Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

March 23, 2026

HBI Seminar Series

Adriana M. Brodsky, PhD, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, HBI Scholar in Residence

This presentation focused on the ways that participation in Argentina’s Zionist youth groups from the 1940s to the 1970s changed the lives of young women. Sephardi young women, whose lives had been limited to the home and family, became active public figures within their communities, assuming the roles of teachers, public speakers, researchers, and counselors to younger children. These young women learned new skills as they embarked on organizing lectures, researching topics, and venturing outside the homes. The youth groups also exposed young women to novel ideas like sex education and free love, which affected their understanding of family traditions, creating conflicts with their parents and community leaders. Those who moved to Israel found kibbutz family life challenging to their new and old customs.

Adriana M. Brodsky is Professor of Latin American and Jewish History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She has published on Sephardi food, schools, beauty contests, and Latin American Jewish History in general. She is currently finishing a manuscript on Argentine youth in Zionist movements (1940s-1970s). She is co-President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). Her most recent publication, Jews Across the Americas is co-edited with Laura Leibman and follows her book, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Creating Community and National Identity, 1880-1960, (Indiana University Press, 2016).

March 19, 2026

HBI celebrated the launch of A Force for Good  (Casemate IPM, 2026), Anita Wyzanski Robboy’s biography of her mother, Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth, social standing, and extraordinary determination to save countless Jewish children from annihilation during the Holocaust.

Drawing on a trove of letters and documents preserved by her mother and discovered decades later, HBI Research Associate Anita Wyzanski Robboy brought Gisela’s story vividly to life. In conversation with renowned Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Emeritus, at Brandeis University. Robboy explored her mother’s tireless rescue work across Germany, Palestine, England, and the U.S., and reflected on what her extraordinary life teaches us about Jewish leadership, moral responsibility, and the enduring power of individual courage in times of crisis.

March 10, 2026

In partnership with Hummingbird Books and Nu Reads, a new initiative from The Jewish Book Council, we invite you to the launch of Allegra Goodman’s newest book This Is Not About Us, moderated by author Tova Mirvis. The two will discuss Goodman’s highly anticipated story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters as well as the craft of storytelling, and the ways Jewish identity, tradition, faith, and cultural inheritance shape their work. 

Both Tova Mirvis and Allegra Goodman are longstanding HBI-affiliates. HBI is delighted to have supported Allegra Goodman, 2023 HBI Scholar in Residence, as she wrote This Is Not About Us. Tova Mirvis is a past HBI Scholar in Residence, Research Award recipient, Sandra Seltzer Silberman Conversations Series author, and member of HBI's Academic Advisory Council. 

March 8, 2026

Winner, 75th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award in Amer­i­can Jew­ish Studies

Introductory remarks by Brandeis University President Arthur Levine. 

In observance of International Women's Day, HBI was honored to host Pamela S. Nadell, PhD, author of Antisemitism, an American Tradition (W.W. Norton, 2025), as the 2026 Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights guest speaker.

American Jews imagine the U.S. to be a haven from antisemitism. In her powerful new book, historian Pamela Nadell details that antisemitism has always been a feature of American Jewish life, from 1654 when Peter Stuyvesant turned Jews away from the new colony to the current post-October 7th campus protest movement. Nadell argues that ubiquitous and systematic forms of antisemitism are connected and dangerous, warning that when ignored, antisemitism continues to lead to violence. Her lecture explored this history and offered a way forward, with a particular focus on Jewish women's experiences in the women’s movement and wider society.

Professor Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. She is the author of nine books, including America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today which won the 2019 National Jewish Book Award’s Everett Family Foundation “Book of the Year” and was translated into Hebrew. 

The Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture Series was created by Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law founder Sylvia Neil and her husband Dan Fischel in memory of Sylvia’s late sister, Diane Markowicz, to honor her commitment to gender equality and social justice. Read more about the Markowicz Memorial Lecture Series.

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February 26, 2026

Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series 

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army by shining light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors, in this case, Jewish women, endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel during the liberation process. The twelve contributors and three editors of this work explore a wide range of interactions through testimonies and memoirs including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance, and in doing so, uncover a far more complicated, if not devastating, reality.

Joanna Beata Michlic, PhD is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Education, Practice and Society, UCL and Affiliate Faculty in Gratz College's Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Antisemitism Studies Departments. A current HBI Research Associate, Michlic was founder of the HBI Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust as well as a past visiting professor in Holocaust and Contemporary history at Lund University. Her many books include Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory, (Brandeis University Press, 2017, HBI Series on Jewish Women). Her forthcoming publication, Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland: Family, War, Identity and Nationhood is expected in May 2026.

Shattered Liberation, co-edited by Nina Paulovicova, PhD, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, PhD, and Joanna B. Michlic, PhD, is available for purchase at Purdue University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller. A free PDF download is also available at Purdue University Press.

This is a companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, at the Kniznick Gallery, January 27 - April 30.

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February 10, 2026

A companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, guest curator and scholar Rachel Perry, PhD moderated this online panel discussion with experts on contemporary Jewish women's graphic novels. The program brought the works in the exhibit into dialogue with 21st century approaches to visual storytelling. Panelists included: Victoria Aarons, PhD, Tahneer Oksman, PhD, and Charlotte Schallié, PhD. More about the panelists and moderator. 

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January 29, 2026

Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series 

A Brandeis University Press publication in the HBI Series on Jewish Women, Beyond Brutality is 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 and many booksellers.

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January 27, 2026

Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949

Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD

Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery

Image: Collection of Six Graphic Holocaust Books:  Zofia Rozenstrauch, Auschwitz Death Camp, Warsaw, 1945; Regina Lichter, 1939-1945, Florence, 1946; Lea Grundig, In the Valley of Slaughter, Tel Aviv, 1944; Agnes Lukacs, Auschwitz Women's Camp, Budapest, 1946; Luba Krugman Gurdus, They Didn't Live to See, New York, 1949.

Brandeis Cosponsors: Brandeis President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, Brandeis Library, The Center for German and European Studies, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. Community Cosponsors: Studio Israel (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, Vilna Shul), The German Consulate of Boston, The Israeli Consulate of Boston.

January 26, 2026

HBI Seminar Series

Edith Pick, PhD, HBI Postdoctoral Associate

This talk explores how Jewish women – mothers in particular – organize at the intersection of gender and nationalism, in Israel and the diaspora. Drawing on contemporary examples of maternal activism, it asks how women’s voices as mothers reveal diverse relationships with national identities and narratives, militarism, and the Jewish state, and how mothers’ groups position themselves in relation to feminism, including its liberal, radical, and anti-feminist forms. The talk also examines how these political visions and organizational models travel transnationally between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

Edith Pick holds a PhD in Business and Management from Queen Mary University of London, and in her dissertation explored “the construction of diversity and difference in UK Jewish nonprofit organisations.”

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