2024-2025 Lecture Descriptions
Eric Alterman
America’s Fight Over Israel: Where Did It Come From? Where is it Going?”
Wednesday, Oct. 30
Description: American views and especially American Jewish views of Israel are in a period of transformation. This has happened before. The Zionist movement founded by Theodore Herzl was initially opposed by most American Jews but supported by many Christians. This changed in the 1920s and was completely transformed by the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It changed again in 1967 when Israel became the focal point of American Jewish identity and a key issue in US politics. As Israel became an occupying power, and most recently with its battles with the Palestinians in the West Bank and especially Gaza, the intensity of the fight over Israel has increased, especially on America’s campuses. This lecture will give historical context for the arguments we have over Israel and offer some tentative suggestions about where they may go in the future.
Bio: Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY. He has served as a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, the World Policy Institute, and The Nation Institute, and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Schusterman Foundation Fellow at Brandeis University, and a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. A regular columnist and contributor to the most prominent media outlets, Alterman is the author of twelve books, including We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022).
Noah Tamarkin
Jewish Identity, Genetics, and Indigeneity: Remapping Jewish Histories and Futures
Wednesday, Nov. 13
Description: This talk explores questions about Jewish identity through ethnographic research with Lemba people, a group of Black South Africans who in the 1980s and 1990s participated in genetic studies that aimed to demonstrate their Jewishness. The studies sparked international interest among Jewish people about the possibilities of connecting with Lemba people based on a shared Jewishness. At the same time, the studies offered Lemba people new ways to frame their Jewish identity that instead centered their simultaneous identities as Black indigenous South Africans. This talk shows how Lemba Black Jewish indigenous identity can provide openings through which we might rethink and ultimately remap Jewish histories and futures.
Bio: Noah Tamarkin is an associate professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His book Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) received the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Prize in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore from the Association for Jewish Studies.
Natan Paradise
Jewface, Secret Handshakes, and Everything in Between: Performing Jews Performing Jewish
Tuesday, Dec. 10
Description: Jews in America have routinely, even reflexively, turned to humor in navigating their identity. This talk explores how Jewish comedians have done so on stage, screen, and in print, publicly enacting but also modeling—for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences—the varying strategies Jews have turned to in figuring out how to be both Jewish and American. Those strategies have varied considerably from the earliest decades of the twentieth century until today, ranging from openly performing “Jewish” and all the complicated relationships to stereotypes that implies, to trying to hide Jewish identity from everyone except other Jews. This lecture will survey that history, with plenty of comic examples, and with particular attention to gendered differences in strategy as Jews in America tried to negotiate the complicated identity we call “Jewish.”
Bio: Natan Paradise directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota. He teaches courses in Jewish history and cultures, Jewish American literature, and Jewish humor, in addition to his research and writing on the American Jewish experience, antisemitism, and strategies for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion that are both effective and truly inclusive. He regularly serves as an invited speaker to local, national, and international audiences on antisemitism and DEI.
Samira Mehta
Jews of Color: One Term and Many Communities
Thursday, January 30
Description: Jews of color are much in the Jewish news. We hear about how there are a lot of Jews of color—more than we knew! We hear about how that is wrong—there are not so many Jews of color after all! We hear that politically, they are to the left of the Jewish community. We hear that they experience racism within the Jewish community. But who are Jews of color? This talk explains the history of the term Jews of color; the wide array of racial, cultural, and life experiences of the people we call Jews of color; and touches on some criticisms with the term Jews of color. After the talk, we will have a conversation about how to make Jewish spaces more welcoming to a diverse range of Jewish experiences.
Bio: Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of the National Jewish Book Award finalist Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); a book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023); and God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (under contract with University of North Carolina Press). She is the primary investigator on a research project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures and is working on a history of Jews of color in the United States over the past 100 years for Princeton University Press.
Maurice Samuels
The Dreyfus Affair and the Transformation of Jewish Identity
Sunday, Feb. 9
Description: In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany. After a hasty court martial and humiliating degradation ceremony, he was sent to Devil’s Island to serve a brutal life sentence. Over the next twelve years, the Dreyfus Affair transformed French society, leading to an outpouring of antisemitism. The Affair also transformed the nature of Jewish identity, changing how Jews saw their place in the world and their relation to other Jews. This talk explores Jewish reactions to the Affair in different national contexts, with particular attention to the effect of the Affair on Jewish political ideologies. With antisemitism once again on the rise, the Dreyfus Affair has much to teach us about the causes of antisemitic hatred, but also about the ways that antisemitism can be resisted.
Bio: Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he chairs the French Department and directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library, he is the author of five books, including most recently Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Orit Avishai
Queer Jews: The Struggle for Judaism’s Straight Soul
Thursday, March 27
Description:In times of social upheaval, how do observant Jewish communities decide who’s in and who’s out? What happens when rules of belonging are challenged by marginalized groups of Jews? This talk considers these questions through the experiences of queer orthodox Jews in Israel. Until recently, LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews could not imagine embracing their sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about two decades, Orthodox LGBTQ+ people forged social circles and communities and became visible. This talk offers the compelling story of how they created an effective social movement and rewrote what it means to be Orthodox, pointing to broader lessons about Jewish identity and community to be drawn from their struggles.
Bio: Orit Avishai is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. The author of Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (2023), she studies how Orthodox Jews negotiate with Jewish frameworks that regulate gender, sexuality, and desire. As part of a study of religious freedom as a locus of 21st-century culture wars, she is now writing about Yeshiva University students’ attempts to start a pride club on their campus.
