Song Lihong is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Glazer Institute of Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing University, China. He has served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Fellow and Research Scholar at Tel Aviv University, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He is the author of Rome and Jerusalem (in Chinese, 2015), the editor of Representations and Identities in the Jewish Diaspora (in Chinese, 2018) and From Sinai to China (in Chinese, 2012), and a co-editor of The Image of Jews in Contemporary China (in English, 2016). He is currently editing a book series on Jewish culture published by Zhejiang Remin Press. At HYI as a virtual visiting scholar because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he is doing a project on “The Intercultural and Transnational Encounters between Jews and Modern China,” which aims to explore intellectual biographies of key figures on both sides of the Jewish-Chinese connection.
He is working on three projects:
(1) A joint project with the University of Pennsylvania on “China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transnational Encounters.” He is co-editing an English volume of essays, based on an international conference held in Nanjing, which will serve as the final artifact of the project. His own contribution to the project is, and will be, a series of essays exploring the intellectual biographies of key figures on both sides of Jewish-Chinese connections. This is also my core research at the HYI.
(2) He is editing a book series on Jewish culture in China planning to publish 10 books in the next 5 years. The first title, a Chinese translation of R. Scheindlin’s A Short History of the Jewish People, was published two months ago and sold pretty well. And three more titles will come out in 1 year. A special emphasis of the book series will be placed on Jewish-Chinese connections in the modern era. He also plans to include in it a book or two on Antisemitism / Holocaust.
(3) He is preparing a paper on Israel Studies in China, for which he will organize in spring 2021 at HYI a workshop on “The emerging area studies in China: the case of Israel Studies.”