Events
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Upcoming Events
Photo Credit: Anna Roberts
November 18, 2025
11:30 am EST | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
As the daughter of a rabbi raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, Fletcher struggled to conform to the strict expectations placed upon her and her siblings. As she grew older, these restrictions intensified and her questions for G-d hung heavier than ever. Repeatedly let down by those who were supposed to protect her and pushed on to a path that seemed to take her further away from who she really was, she began to yearn for a life where she could embrace all facets of herself. When Fletcher’s sexuality came in conflict with the expectations of her family and community, she was confronted with either losing the faith she loved or losing herself. Fletcher made a daring decision: she decided to stay.
Yehudis Fletcher is the co-founder of Nahamu, a think tank that counters extremism in the Jewish community. She is an author, scholar and activist within her Charedi community. She has written for The Times, Haaretz, The Forward, the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle. She has just finished a masters degree in religion and theology at the University of Manchester and is beginning a PhD in the same at the University of Durham. She lives and loves in the heart of Manchester's Charedi community.
Chutzpah! is available at Penguin, Blackwell's, Amazon (UK), and other booksellers.
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.
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.
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.