JTA — Yeshiva University has announced that prominent British conservative author and pro-Israel commentator Douglas Murray will teach a class at the school this spring.

Murray, who is not Jewish, was appointed as the school’s inaugural President’s Professor of Practice, a role the flagship Modern Orthodox university in New York City billed as bringing “a leading public intellectual into the academic setting.”

“Douglas Murray will join a generations-long conversation about great works from the Jewish canon and the broader humanistic tradition that is alive and impassioned on our campuses, and we look forward to him sharing his insights and perspectives,” said Rebecca Cypess, YU’s dean of the undergraduate faculty of arts and sciences and vice provost for undergraduate education.

At YU, Murray is set to teach an honors poetry course titled “The Values of Verse: Sacred and Secular Perspectives.”

“Great poetry is not an ornament of civilization,” Murray said in a statement distributed by YU. “It is one of the ways civilizations think, remember and endure. In an age of noise and distraction, returning to verse is a way of recovering seriousness — about life, love, loss and responsibility. I’m honored to join Yeshiva University in a setting where those questions are taken seriously and........

© The Times of Israel