Joy Ladin ’82 Lecture—Meet Me at the Intersection of Trans and Jewish Identity

Joy Ladin ’82 will explore the intersections and collisions of trans and Jewish identity through the lenses of both personal experience, including her experiences of becoming the first and still only openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution and speaking with Jewish institutions around the country struggling to understand trans identities, and her work on theorizing trans identities in relation to religious traditions, as she does in her forthcoming book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.

Joy Ladin ’82 is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. A work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, is due out in 2018 from Brandeis University Press. She is also the author of eight books of poetry, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists, Transmigration and Impersonation. A ninth collection, The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press) will be published in December 2017. Her work 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. A nationally recognized speaker on trans and Jewish identity, she was recently named to LGBTQ Nation’s Top 50 Transgender Americans list. She has held the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University since 2003, and taught for a year in Sarah Lawrence’s MFA Writing Program. Links to her poems and essays are available at joyladin.wordpress.com.

Cco-sponsored by Trans Action, Trans Space, and SLC Hillel and funded by Student Senate and Hillel of Westchester. A light kosher dinner will be served.