Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series

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?

2025-2026 Authors

Left, book cover showing 3 people, a mother, father, and young child, standing in front of a barrack apartment, with text: Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, Tracy Slater, overlaid by an American flag.

Tracy Slater, Brandeis University PhD ’99

Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp

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September 2025

Cosponsored by the Brandeis University Alumni Association

Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp 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.

Elly Teman, PhD and Zsuzsa Berend, PhD

A Tale of Two Surrogates: A Graphic Narrative on Assisted Reproduction

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October 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.

Yehudis Fletcher

Chutzpah! A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay

November 2025

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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.

Left: Book cover showing a woman's translucent white vest and skirt, both with several small Hebrew letters, threads, and hair, on a hanger made of a tree branch. Text, Beyond Brutality Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah, Jane Kanarek. Right photo of Jane Kanarek

Rabbi Jane Kanarek, PhD

Beyond Brutality, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah

January 29 | 12:30 pm EST | Online

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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, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah 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.

Book cover: Andi Arnovitz, The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife (2009), Japanese paper, hair, dirt, film and threads, 110 x 46 x 13 cm.

Joanna Michlic, PhD

Shattered Liberation: Sexual Violence Against Holocaust Survivors (1943-1946), Co-Editor

February 26 | 11:30 am -12:30 pm EST | Online

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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 to 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 Joanna Michlic, PhD, Nina Paulovicova, PhD, and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, PhD, is available at Purdue University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.

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.

Miriam Udel, PhD

Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature

March 26 | 7 - 8:15 pm | The Jewish Library of Baltimore, 5700 Park Heights Avenue, Baltimore

Registration to attend is recommended.

Miriam Udel’s rich and original Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature explores the world of Jewish literature - over a 1000 books and several periodicals - written for Yiddish-speaking children from Europe to the Americas during the 20th century when the community clung to Jewish heritage, while also working to help their children makes sense of being a Jew in the modern world. Udel elegantly traces how these stories and poems underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness, creating a world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.

Miriam Udel is an associate professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience and the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.

HBI is delighted to have supported Udel’s research for Modern Jewish Worldmaking. During her residency as an HBI Scholar in 2022, Udel explored the "New Girl", a central character in Yiddish literature, "a creature of freedom" who gets lost, then "finds herself and uncovers resources that exceed anyone’s wildest imaginings".

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event and are also available at Princeton University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.

Miriam Udel photo credit: Sarah Wood

Judy Batalion

The Last Woman of Warsaw

April 23 | 12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online

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While writing the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins, 2020), Judy Batalion was drawn into the cosmopolitan society of inter-war Warsaw - a city filled with theaters, cabaret, and nightclubs with revolving dance floors - that had created these extraordinary young women. Batalion’s debut novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, shines a light on this rarely explored world through the lives of two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.

Judy Batalion is the author of several books of award-winning nonfiction including The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos and her work has appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, and many other publications. HBI was honored to support The Last Woman of Warsaw in 2022 with an Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Award on Women, Gender and the Holocaust as well as The Light of Days with several research awards.