Events
View our past events page to watch recorded events.
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All of HBI’s events are free and open to the public. HBI is pleased to participate in the Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture Program.
Upcoming Events
September 4, 2025
Dates: September 4 to September 18, 2025 | Kniznick Gallery
The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women's Studies Research Center are pleased to present photographer Becky Behar's Tu Ke Bivas in the Kniznick Gallery, an immersive presentation in which Behar traces Sephardic traditions enacted by her mother and daughter.
"Tu Ke Bivas is part of a Sephardic blessing my parents often invoked: ‘May you live, grow, and thrive like a little fish in freshwater.’ I am a Sephardic Jew, part of the diasporic population expelled from Spain during the Inquisition in the late 15th century. My family’s migrations have taken us from Turkey to Colombia to the United States. Throughout, we have maintained our Ladino language, Jewish religion, and Sephardic customs. More about the presentation.
Groups interested in arranging a private tour with the artist can contact Olivia Baldwin.
Image caption: Becky Behar, L'Dor V'Dor, (From Generation to Generation), Archival pigment print.
Tu Ke Bivas Opening Reception
September 4, 5-7 pm | Kniznick Gallery
Join photographer Becky Behar, the Women’s Studies Research Center, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for the opening celebration of Becky Behar’s Tu Ke Bivas. Explore Behar’s recent photographs, engage with the other components of Behar’s immersive presentation, mingle with colleagues and friends, and enjoy light refreshments.
Tu Ke Bivas Closing Reception and Performance by Ira Klein
September 18, 7-9 pm | Kniznick Gallery
Enjoy a live performance of Sephardic music by Brooklyn based guitarist, composer, and educator Ira Klein, and a final experience with Becky Behar’s Tu Ke Bivas.
September 8, 2025
Open House
4:30-5:30 pm at HBI, 515 South Street (Epstein Building), Waltham | In-Person
We invite everyone to join us for an Open House, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm, to share a bite to eat, meet the HBI community and hear about our plans for the year. Dietary laws will be observed.
"Jewish College Students Reflect on Israel-Gaza and Campus Polarization", a conversation with Jonathan Krasner, PhD, and Cheryl Weiner, PhD
5:30-6:30 pm at HBI, 515 South Street (Epstein Building), Waltham | In-Person
Directly following the Open House, join HBI for a conversation with Jonathan Krasner and Cheryl Weiner. They will present insights from their research, Between Home and Homeland: Jewish College Students Confront the Israel-Gaza Conflict and Campus Divides, which explores how Jewish American college students responded to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the Israel-Gaza war, and the evolving climate on U.S. campuses through the lenses of race, class and gender.
Drawing on interviews conducted between the winter of 2024 and summer of 2025, their research illuminates how 36 students from 24 campuses navigated internal tensions, reexamined beliefs, and felt about their sense of responsibility and belonging. While recent quantitative studies have captured large-scale trends in Jewish student behavior and beliefs, their approach focuses on individual experiences. Much public discourse on campuses, in the media, and in the Jewish communal world tends to focus on students who are vocally pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. This study moves beyond these polarities, revealing a wider spectrum of cognitive, emotional, and social responses.
Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Chair of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. Cheryl Weiner, PhD, is the Engagement Specialist at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
September 10, 2025
12 pm | Lown 315 | Brandeis University | In-Person
A light kosher lunch will be served.
Sponsored by the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis Hillel, Brandeis Orthodox Organization, Masorti Social Group, and the Jewish Feminist Association of Brandeis, with support of the Ratner Fund.
Join the Tauber Institute for another installment of its Author Conversations, this time featuring Noa Shashar, author of The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850, in conversation with ChaeRan Freeze, Brandeis University. Noa Shashar's The Marital Knot was published by the Brandeis University Press in the Tauber Institute Series and the HBI Series in Gender, Culture, Religion and Law.
