Jessica Roitman

Roitman is an historian of early modern and modern Jewish History. Her research focuses on Jews and Jewish communities in the (Dutch) Caribbean. She is interested in issues of race, ethnicity, minoritization, slavery, and colonialism and the intersection of Jewish and Caribbean histories. She wrote The Same but Different? Inter-cultural Trade and the Sephardim, and co-edited (with Gert Oostindie) Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800. More recently, she published Highlights of the Mongui Maduro Museum and Mongui Maduro Library. 

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English, Dutch.

Recent Publications:

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV-FTuLWL8h9O9YTKpXo8wg

Selected Videos:

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.