Emerging Voices Lecture Series
The Emerging Voices in Jewish Studies lecture series showcases cutting-edge scholarship about Jews and Judaism. Highlighting the work of young scholars, the Emerging Voices series covers topics in Jewish history ranging from biblical antiquity to contemporary America. With a particular focus on work featuring intersections between Jewish Studies and other humanities fields, the Emerging Voices series aims to foster understanding of Jews and Judaism while contributing to the intellectual culture of the university.
Sari Fein, “'I urge the Spirit Who its on the Womb': Jewish Women’s Reproductive Practice in the Ancient World” | February 5, 2025, at 6pm EST
Sari Fein is Visiting Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She received her PhD in 2022 from Brandeis University with a dissertation entitled Conceiving Motherhood: The Reception of Biblical Mothers in the Early Jewish Imagination, which is currently being reworked for publication as a monograph. Her current research uses textual and material sources to interrogate how women exercised agency and authority over their reproductive lives in Jewish antiquity, and an article on this topic is forthcoming in Advances in Near Eastern and Biblical Research.
In the ancient world, reproduction was critically important yet fraught with risk. Survival of not only the family but the community itself was dependent upon women's success in conceiving, bearing, and raising children. This talk explores how women in antiquity navigated these physical and social vulnerabilities and exercised agency over their reproductive lives. We will explore texts from the Torah and rabbinic literature alongside magical objects such as incantation bowls and amulets for what they reveal about women's reproductive experiences in Jewish antiquity. Through this conversation, we will gain a deeper understanding about how Jews in the ancient world understood larger issues such as bodies, health, communal identity, and religious belief.
To register for this talk, please click here.
Emilie Amar-Zifkin, Emilie Amar Zifkin, "Being Seen Seeing: Jews, Christians, and the Medieval Public Eye" | March 11, 2025 at 6pm EST
Dr. Emilie Amar-Zifkin is the Flegg Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at McGill University, where she works on medieval history, disability studies, and ghosts. She just finished a year at the University of Toronto, where she was the Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish-Christian Relations, and where she explored sensory studies as a pedagogical framework for the study of medieval Jewish history. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from Yale University, an M.A. in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a B.A in from Fordham University in Theology and Stage Management. She is currently working on her first monograph, called Acting out in Ashkenaz, which offers an analysis of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval towns that conceptualizes both the history and the primary sources as texts with their own theatrical components.
This presentation suggests that reciprocal spectatorship — Christian public seeing of Jews and Jewish public seeing of Christians — can inform a more nuanced reading of Jewish-Christian public interaction than the standard narrative of persecution and mutual ill-will would indicate. An examination of primary sources on distinctive clothing, the role of Jews in major civic events, and rules and rituals of daily seeing and being seen demonstrates the importance of vision and visuality within the greater medieval sensory landscape. Both Jews and Christians conceived of vision as a profoundly active sense that could literally touch the object of sight, a notion that had serious consequences for spectators on both sides.
To register for this talk, please click here. When you register, you will be asked for a Net ID. If you do not have a UT Net ID, you can put in any text (your name, for example) and the registration will be successful.
Chumie Juni, "Halakhic Women? Pious Gender Formation in Ultra-Orthodox Women's Practice of Daily Prayer" | April 3, 2025 at 6pm EST
Nechama (Chumie) Juni is assistant professor of religion at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her work lies at the intersections of Modern Judaism, theory of religion, gender studies, and law. Her first book project, Halakhic Women: Gender and Ritual Conflict is a study of contemporary American Ultra-Orthodox women's practice of positive timebound commandments.
This talk will examine the ways that contemporary American Ultra-Orthodox women's practices of daily prayer defy expected gender categories. I will trace key historical and structural conditions that have combined to shape Ultra-Orthodox womanhood today as a space of conflicted gender formation. Against the typical scholarly move that casts gender-traditional women as wholly feminine, I will show how daily prayer calls upon women to enact multiple forms of gender in their earnest pursuit of piety.
To register for this talk, please click here. When you register, you will be asked for a Net ID. If you do not have a UT Net ID, you can put in any text (your name, for example) and the registration will be successful.
Eli Rosenblatt, "Black Christian Hebraism: Charles Lee Russell and the Afro-Protestant Encounter with Rabbinic Culture, 1918-1948" | April 9, 2025
Eli Rosenblatt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His interests span Jewish ideas and cultures across the Americas, with particular interests in the United States and the Caribbean. His forthcoming monograph, titled Creole Israel: The Jewish Atlantic World After Slavery, takes up traditional tools in Jewish Studies - Hebrew, Yiddish and co-territorial languages - but repositions multilingualism to reconsider the historical role of Creole and African Diasporic cultural formations in American Jewish life.
This lecture examines the life and scholarship of Charles Lee Russell (1886-1948), Bishop of the CME Church, scholar of the Hebrew language, and the author of the only known study of the Babylonian Talmud by an African American. Russell’s study of Jewish languages and his translation of rabbinic literature, which he first encountered in Thomasville, Georgia in the late 1910s, is an overlooked view onto the evolution of the Black church in its theological and political relations with non-Christian traditions and Jewish culture and communities. Russell’s scholarship, activism, and the cultural world it signifies uncovers a decades long instance of dialogue between a variety of Afro-Protestant intellectuals and traditionally educated Eastern Ashkenazic Jews rooted in the cooperative interpretation of Hebrew and Aramaic texts and their theo-political implications.
To register for this talk, please click here.