HBI Virtual Conversations with Pamela Nadell
July 8, 2020
2:00 – 3:00 pm EDT
As our country celebrates its independence, Professor Pamela Nadell, author of America’s Jewish Women: A History From Colonial Times to Today, uncovers what it has meant to be a Jewish woman in America by weaving together the stories of remarkable individuals—from the colonial matron Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, the poet Emma Lazarus, to labor activist Bessie Hillman and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Prof. Nadell is the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of Jewish studies at American University. She will be in conversation with Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Director, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
Shekhinah Speaks: Gender and Divinity with Joy Ladin
July 23, 2020
2:00-3:00 pm EDT
This presentation will describe the theology driving Joy Ladin’s current project, Shekhinah Speaks, a book-length series of poems in the voice of the Shekhinah, traditionally imagined as a female. She will present a radically different idea of the Shekhinah as a trans female archetype who identifies and is identified as female despite her lack of a female body but who is neither defined nor limited by binary gender. Ladin’s poems combine contemporary American poetic techniques with those found in Biblical prophetic texts.
Joy Ladin is an American poet and the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. She is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution
