Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Learning and Teaching Jewish American History

Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Noam Sienna

Dr. Noam Sienna is an educator, artist, and scholar of Jewish history, focusing on Jewish life and culture in the premodern Mediterranean world. He completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2020, specializing in Jewish History and Museum Studies, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, working with the Mellon-funded interdisciplinary project “Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book.” He is also a Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His first book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), received the 2020 Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries and the 2020 Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation. His monograph on North African Jewish book culture is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

Noam Sienna is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Hebrew.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NT9D6xwM3LxwwnU1XI6EJ0wRIdTJiB_L/view?usp=sharing

Website: https://noamsienna.com/

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.