Events
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Upcoming Events
December 8, 2025
HBI Seminar Series
Dotan Brom, PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University's School of Historical Studies, HBI Scholar in Residence
12-1:30 pm EST | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
12 pm: brown bag lunch at HBI | 12:30-1:30 pm EST: lecture
This talk will explore the formative years of lesbian-feminist activism in Israel, tracing the influence of American and other English-speaking feminists on the creation of the country's first lesbian organizations and spaces. At the center of the story is Marcia Freedman, an American Jewish feminist who immigrated to Israel and became a pivotal figure in both the Women's Liberation Movement and in establishing lesbian-feminist institutions such as ALEPH and Kol HaIsha.
Drawing on archival sources - including Freedman's papers held at Brandeis University's Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections, as well as personal testimonies, the presentation will highlight how immigrant women, particularly from the United States, helped shape Israeli feminist and lesbian politics, and how transnational networks of knowledge transmission and activism connected local struggles with broader global feminist movements.
Helmar Lerski, Lea Grundig Drawing Hands, c. 1944, © Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Exhibition Dates: January 27 to April 30, 2026 | Kniznick Gallery
Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Between 1944 and 1949, scores of survivors created graphic narratives of their personal and collective experiences under Nazi persecution. Who Will Draw Our History? introduces ten Jewish women who survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and outside the Warsaw ghetto under “Aryan” papers and then, days after their liberation, began recording their memories in images and words. Lacking photographs of what they witnessed and endured, they turned to visual storytelling to represent Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, particularly as it affected women.
This exhibition showcases their little-known “books of memories”: wordless novels, handmade albums, pictorial diaries, illustrated books and portfolios. Culled from private collections and museum archives around the world, these works contribute vital evidentiary material about the Holocaust, but they also reveal how the “return to life” was experienced and represented. In so doing, they radically transform how we understand the role and reach of art in early survivor publications, exhibitions, and community building.
Arriving at a crucial moment, as we near an age “after testimony,” Who Will Draw Our History? brings together these works of early Holocaust memory for the first time, placing them within their historical and cultural context.
January 27, 2026
Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949
5 - 7:30 pm | Kniznick Gallery
Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Cover image: Andi Arnovitz, “The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife” (2009), Japanese paper, hair, dirt, film and threads, 110 x 46 x 13 cm.
January 29, 2026
12:30 pm EST | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
A feminist reading of one of the most troubling tractates of the Talmud addresses family law including laws relating to a sotah (a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery).
Beyond Brutality draws on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Professor Jane Kanarek brings to light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text. Despite the brutality of the sotah ritual—in which the woman accused of adultery is put through a divine ordeal intended to reveal her innocence or her guilt—this book demonstrates that Bavli Sotah is not primarily concerned with describing the sotah ritual or establishing male control over women. Instead, Bavli Sotah becomes an instructive text in which the sotah is secondary to moral and sinning men. As the sotah herself fades into the background, the sotah ritual nevertheless overflows its boundaries and weaves its way through a range of other topics within the tractate. In the process, Bavli Sotah teaches its audience who transmits and how one transmits rabbinic culture.
Rabbi Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and the co-editor of Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How it Happens and Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, the latter two of which were finalists for the National Jewish Book Awards. Her work has been published in AJS Review, Teaching Theology and Religion, the Journal of Jewish Education, and Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.
Beyond Brutality, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah is available at Brandeis University Press, Bookshop, and other booksellers.