Book Launch: Joy Ladin on What We Make of Who We Are: Jewish, Trans, and Family Identities

This event will celebrate the launch of two new books by Joy Ladin: Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender and Family, a new collection of poems. She will read from both books and reflect on what Jewish identity can teach us about trans identity, what trans identity can teach us about being human, and how family can simultaneously teach us and make it harder to be who we really are.

About the Speaker
Joy Ladin is the author of National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders; the first book-length work of Jewish trans theology and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, and 10 books of poetry, including Shekhinah Speaks and 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna. She became a nationally recognized speaker on trans and Jewish identity after her transition at Yeshiva University made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, and she has been named to both the Forward Fifty list of influential or courageous Jews and to LGBTQ Nation‘s Top 50 Transgender Americans list and featured on a number of NPR programs. Her writing has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors.