Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Learning and Teaching Jewish American History

Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Adriana Brodsky

Adriana Mariel Brodsky is Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her work focuses on the history of Sephardim in Argentina. She has co-edited (with Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University) The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone (Brill, 2013), which won the Best Book Award from LAJSA in 2013, and is the author of Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2016. A native Argentinian with a degree in Education and a Ph.D from Duke University, Adriana has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Tel Aviv University. She is currently finishing a manuscript on the role played by Jewish youth (1940-1976) both in Argentina, helping modernize and energize the local communities, and in Israel, as members of kibbutzim, keeping their Argentine and Latin American identities alive. 

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.