Brunch with Professor Burt Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary, author of "Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It" The Passover Seder is a Greco-Roman symposium banquet? The Talmud rabbis presented themselves as Stoic philosophers? The Jewish courts were named after the Roman political institution, the Sanhedrin? There were synagogues in Israel where the prayers were recited in Greek? Rabbi Burt Visotzky, eminent scholar of ancient Judaism, shows that the Greco-Roman culture in which rabbinic Judaism grew in the first five centuries of the Common Era nurtured the development of Judaism as we still know and celebrate it today. $25/person; $18/USH members.