Dan & Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok

This week I have interviewed Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok who were based in Kent from 1975 until 1997 when they moved to Lampeter after Dan was appointed Professor of Judaism.

Dan is originally from Denver, and is of Hungarian descent, while Lavinia descends from an established middle class English family whose father was the lawyer of the Church of England. Dan talks about how he found out when he was in his twenties that he was the product of artificial insemination and how he didn’t have a good relationship with the man that he had hitherto thought was his father.

Lavinia relays her unhappy experience of going to a girls’ boarding school and how university was a completely different, liberating experience for her. We learn that from 1980-87 Lavinia taught Religious Studies at King’s School, Canterbury, where she was the only full time female member of staff. She later became a headmistress.

Dan talks about his experience of going to an ‘American Graffiti’-type high school and from there went to a small elite male-only college in Massachusetts. We learn why he found it to be so horrible and why he felt a sense of displacement. He later went to a rabbinical seminary and on to Cambridge to do his PhD which is where he and Lavinia met.

Lavinia reflects on having been an unmusical child in a musical family but is someone keen on opera and Anglican church music, and she relays her experience of passing her driving test by singing hymns – and how she invited the examiner to join in with her.

Dan talks about how he has a perverse fascination with films about dysfunctional families and he explains why there is something psychologically strange about the cathartic experience.

Lavinia discusses her reasons for writing ‘A Campus Conspiracy’, based on the way she and Dan have been perceived by colleagues over the years, and we move on to talk about how we have to deal with conflicts in all aspects of life. This leads us to the question of whether nostalgia can have a negative as well as a positive dimension. Dan and Lavinia share quite different perspectives here, with Dan fearing that nostalgia can blind us from facing the present while Lavinia’s family is obsessed with the past.

In the final part of the interview we learn whether Dan and Lavinia have fulfilled the dreams they had when they were young and why Lavinia is a looking back and Dan might be thought of as more of a looking forward type of person.

Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and Dan & Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.