Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
HBI mourns the loss of our beloved Conversations friend, Sandy Silberman, z"l, in September 2023. Please read HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe's tribute.
Want to explore Jewish women's lives through new and thought-provoking literary fiction, memoir and more? Want to connect first hand with those who create it? The Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series, dedicated in honor of our beloved Conversations friend, Sandy Silberman, z"l, brings us together in a warm, online setting to share stories that explore the diversity of Jewish women's experiences across the world from yesterday and today.
"When I first read your book, I was inspired by your story and your writing. Listening to you describe some of your experiences personally yesterday was a treat, and added even more depth to your story for me." — Rabbi Beth Naditch, sharing her thoughts with a HBI Conversations author
We encourage you to purchase the books, read in advance, and bring your thoughts and questions to discuss with our authors.
HBI has been a network site of the Jewish Book Council since 2010 which provides extraordinary access to authors with recently published books.
What types of books are selected?
We select both literary fiction and nonfiction, including memoirs, biographies and scholarly essays. These include research supported by HBI, whether written by HBI Scholars-in-Residence or recipients of HBI research awards, and books published in the HBI Series on Jewish Women. All of our books will focus on themes related to Jews and gender.
See a partial list of authors who have participated in the HBI Conversations Program.
Which authors are joining the Sandra Seltzer Silberman Conversations Series this year? When are the events?
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home
September 2023
Author Jennifer Rosner joins HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation about Rosner's beautifully evocative and tender novel, Once We Were Home, which reveals the little-known post-War history of Jewish children who were hidden during the Holocaust. Based on true stories, this heart-wrenching novel raises questions of complicity and responsibility, belonging and identity, good intentions and unforeseen consequences, as it confronts what it really means to find home.
In addition to Once We Were Home, Jennifer Rosner is the author of The Yellow Bird Sings, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award; the memoir If A Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard, an inclusion in the Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series, a former joint project of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and The Feminist Press; and a children's book, The Mitten String, which is a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable.
HBI is a network member of the Jewish Book Council.
Once We Were Home is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series: "Jewish Girls and Women in Forced Labor in the Holocaust" Featuring Janine Holc in Conversation with Joanna Michlic
October 2023
An in depth conversation between noted scholars Janine Holc, author of The Weavers of Trautenau: Female Jewish Forced Labor in the Holocaust (2023) and Joanna Michlic, HBI Research Associate and Editor, Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present: History, Representation, and Memory (2017), about the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on Jewish families and communities, especially the lives of women and girls. Both works are publications in the HBI Series on Jewish Women.
The Weavers of Trautenau is available at Brandeis University Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present is available at Brandeis University Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Lea Taragin-Zeller, author of The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land
November 2023
Anthropologist Lea Taragin-Zeller joins HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation about Taragin-Zeller's work, The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land. In this groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, Taragin-Zeller investigates the impact of recent Israeli state policies attempting to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families. Utilizing interviews to provide an intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state, Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting.
Lea Taragin-Zeller (she/her) is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in religion, medicine, gender, and reproductive politics. She is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee.
The State of Desire is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Julia Watts Belser, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole
January 2024
Winner of the 73rd National Jewish Book Awards Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.
Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser joins HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation about Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole. In Loving Our Own Bones, Watts Belser paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God's beloved, delving deeply into sacred literature and braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies.
Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is a professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies program, and a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee whose research centers on gender, sexuality, and disability in rabbinic literature.
Loving Our Own Bones is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Talia Carner, The Boy with the Star Tattoo
February 2024
This event was not recorded.
The Boy with the Star Tattoo is a novel of courage, love, and loss spanning a period of 25 years, from postwar France when Israeli agents roamed the countryside rescuing hidden Jewish orphans, to the 1969 Israeli military operation, the Cherbourg Project, when embargoed Israeli missile boats daringly escaped the French port of Cherbourg. Focusing on the decimation of European Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the postwar Youth Aliyah movement which brought 16,000 Jewish youth to Mandatory Palestine, and the State of Israel’s military struggles in its nascent years, Talia Carner’s The Boy with the Star Tattoo delves deep into the nature of identity, uncertainty, and belonging.
Novelist Talia Carner, who will join HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation, is formerly the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine, an award-winning author of six novels and numerous stories, essays, and articles, and a committed supporter of global human rights. HBI is honored that Talia Carner is a longstanding member of the HBI Board of Advisors.
The Boy with the Star Tattoo is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Orit Avishai, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
March 2024
Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai’s Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel accomplished this radical change.
Orit Avishai, who will join HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation, is a professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies. HBI is honored to have supported Orit Avishai’s research on this project in 2018 with an HBI Research Award.
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt
April 17, 2024 | 12:30 pm EDT | Online
Award-winning author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen joins HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation about The Wolf Hunt, a head-on collision between the American dream and the Jewish longing for the promised land, as the reality of racial tensions threatens to boil over. While the novel explores the burning questions of Jewish and Israeli identity, it is also a piercing psychological portrait of the relationship between parents and their children, a story about a mother forced to take on the role of a detective, in search of a truth that might destroy her.
