Limmud Oz 2025: program highlights

How do you evaluate a community’s wellbeing? Measures might include an inclusive thriving community, connected cultural experiences, active healthy people, and a strong sense of mission. For the Jewish community, a proxy for such indicia might be formal opportunities to learn from, and with, each other.

Jewish communities, so diverse in geography, belief, practices, and politics, have a common denominator – their commitment to learning. The international Limmud movement developed as immersive Jewish “teach-ins” to bind communities by sharing knowledge.  

This year’s Limmud Oz implicitly ticks all the community wellbeing boxes, even in trying times. 

Limmud Oz 2025 will be held from June 7 to 9 in Melbourne. 

There are eight parallel sessions every hour over the two main days of the event, as well as a smaller Shabbat program. Highlights include presentations by eight international experts in Jewish history, music, theology, and politics from the UK, USA, Canada and Israel. 

The program has seven themes: Mind, Body and Soul; Arts and Culture; Everything Israel; Society and Politics; History and Memory; The Modern Jewish World; and Text and Philosophy.

Meet your favourite TJI writers and presenters and see some of the ideas we have discussed in the past year come to life. TJI is hosting a panel discussion about body image in the Jewish community based on the Every Body series. Tami Sussman and Dashiel Lawrence will host Ashamed to Admit's first live broadcast with Rabbi Ralph Genende and Rabbi Alison Conyer. Editor Deborah Stone will participate in a session on the difficulty of maintaining nuanced debate in these polarised times. Many TJI contributing writers are giving sessions, among them Michael Gawenda, Julie Szego, Esther Takac and Sidra Kranz Moshinsky.