HUC-JIR Names First Four Panken Professorships

(JTA) — The first four Aaron D. Panken Professorships have been named.
The professors, who serve on each of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s four campuses in Cincinnati, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and New York, will be funded by a $12 million endowment contributed by nearly 1,000 donors in memory of Panken.
Panken, who served as the president of HUC-JIR from 2014-2018, was killed in May piloting a small aircraft in the Hudson Valley area of New York state.
The first Panken professors are:
Jennifer Grayson, PhD, assistant professor of History at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati;
Rabbi Dalia Marx ’02, Ph.D., Professor of Liturgy and Midrash at the Taube Family Campus in Jerusalem;
Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot ’10, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History at HUC-JIR/New York;
Rabbi Dvora E. Weisberg ’11, Ph.D., Professor of Rabbinics and Director of the School of Rabbinical Studies at the Jack H. Skirball Campus in Los Angeles.
A day of learning led by the four professors will be held near the date of the rabbi’s first yahrzeit.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO