Speakers

Martha Ackelsberg

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita of Government & Professor Emerita of the Study of Women & Gender, Smith College

Ackelsberg is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emerita of Government and Professor Emerita of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She has published articles and book chapters on women’s activism in Spain, the United States and Latin America, on gender and public policy, feminist and democratic theory, changing understandings of families, gender and citizenship, and Jewish feminism. She has also written “Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women and Resisting Citizenship: Feminist Essays on Democracy, Politics and Community,” as well as  “Women, Welfare, and Higher Education: Toward Comprehensive Policies,” edited with Randall Bartlett and Robert Buchele.

Rabbi Alana Alpert

Executive Director of Detroit Jews for Justice and Rabbi of Congregation T’chiyah

Alpert studied resistance and social movements and first learned about faith-based community organizing as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. While at Hebrew College in Boston for rabbinical training, she worked at Harvard Hillel, Temple Shir Tikva, the Pardes Center for Judaism and Conflict Resolution; led feminism, Israel/Palestine, GLBTIQ rights, prison reform efforts and completed a unit of clinical pastoral education where she served Holocaust survivors. She was ordained in 2014.  Alpert is also a graduate of AVODAH the Jewish Service Corps and ACTIVATE! The Community Organizing Fellowship of Social Justice Leadership and has worked as an organizer at NY Jobs with Justice and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

Joyce Antler

Samuel J. Lane Professor Emerita of American Jewish History and Culture and Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University

Antler is the author of “Jewish Radical Feminism:  Voices of the Women's Liberation Movement,” as well as “The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America,” “You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother,” and many other books on American Jewish history and women’s history. Her prize-winning documentary drama “Year One of the Empire: A Play of Politics, War and Protest,” has been performed in Los Angeles and New York City.

April Baskin

Principal, Joyous Justice Consulting and Racial Justice Director, Jewish Social Justice Roundtable

Baskin is the principal of Joyous Justice Consulting and also serves as the Racial Justice Director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable. She is the Union for Reform Judaism's (URJ) immediate past Vice President of Audacious Hospitality. Before founding and developing the URJ's exciting leading edge department, she happily served as the National Director of Resources and Training at InterfaithFamily. Dedicated to building a stronger, more inclusive Jewish community committed to social justice, Baskin has spent over 15 years advocating for Jewish diversity inclusion throughout North America in a variety of ways, including facilitating LGBTQ educational trainings through Keshet and writing a thesis about the experiences and identities of Jews of Color in American Judaism. A graduate of Tufts University, she is a member of the Selah Leadership Network and an alumna of the Jewish community organizing Jeremiah Fellowship and The Schusterman Insight Fellowship for Jewish Community in Washington, DC. April Baskin is a past President of the Jewish Multiracial Network. She conducted research at the Kennedy School of Government and was an Americorps fellow for the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston. More recently, before joining the staff, April proudly served on the Leadership Team of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable from 2017-2019.

Evelyn Torton Beck

Professor Emerita of Women's Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland

Beck pioneered numerous interdisciplinary courses on topics as diverse as “Women in the Arts,"   "Mothers and Daughters,” “Jewish Women in International Perspective,” “Women and the Holocaust,” ”Death and Dying in Modern Literature,” “Lesbian Studies,” “Gender, Power and the Spectrum of Difference,” and “Feminist Perspectives on Psychology." Beck is the author of numerous books and essays focusing on Franz Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, Frida Kahlo, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (with whom she worked closely and whose stories she translated from the Yiddish). She has written on multiculturalism and the impact of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia on identity development. She is the editor of “Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology” and is an alum research fellow with the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Initiative at the Fielding Graduate University.

Heather Booth

President of Midwest Academy, Democracy Partners

Booth is a leading strategist on progressive issue campaigns and elections. An activist organizer since the 1960’s civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and women's movements, she founded JANE, an underground abortion network, before Roe v. Wade. Almost fifty years later, Booth coordinated the national coalition for marriage equality which led to the 2015 Supreme Court decision. She served as strategic advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship, which is the largest coalition of the immigration reform campaign, and founded Midwest Academy, which trains social change leaders and organizers, where she is now president. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the training director of the Democratic National Committee. She coordinated AMOS, a project to re-instill social justice in the heart of the Jewish community.

Marla Brettschneider

Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire with a joint appointment in Politics and Women’s Studies

Brettschneider is the author of numerous award winning books in Jewish diversity politics including “Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality” and “The Family Flamboyant:  Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives.”

Karen Brodkin

Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles

Brodkin is Professor Emerita at UCLA, a former Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies. She writes about democracy, race, gender, labor and grassroots activism. Her books include “Caring by the Hour: Women, Work and Organizing at Duke Medical Center,” “How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America,” and two books on activism in Los Angeles: “Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles” and “Power Politics: Environmental Activism in South Los Angeles.”

Nylah Burton

Writer

Burton is published in New York Magazine, The Nation, ESSENCE, and The Forward. She also serves as a sexual assault prevention specialist, providing communities educational support on sexual assault and intersections of race and gender. In her writing, Burton explores Black-Jewish identities and experiences, especially within a U.S. context.

Rabbi Ayelet Cohen

Senior Director of New Israel Fund, New York/Tri-State Region

Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Cohen is the author of “Changing Lives, Making History: Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the First Forty Years”, and co-editor of Siddur B’chol L’vavcha. Cohen served for a decade at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBTQ synagogue, serving Jews of all sexual orientations and sexual identities.  She also directed The Center for Jewish Living and The David H. Sonabend Center for Israel at JCC Manhattan. She currently serves on the board of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.

Elana Dykewomon

Author and Social Justice Activist

Dykewomon is a long-time social justice activist and teacher who has published eight books foregrounding lesbian heroism. “Riverfinger Women,” the first lesbian novel with Jewish protagonists (after Stein), was recently awarded the Lee Lynch Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society. “Beyond the Pale,” which is about Jewish women and lesbians in Russia and New York 1860-1912, received the prestigious Lambda Lesbian Fiction and Ferro-Grumley Awards. “What Can I Ask – New & Selected Poems 1975-2014” is her most recent book. Dykewomon served as an editor of Sinister Wisdom from 1987-94. She and Judith Katz are currently editing a special issue of Sinister Wisdom entitled "To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century," which is due out in 2020. Alter Theater Lab has recently awarded Dykewomon a residency to complete her play about lesbian community and the moral dilemmas involved in an individual’s right to die. Dykewomon is grateful to still have work to do.

Kirsten Fermaglich

Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University

Fermaglich is the author of “A Rosenberg By Any Other Name” and “American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares.” She also co-edited the “Norton Critical Edition of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.” Fermaglich is co-editor of the journal American Jewish History along with Adam Mendelsohn and Daniel Soyer.

Karla Goldman

Sol Drachler Professor of Social Work  and Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

Goldman is the chair of Jewish Feminisms/American Visions and directs the Jewish Communal Leadership Program, a collaborative effort of the School of Social Work and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the history of the American Jewish experience with special attention to the history of American Jewish communities and the evolving roles and contributions of American Jewish women. She is the author of “Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism” (Harvard University Press). She also serves as co-chair of the board of directors of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Rabbi Maralee Gordon

President, Greater Carolinas Association of Rabbis

Gordon is a recently retired pulpit rabbi, President of the Greater Carolinas Association of Rabbis, and an active participant in the Interfaith Committee for Detained Immigrants, visiting immigrants detained by ICE for deportation in the McHenry County Jail. She also teaches a class on Judaism to detained immigrants of all religious backgrounds. Gordon has been focused on the intersection of Jewish community, education, social justice and spiritual connection her entire adult life. She was ordained as a rabbi in 2001 by the Academy for Jewish Religion. In the early ‘70’s she was a founder of the Jewish Feminist Organization, edited the Jewish feminist newsletter, Lilith’s Rib, and taught in the Liberation School of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. She was a founding member of the Chutzpah Collective, a radical Jewish political collective in Chicago, 1971-1982, which published the journal Chutzpah. She is also Rabbi Emerita Congregation Beth Shalom, DeKalb, IL and Rabbi Emerita McHenry County Jewish Congregation, Crystal Lake, IL.

Miriam Hawley

Activist, Author, and Business Coach

Hawley is an activist, author, business coach and a founding member of Our Bodies Ourselves. She led the first workshop at Emmanuel College in May 1969 that initiated the work that became “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” As CEO of Enlightenment, Inc., she partnered with her husband to publish “You and Your Partner, Inc: Entrepreneurial Couples Succeeding in Business, Life and Love” (2012). She has the privilege of coaching global women leaders in both the profit and social profit sectors.

Debra Kaufman

Professor Emerita of Sociology and Anthropology Departments, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern University

Kaufman was the founding Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and one of the founding Directors of the Jewish Studies Program at Northeastern University. Her award-nominated books include “Rachel's Daughters” and “Achievement and Women” (co-authored with Barbara Richardson). Her edited volumes which relate to her current work on gender, Jewish identity, and post Holocaust narratives include: "Demographic Storytelling Contemporary Jewry" (2014); "From the Protocols of Zion to the Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging the Media, the Law and the Academy" (2005); and a special edition of Contemporary Jewry (1996), entitled "Women, Scholarship and the Holocaust”. She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University, England, the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College, the Wellesley Center for Women at Wellesley College and has guest lectured around the world, including Frei University in Germany where she conducted a seminar on post-Holocaust narratives among young adults in the United States and Israel. She is a frequent lecturer for the Distinguished Lectureship Program of the Association for Jewish Studies. Her participation in the Holocaust Research and Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Feminism study groups at Brandeis University help her maintain the link between her activist and scholarly activities.

Rabbi Georgette Kennebrae

Rabbi, West End Synagogue, New York, New York

Kennebrae is the spiritual leader of West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in Manhattan. She has a passion for co-creating sacred community which is inclusive, meaningful and joyous. Kennebrae works towards building healthier, more vibrant and just environments through both social activism and pastoral care. Coming from a military family, she has lived around the world and is committed to multi-faith and multi-ethnic engagement, fostering dialogue and action in local and national arenas. She also encourages sacred conversations around death and dying and serves on the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel Board. Kennebrae graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and earned her joint M.A. degree in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Brandeis University.  She is a Wexner Graduate Fellowship Alum and a current Schusterman Fellow.

Clare Kinberg

Librarian, Temple Beth Emeth; Director, Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation Religious School; Editor, Washtenaw Jewish News

Kinberg was managing and general editor of Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal from 1990-2011. Born in 1955 in St Louis, she has also lived in Brooklyn, Seattle and Eugene, OR. She currently works for a Reform congregation as librarian and a Reconstructionist congregation as director of their religious school. As of February 2019, she is also the editor and publisher of the Washtenaw Jewish News.

Irena Klepfisz

Adjunct Associate Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, Barnard College

Klepfisz is a US poet, essayist, Yiddishist, and political activist. Born in the Warsaw ghetto, Klepfisz is the daughter of Michal Klepfisz, a ghetto hero who died early in the uprising, and Rose Perczykow Klepfisz, who survived the Holocaust. Klepfisz spent part of the war in a Polish orphanage and later—until liberation—with her mother, both passing as Poles. and was reunited with her mother after liberation. After a three-year stay in Sweden, they entered the United States in 1949, where Klepfisz learned English and also studied Yiddish at Workmen's Circle Yiddish secular schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the City College of New York and her PhD at the University of Chicago. She self-describes as a Jew, a child survivor of the Holocaust, a lesbian, a poet, a teacher, and an activist. Klepfisz's poems and essays reflect her commitment to socialist secular Judaism and to the challenge of living Jewishly as a lesbian feminist. As in her signature poem, "Bashert," some of her work blends Yiddish with English. Klepfisz co-founded the feminist magazine, Conditions, co-edited “The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Woman's Anthology” (1986), and “A Jewish Woman's Call for Peace: A Handbook for Jewish Women on the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” (1990). Her collections of poetry include “Periods of Stress” (1977), “Keeper of Accounts” (1982), and “A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971–1990)” (1991); Her politics and activism are reflected in “Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes” (1990).

Keren R. McGinity

Director, Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement Program at Hebrew College and affiliate of the Maurice & Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and Honorary Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

McGinity is a 2018 Forward 50 honoree for her clarion call “There needs to be a Jewish response to the #MeToo movement,” published in the New York Jewish Week, a Jewish Boston “Top Pick” and on Lilith magazine’s “7 Jewish Feminist Highlights of 2018” list. Her pioneering books include Still Jewish: A History of Women & Intermarriage in America (NYU Press 2009), a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, and Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage & Fatherhood (Indiana University Press 2014). She is an honorary research associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and the inaugural director of the Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement Program at Hebrew College’s Shoolman Graduate School of Jewish Education. After earning her PhD from Brown University, she was subsequently appointed visiting assistant professor of history, and then became the first Mandell L. Berman Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary American Jewish Life at the University of Michigan Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. McGinity serves on the Sexual Misconduct Taskforce of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Academic Advisory Council of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Ellen Meeropol

Author

Meeropol is the author of three novels:  “Kinship of Clover,” “On Hurricane Island,” and “House Arrest.” Her fourth novel, “Her Sister’s Tattoo,” is forthcoming in spring 2020. Recent essay publications are included in The Boston Globe, The Writer, Guernica, The Cleaver, Necessary Fiction, and The Writer's Chronicle. Her dramatic script telling the story of the Rosenberg Fund for Children has been produced five times, most recently in Manhattan in 2013 featuring Eve Ensler, Angela Davis, and Cotter Smith. Ellen has an MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She is a founding member of Straw Dog Writers Guild and leads the Guild’s Social Justice Writing project.

Samira Mehta

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Albright College

Mehta is a scholar of religion and the politics of the American family.  She is particularly interested in how families create meaning — their practices, identities, and senses of morality; and how, in turn, outside forces (religious leaders and institutions, politicians, and creators of popular culture) construct the American family through theology, legislation, and public discourse. Mehta has a MDiv from Harvard University, a PhD from Emory University, served as a Health and Spirituality Fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, has published numerous articles, and has been featured on NPR's “All Things Considered.” Her first book, “Beyond Chrismukkah: Christian-Jewish Interfaith Families in the United States” asks these questions in terms of Christian-Jewish interfaith families from 1965 to the present and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of American Jewish Studies. Her new project, “God Bless the Pill? Contraception, Sexuality, and American Religion,” considers the role of liberal religious actors in increasing women's access to contraception in the second half of the twentieth century.

Alice Mishkin

Lecturer, PhD Student and Center for Jewish Nonviolence Board Member

Mishkin is a first year doctoral student in American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she studies anti-Occupation Jewish organizations in the United States, Palestinian solidarity, Zionism, White nationalism and anti-Semitism. She is a graduate of the Jewish Communal Leadership Program with an MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked for a range of nonprofits focused on international human rights work, including time spent working in Palestine and Israel. For the past three years, Mishkin has taught courses on resistance in Palestine and Israel and co-led study abroad trips to the region. She currently serves as a board member with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

Deborah Dash Moore

Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at U-M and the former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies

Moore is the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at U-M and the former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. In recent years, Moore has been teaching and studying documentary photography and has been involved in the Chene Street Project, a public history project in Detroit. She has also engaged in a number of major editorial projects, including the three-volume award winning book” “City of Promises” (2012 NYU Press) as well as serving as editor-in-chief of the ten-volume “Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.”

Judith Plaskow

Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Manhattan College

Plaskow is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Manhattan College and a Jewish feminist theologian. She is co-founder, and was for many years, co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is author or editor of several works in feminist theology, including “Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective” and “The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 1972-2003.” Her latest book, co-authored with Carol P. Christ, is “Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology.”

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Author, Activist and National Lecturer

Pogrebin serves on the boards of Americans for Peace Now, Combatants for Peace, the Brandeis University Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Harvard Divinity School Women in Religion Program. She is a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, is a writer, lecturer and social justice activist with a special interest in feminism, Judaism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is the author of eleven books, including “Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America” and the novel “Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate” and was the consulting editor for Free To Be...You and Me, Marlo Thomas' non-sexist, non-racist book, record, and TV special. Pogrebin has co-founded, among other organizations, the National Women's Political Caucus, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Free to Be Foundation, and several black-Jewish and Palestinian-Jewish dialogue groups.

Rayna Rapp

Professor at Department of Anthropology, New York University

Rapp is a founding member of the New School for Social Research women’s studies collective. An anthropologist, she teaches at NYU and researches and writes about reproductive technology, health politics and disability. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at U-M and was active there from 1964-73 in civil rights, anti-war and women's movements. She also was the founding chair of Gender Studies and Feminist Theory at the New School for Social Research, a founding member of the team of Science Studies Seminar at NYU, and is associated with Disabilities Studies at NYU.

Judith Rosenbaum

Executive Director, Jewish Women’s Archive

Rosenbaum is the Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive, a national organization that documents Jewish women’s stories, elevates their voices and inspires them to be agents of change. A writer, educator and historian, Judith earned her doctorate in American Studies from Brown University. She teaches and lectures widely on Jewish studies and women’s studies, and publishes in both academic and popular journals and blogs.

Kate Rosenblatt

Visiting Assistant Professor for The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Department of Religion, Emory University

Rosenblatt is the Visiting Assistant Professor for The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and Department of Religion at Emory University. Rosenblatt was a postdoctoral fellow at U-M’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. She specializes in  modern Jewish history, modern U.S. history, and women and gender studies. Her dissertation is on “Cooperative Battlegrounds: Farmers, Workers, and the Search for Economic Alternatives” and is a book (titled "Cooperative Battlegrounds") under contract with Columbia University Press' History of US Capitalism Series.

Vivian Rothstein

Activist

Rothstein was a founder of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU), one of the first feminist organizations of the 1970s.  She served as CWLU’s first staff member, coordinated its representative decision-making body, and helped establish the organization’s Liberation School for Women. Rothstein’s activist career started with the Civil Rights movement, continued with Students for a Democratic Society, and community organizing in Chicago to build “an interracial movement of the poor.”  In 1967 she participated in a peace delegation to North Vietnam. For the past 17 years, she has worked with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, an advocacy organization working to lift standards for workers in the region’s major low wage industries. Rothstein is also is a Board member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE).

Susan Weidman Schneider

Editor-in-Chief, Lilith Magazine

Schneider is a founding mother of Lilith— independent, Jewish and frankly feminist––the award-winning Jewish women’s magazine, where she has been editor-in-chief since its debut in 1976. ​She is the author of three books: “Jewish and Female,” the first book to take a comprehensive look at Jewish women’s particular concerns; “Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living with Differences between Christians and Jews;” and “Head and Heart,” about money in the lives of women. Her articles and books have garnered several journalism awards. She has appeared on national media, including “Oprah,” “Good Morning America” and “CNN.” Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, Glamour and USA Today.

Tilly Shames

Executive Director, University of Michigan Hillel

Shames is the Executive Director of University of Michigan Hillel.  Tilly has worked with Hillels in Toronto and Michigan for 15 years in various positions, including Director of Israel Affairs and Associate Director, before becoming Executive Director at the University of Michigan in 2012. Shames is passionate about youth engagement, community-building, pluralism, women’s advancement, and social justice. She holds a master's degree in International Affairs and a bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies and Political Science. She is currently a Wexner Field Fellow and is on the Steering Committee of the Safety, Respect, Equity initiative. She loves art, traveling, yoga, hiking, anything food related, and diving into a conversation about our Jewish future.

Ronit Y. Stahl

Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley

Stahl is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies, the religious diversity cluster of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and the Center for Research on Social Change. She is the author of the award-winning book, “Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America" (Harvard University Press, 2017) and has published op-eds and commentaries in numerous venues, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Forward.

Alicia Svigals

Composer and Violinist

Svigals is a the world's leading klezmer violinist as well as a founder of the Grammy-winning band The Klezmatics, which she co-directed for seventeen years.  She has written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwright Tony Kushner, documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand, singer and songwriters Debbie Friedman and Diane Birch, among others,  and has collaborated with them as a performer and improviser as well as with poet Allen Ginsberg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Gary Lucas and Najma Akhtar, and many others. Svigals has been a fellow at LABA, a non-religious house of study and culture laboratory at the 14th St. Y in NYC, which annually invites a group of artists to consider ancient texts and create work that pushes the boundaries of what Jewish art can be. In 2014 Svigals was an NEA Macdowell Fellow.  In 2018, Svigals released Beregovski Suite, an album of music from a long-lost archive of klezmer melodies, arranged and performed with a contemporary spin with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer. She is currently touring two silent film and live original music projects, the Yellow Ticket (1918), with pianist Marilyn Lerner, and the Ancient Law (1923), with pianist Donald Sosin.

Ruth Tsoffar

Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Women's Studies, and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

Tsoffar is Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Women's Studies and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women (Wayne State University Press, 2006) which won the Elli Kongas Miranda Prize and was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Ongoing projects include the book, "'Cannibal ideology: The Violence of Texts and Bodies in Hebrew Cultures" and an ethnographic memoir of Jamusin, a Palestinian neighborhood in Northern Tel Aviv, resettled in the early fifties by Jews of Middle Eastern origin, now replaced by the Akirov Towers apartment complex.

Marilyn Webb

Author

Webb was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1997 book The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life, which traces the lives of 15 terminally ill patients, using their experiences to explore social, legal, and moral issues surrounding death in America. Over the course of her research, Webb  interviewed 300 health care professionals, including the infamous "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian and the famed Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Webb is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism at Knox College in Illinois and has also taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She was an editor in chief of Psychology Today magazine, an editor and/or writer for national women's magazines, a founder of the feminist journal, off our backs, a founder of Washington D.C. Women's Liberation, and a founder of one of the first college-based women's studies programs, at Goddard College. She is now completing her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago after being thwarted via a #MeToo moment there in 1966. You can call her Dr. Webb this June!