Events
Upcoming Events
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
7:00PM (MT)
Center for British & Irish Studies Room
Norlin Library
and via Zoom (registration coming soon)
This year’s Embodied Judaism highlights the oral histories of Jews of Color that are being added to our archive through the Jews of Color: Histories and Futures project, made possible by funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. Please join Ilana Kaufman (the Jews of Color Initiative), Marc Dollinger (San Francisco State University, author ofBlack Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s), and Bryan K. Roby (University of Michigan, author ofThe Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948-1966) for a panel discussion about the lives, experiences, and histories of Jews of color in the United States and Israel.
Judaism is often considered a religion of the mind, defined by the study and practice of Jewish law, but it also has rich traditions as a religion of the body, engaging sights, sounds, emotions, and feelings of spirituality. The Embodied Judaism Series, held biannually at the , draws on materials housed in the Innovations in Jewish Life Collections to explore the role of the body in Jewish life through public symposiums, featuring academic scholars, prominent practitioners, and artistic performers, and multimedia exhibits aimed at academic and non-academic audiences.
Ilana Kaufman is the Chief Executive Officer of the Jews of Color Initiative. Her work sits at the center of Jewish community, racial equity and justice, and is anchored by the voices and experiences of Jews of Color. Ilana has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Code Switch,The Forward, eJewish Philanthropy, and her Eli Talk, titled “Who Counts? Race and the Jewish Future,” has over 45,000 views. She is passionate about the intersection of Jewish community, racial justice, Jews of Color, education, and philanthropy, and is a Senior Schusterman Fellow.
Marc Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University. Professor Dollinger is author of four scholarly books in American Jewish history, most recentlyBlack Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing The Alliance in the 1960s. He has published entries in theEncyclopedia Judaica, theEncyclopedia of Antisemitism, and theEncyclopedia of African American Education. His next project, an academic memoir titledLaundering Antisemitism: Identity Politics, Ethnic Studies, and the University,Indiana University Press, traces his experiences as an identified Jewish (and Zionist) professor in the current political climate. Professor Dollinger has spoken about his research with the CEO of the NAACP on CNN as well as the CNN-podcast “Silence Is Not An Option,” the NFL Network, ESPN, and Germany’s National Public Radio. Just for fun, Dr. Dollinger helped actress Helen Hunt learn about her Jewish roots on the prime-time NBC show, “Who Do You Think You Are?”
Bryan K. Roby is an Associate Professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. His research focuses on the history of race/racism, Black diasporas, and Jewish identity in Israel/Palestine and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. His first book, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015), provided an extensive history of social justice protests by Middle Eastern Jews in Israel.
His current book project, Blackness Refracted: Race and the Making of the Jewish Color Line in the Twentieth Century, traces the migration history of racialized peoples and ideas across seas and oceans throughout the global twentieth century. The book examines how early 20th century European scholarship constructed Afro-Asian Jews (i.e. Mizrahim) as Black and how, in the second half of the 20th century, Afro-Asian Jews responded to this interpellation within Israel, Asia, and Africa. It explores the histories of the Israeli Black Panthers, Indian Jewish civil rights activism, and Ethiopian Jewish migration to Israel with the aim of engaging in reparative history.
Monday, March 3, 2025
Time & Location TBD
Join us for a Faculty & Graduate Student Research Colloquium,led by Dr. Laura Leibman. This event is part of the Program in Jewish Studies' 2025 Bender Visiting Scholar Program.
Branded as impure, Jewish sex workers and traffickers were banned from burial in Jewish communal cemeteries in New York, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Constantinople, and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In response, Jewish criminal organizations across the Americas created their own burial societies and cemeteries where members could be buried with religious rites and honor. While their cemeteries in Brazil and Argentina have garnered extensive scholarly interest, the cemeteries in New York have gone virtually unstudied. In this colloquium Leibman discusses her fieldwork in the “pimps and prostitutes” cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens, NY in Summer 2024 through the lens of space, honorifics, and familial connections. She argues that the New York cemeteries of the impure both mirror and refute concerns about death and Jewish purity in the nearby city of the living.
Laura Arnold Leibman is theLeonard J. Milberg '53 Professor in American Jewish Studies.Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life.She isPresident of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the author of the author ofThe Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects(Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier bookMessianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life(2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph,Once We Were Slaves(Oxford UP, 2021) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and theSaul Viener Book Prize, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
Photo Description:Mourning the Dead at Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma ("Cemitério das Polacas"), Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 1934. Photo courtesy Felipe Parada.
Monday, March 3, 2025
In person and streaming via Zoom(registration link coming soon)
7:00pm
Center for British & Irish Studies
Norlin Library
2025 Annual Bender Visiting Scholar Public Lecture byDr. Laura Arnold Leibman
An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. In this talk, Professor Leibman overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados. Leibman traces the siblings’ extraordinary journey around the Atlantic world, using artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten people of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived.
Laura Arnold Leibman is theLeonard J. Milberg '53 Professor in American Jewish Studies.Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life.She isPresident of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the author of the author ofThe Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects(Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier bookMessianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life(2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph,Once We Were Slaves(Oxford UP, 2021) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and theSaul Viener Book Prize, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
Past Events
Funny—You Don't Look Jewish!
May 21, 2024
We welcomedDr. Helen Kim of Whitman College to join us for a conversation about Asian American Jewish experience. Hertalkexplores the intersections of race, religion, and Jewish identity in the context of mixed-race families in contemporary U.S. society.Dr. Kim discusses the research she conducted with her partner, Noah Leavitt, for their book,JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America's Newest Jews(University of Nebraska Press, 2016).Roughly ten years after conducting research for this book, Dr. Kim providessome reflections and discuss some connections between her work, the current racial and ethnic landscape in the U.S., changes in American Jewish demography, and the vibrant work currently being conducted on Jews of Color in the United States.
Helen Kim is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her scholarship focuses on race and American Judaism in the contemporary era. Along with co-author, Noah Leavitt, she published JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America's Newest Jews in 2016 with University of Nebraska Press. Her scholarship has been profiled in various popular news outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Huffington Post.