September 10, 2025
4-5:30 pm EDT
Hybrid: In-Person at HBI/WSRC | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
Join the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University to welcome back Shulamit Reinharz, founding director of both, for an event celebrating her latest book, Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Hiding in Holland is a memoir detailing her father, Max Rothschild’s experiences in the Holocaust as a Jewish man who saved his life repeatedly during the Holocaust, eventually being hidden by Dutch Righteous Gentiles for three years. Reinharz introduces historical contexts that challenge the exaggerated stereotypes of the valorous Dutch. Together, this inner and outer perspective helps explain why the Netherlands had the worst record of Jewish annihilation of all Western European countries. Only now are Dutch government leaders acknowledging the truth.
Reinharz will be in conversation with Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, the Shulamit Reinharz Director of HBI.
Cosponsored by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
September 17, 2025
12-12:30 pm: Brown bag lunch (drinks and dessert provided) | In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall
12:30-1:30 pm (EDT) | Hybrid: In-Person and Online
HBI Seminar Series
Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s recent project, Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women, 1154–1307 , explores the lives of Jewish women from medieval England as they appear in English national records. In response to a century of scholarship focused on medieval Anglo-Jewish men, Boyarin asks with this project: what can we discover when we focus exclusively on women? This talk will share some of her discoveries, as told through newly visible women’s biographies, but it will also reflect on the analytical difficulties that arise when gender is the researcher’s primary tool of analysis.
Adrienne Williams Boyarin is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. She is the author of The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism (Penn, 2021), which won the Medieval Academy of America’s Jerome E. Singerman Prize, and Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (D.S. Brewer, 2010).
Photo Credit: (Tracy Slater) Patricia Shinkoda
September 18, 2025
12:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Cosponsored by the Brandeis University Alumni Association
Together in Manzanar brings into focus the dark episode in American history, set in motion by the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the US government imprisoned in detention camps tens of thousands of Japanese Americans due to the unfounded fear of anyone in America with even “one drop” of Japanese blood. Among the incarcerated were over 2,000 members of mixed-race families — including Elaine Buchman Yoneda, a Jewish American woman, Karl Yoneda, her Japanese American husband, and their three-year-old son, Tommy. Slater’s intimate account explores painful choices and conflicting loyalties, including Elaine’s leaving behind her White daughter from a previous marriage, the upheaval and violence that followed, and the Yonedas’ quest to survive with their children’s lives intact and their family safe and whole.
Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston living temporarily in Toronto, although usually based in Japan, her husband's country. Her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Best Women's Travel Writing, The Boston Globe, and Literary Hub, among other places. Slater’s first book, The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self and Home on the Far Side of the World, was published in 2015. Slater received her doctorate in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and taught for ten years at various Boston-area universities as well as in men's and women's prisons throughout Massachusetts.
Together in Manzanar is available at Chicago Review Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
October 30, 2025
12:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
A Tale of Two Surrogates explores the complicated emotional, medical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding assisted reproduction. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research conducted by anthropologist Elly Teman, PhD, and sociologist Zsuzsa Berend, PhD, this book presents, in an accessible and entertaining graphic novel format, the intertwined stories of two fictional women who decide to become gestational surrogates. The experiences of the two composite characters, Jenn, from California, and Dana, from Tel Aviv, highlight various paths, interpretations, and experiences that are common in surrogacy.
HBI is delighted to have supported Teman's and Berend's work with a Research Award, dedicated to the memory of Frances Leder Kornmehl, in 2022, and that Teman continued her research and writing while an HBI Research Associate. After receiving the award, Teman and Berend shared with HBI how their work came together.
Elly Teman, PhD, is an associate professor of medical anthropology in the Dept. of Behavioral Sciences at Ruppin Academic Center, Israel. She is the author of an ethnography on gestational surrogacy in Israel entitled Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self which won three book prizes from the American Anthropological Association.
Zsuzsa Berend, PhD, teaches courses on economic sociology and the sociology departmental honors thesis seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, The Online World of Surrogacy, was published by Berghahn Books in 2016.
A Tale of Two Surrogates is available at Penn State University Press and Amazon.