A clinical psychologist and author, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's first novel, One Night, Markovitch, won the Sapir Prize in 2012 for debut novels, the Italian Adei-Wizo Prize, and the French Adei-Wizo Prize, and has been translated to 14 languages. Gundar-Goshen's second novel, Waking Lions, won the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. The New York Times Book Review picked Waking Lions as "Editors' Choice”, and The Wall Street Journal selected it for its "Best Summer Reads" list. Her critically acclaimed third novel, The Liar, was published in English in 2019. Gundar-Goshen was recently named one of Israel's 8 best contemporary women fiction writers.
The Wolf Hunt is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Please note: The recording of this event will be shared with registrants after the event for two weeks only. It will not be available to view on the HBI website.
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series Featuring Shulamit Reinharz and Barbara Vinick, Editors, 100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World
May 22, 2024, 7:00 pm EDT | Hybrid: In-Person and Online
Register here to join in person.
HBI Founding Director, Shulamit Reinharz, returns to HBI with co-editor Barbara Vinick, for a conversation with HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe about their expansive and colorful first person collection, 100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World. The collection features stories of Jewish brides from six continents and highlights diverse rituals related to weddings then and now.
Shulamit Reinharz is the Brandeis University Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology, Emerita, the founding director of the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and the founding director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute/HBI. Barbara Vinick, former Associate Professor at the School of Public Health of Boston University, is secretary of Kulanu, an organization that supports isolated and emerging Jewish communities around the world.
100 Jewish Brides is the third collection inspired by Shulamit Reinharz's vision of Judaism as practiced by women world-wide. As a past HBI Research Associate, Barbara Vinick collected and edited stories for Esther’s Legacy: Celebrating Purim Around the World. Vinick and Reinharz followed this with the award-winning and co-edited anthology Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World.
Read the Times of Israel review: Global mazel tov! New book chronicles weddings of 100 Jewish brides from around world, Renee Ghert-Zand, 2/14/2024.
100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
What does it cost?
The Sandra Seltzer Silberman Conversations Series is free to join and made possible by generous gifts from participants and supporters. Consider becoming a Friend of HBI with a gift of $180. Give here.
How do I join?
Please join HBI's email list to receive our communications.
Where can I watch recordings of past events?
The Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series records most events. View all HBI recorded events here, including those in this series, or view previous HBI Conversations Series events below.
Lea Taragin-Zeller, "The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land”
- November 2023
Janine Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust"
- October 2023
Jennifer Rosner, "Once We Were Home"
- September 2023
- May 2023
Paula Birnbaum, "Sculpting a Life: Chana Orloff between Paris and Tel Aviv"
- March 2023
Pnina Lahav, "The Only Woman in the Room, Golda Meir and Her Path to Power"
- February 2023
- January 2023
- October 2022
Max Strassfeld, "Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature"
- October 2022
Tamar Biala, "Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash"
- October 2022
Rachel Barenbaum, "Atomic Anna"
- September 2022
Marcia Falk, "Night of Beginnings: A Radical Re-visioning of the Passover Seder"
- April 2022
Judy Heumann, "Being Heumann: An Unrepentent Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist"
- March 2022
- HBI is honored to have funded a portion of Leibman's research.
- February 2022
Rachel Sharona Lewis, "The Rabbi Who Prayed With Fire"
- January 2022
Dr. Carole Kessner, "Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self" — with Peter Osnos
- A publication of the HBI Series on Jewish Women and winner of the National Jewish Book Award fo Biography
- December 2021
Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, "Hope Valley"
- December 2021
- HBI is honored to have funded a portion of Batalion’s research.
- October 2021
- HBI is honored to have funded a portion of Bolton-Fasman's research.
- October 2021
Exploring Jewish Women's Fiction as Mirrors into Jewish Women's Lives — with Dr. Nora Gold
- April 2021
- Please note the connectivity issues in the recording from minutes 0:00 to 3:59 resolve completely at minute 4:00.
Jacqueline Saper, "From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran" — with Farideh Goldin
- March 2021
- February 2021
Rachel Biale, "Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood"
- January 2021
Anna Solomon, "The Book of V."
- December 2020
Beth Ricanati, MD, "Braided: A Journey of A Thousand Challahs"
- Real-Time Challah Bake and Discussion
- September 2020
Dr. Pamela Nadell, "America’s Jewish Women: A History From Colonial Times To Today"
- July 2020
Jennifer Cody Epstein, "Wunderland"
- June 2020
Susan Solomont, "Lost and Found in Spain: Tales of an Ambassador’s Wife"
- May 2020
Rachel Barenbaum, "A Bend in the Stars"
- May 2020
Goldie Goldbloom, "On Division"
- April 2020
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For More Information
Contact Terri Brown Preuss, director, Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series.
Location
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Epstein Building
Brandeis University
515 South Street
Waltham, MA 02454