Past Events

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the...

This talk will explore the intersections between transgender identity and religious tradition by demonstrating what it means to read the Bible from a transgender perspective.

Joy Ladin is the author of The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, due out in 2018 from Brandeis University Press. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. She has also published nine books of poetry including The Future is Trying to Tell Us...

The hatred of Jews has increased in Europe and the Americas over the last decades. Armin Lange argues that contemporary Jew hatred draws on ancient traditions. To effectively fight anti-Semitism, a cultural forgetting of anti-Semitic prejudices and stereotypes needs to be achieved, i.e. the cultural and religious memories of Western and Islamic worlds needs to be changed.

Armin Lange is the Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Vienna University and the Professor for Second Temple Judaism. Lange is a corresponding member of...

Sunday, October 22, 2017, 1 PM – 6 PM 1100 Tawes Hall (TWS) 

Monday, October 23, 2017, 9AM – 5:15PM 4116 Susquehanna Hall (SQH) 

This two-day conference will challenge the common assumption that organized Jewish political activity began only in recent times. In fact, Jews “entered into history” and became active agents of their own collective destiny even before the birth of socialist or nationalist parties. Starting in the early modern period—from the sixteenth though nineteenth centuries—Jews organized to shape their group...