This year the Morton E. Ruderman Memorial Lecture will take the form of a series of lectures on the theme of Colors, Cultures, and Flavors of the Jews. The first two lectures will be run in collaboration with the Fall 2021 Open Classroom at Northeastern University “Repairing a Divided America.”
The first lecture takes place October 6 from 6-8 pm, in a hybrid format. Professor Eric Goldstein of Emory University will be in conversation with Professor Kabria Baumgartner of Northeastern, discussing The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation organized around the categories of “Black” and “White”? How have the ambiguities of Jewish identity complicated ideas of race in America?
Livestream link is at
https://packnetwork.com/openclassroom
Eric L. Goldstein is Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where he is also Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies. He is the author of The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006) and, with Deborah R. Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). From 2007 to 2012, he was the editor of the scholarly journal American Jewish History.
Kabria Baumgartner is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies as well as Associate Director of Public History at Northeastern University. She is a historian of African American life and culture in the nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of the award-winning book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2019) and is writing a book about the history of civil rights in nineteenth-century Boston.
This event will take place in person and will be livestreamed. Northeastern students, faculty and staff are invited to attend in person, space permitting. Register here.
The second lecture will be October 20, 6-8 pm, Asian Americans in a Multi-Racial and Multi-Religious Democracy. Speakers will include Rabbi Mira Rivera, and Professors Phil Thai, Matt Lee and Lily Song. More details forthcoming.
