Community Dinner with Scholar in Residence – Dr Laura Leibman

Community Friday night dinner with lecture.

Laura Leibman is a Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  Her most recent book Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and was selected as one of Choice journal’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013.  She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Her current book project The Material of Race: How Emancipation Transformed American Jews involves an early multiracial Jewish family that had ties to Bevis Marks and other historic Western Sephardic congregations.