History
JLI was founded in 1999 with the mission to inspire increased Jewish learning worldwide and create a global network of informed students connected by bonds of shared Jewish experience. The first JLI course, Jewish Mysticism, was piloted at 15 Chabad centers in 1999. The institute expanded thereafter, introducing 15-20 new cities annually. In 2005, JLI was expanded to 40 new cities. JLI serves over 24 countries, with 350 locations around the globe (260 of which are in the United States).
Since its inception in 1998, over 220,000 students have completed JLI courses, with enrollment of 12,000 to 16,000 students each semester. As of 2011, JLI has developed 37 separate six-week courses, the most popular of which have been on Jewish thought, law, and mysticism.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)