelists’ presentations will be followed by a Q&A session and reception. This event is free and open to the public, but the LJCC requests advanced registration on its website, ljcc.shulcloud.com.
