Current Authors
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Photo Credit: (Tracy Slater): Patricia Shinkoda
September 18, 2025
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, 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
A Tale of Two Surrogates: A Graphic Narrative on Assisted Reproduction 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 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 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.
Photo Credit: (Yehudis Fletcher) Anna Roberts
November 18, 2025
As the daughter of a rabbi raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, Yehudis 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.
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
A Brandeis University Press publication in the HBI Series on Jewish Women
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, PhD, 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.
Beyond Brutality, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah is available at Brandeis University Press, Bookshop, and other booksellers.