Jewish Studies and Black Studies in Dialogue Series: Race, Religion, and Black Jewish Identity in Early 29th-Century U.S.

In this talk, Judith Weisenfeld and Jenna Weissman Joselit will explore the theologies, practices, and politics of early 20th-century congregations in the U.S. in which members claimed Ethiopian Hebrew identity and navigated race and religion among Black Christians and Jews of European descent.

About the Speakers
Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, where she is also associate faculty in the Department of African American Studies and in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program. She is the author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (NYU, 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997). Her current research focuses on the psychiatry, race, and Black religions in the late 19th and early 20th-century United States.

Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and history professor at George Washington University, is the author of Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments. A monthly columnist for Tablet, whose work has also appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic, Gastronomica, and Material Religion, she is currently writing a cultural biography of Mordecai Kaplan for Yale University’s Jewish Lives series.