LECTURES ON JUDAISM to be given at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

Curator to hold talk on gallery

CHAPEL HILL -- John Coffey of the N.C. Museum of Art will discuss the museum's Judaic Art Gallery on Jan. 31 at UNC.

His talk will be the first of five free, public speeches in the spring 2007 lecture series of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.

All lectures will be at 7:30 p.m. in the theater of UNC's Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History on South Road.

Coffey, curator of American and modern art and deputy director for art at the Raleigh museum, will discuss the history, mission and collection of the Judaic gallery. He is a UNC graduate and Raleigh native. Other series events include:

-- Feb. 15: "Ancient Judaism and the Prism of Orthodoxy." Michael Stone, professor of religious studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will consider challenges facing Jewish and Christian scholars of Judaism in the ancient world.

-- Feb. 28: "New Light on the Phoenicians and the Maccabees: Excavations at Tel Kedesh, Israel." Andrea Berlin, associate professor in the department of classical and near Eastern studies at the University of Minnesota, will discuss how recent discoveries provide new evidence of political and social interactions among Jews, Phoenicians and Greeks in second century B.C. Palestine.

-- March 20: "Mysticism, Magic and Rabin's Murder: The Pulsa DeNura Ritual." Zion Zohar, director and chair of the program for the study of Sephardic and Oriental Jewry at Florida International University, will discuss a controversial death curse/ritual performed by rabbis who influenced the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin.

-- April 16: "Kurt Weill's Kol Nidre and Jewish Memory." Tamara Levitz, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, will explore the composer's use of the melody of the Kol Nidre -- a Jewish prayer recited on Yom Kippur -- in three of his works.