Justin Jaron Lewis

Justin Jaron Lewis: I am a storyteller and scholar who loves the Yiddish language. My contribution to this volume is a translation of an editorial from Der Veker, a Yiddish-language journal that I have also written for. I am the author of Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), and the translator of Many Pious Women, a Yiddish work from Renaissance Italy in praise of women. At the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada) I teach in the Department of Religion and the Judaic Studies Program, where one of my predecessors was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi; my interviews with people who knew him then are available on line as the Winnipeg Jewish Renewal Oral History Collection. My course topics include Hasidism, Talmud, and Kabbalah, as well as “Storytelling and Religion” and “Religion and Sexuality.” My Ph.D. is from the University of Toronto, where Harry Fox was my Doktorvater; my love of storytelling was nourished by years of participation in the weekly Toronto gathering “1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling.” I am also a rabbi, ordained at the pluralistic Academy for Jewish Religion (New York), and a Maggid (Jewish teacher-storyteller) ordained by Yitzhak Buxbaum (his memory for a blessing).

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Yiddish.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IYRb8NM7toFuoTQzPkGrxCj1edhu7Sys/view?usp=sharing

Academic Website: https://www.JustinJaronLewis.ca

Recent Work: https://www.colorado.edu/post-holocaustamericanjudaismcollections/winnipeg-jewish-renewal-oral-history-collection

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@justinjaronlewis

“Hasidic Creativity in Yiddish Today” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbdt6RoRBXc

Laura Leibman

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is the author of "The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects" (BGC 2020), "Indian Converts" (UMass Press, 2008) and "Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Laura has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Utrecht University, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Laura, who earned her PhD from UCLA, is currently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the history of members of a multiracial family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean but became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.

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