Women's history through objects 

Laura Arnold Leibman, Reed College 

November 20 at 1:30 pm
 

 

In her talk, Laura Arnold Leibman will discuss her new book The Art of the Jewish Family in which she examines objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850.  She uses these objects created and used by the women to create a biography through an object.  By utilizing material culture to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives, Leibman restores their agency as creators of Jewish identity. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, Dr. Leibman sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives. 

 

 

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. Her general field of interest is religion and American culture prior to the American Civil War. She is the author of Indian Converts (U Mass. P. 2008); Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Vallentine Mitchell 2012) which won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award, and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and The Art of the Jewish Family (University of Chicago, 2020). She has been a Fulbright scholar at University of Panama and Utrecht University (Netherlands) and a visiting fellow at Oxford University.