Participants

Donavan L. Ramon, who earned his doctorate in African American literature from Rutgers University, is an assistant professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. A specialist in African American and African diasporic literatures, he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields. He has published articles on Philip Roth and Alice Dunbar-Nelson and, most recently, guest edited a special double issue of the South Atlantic Review on the ninetieth anniversary of Nella Larsen's Passing. His first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives, was published by Mercer University Press in 2024. It explores the psychoanalytic motivations for jumping the color line in African American literature.
Abstract: The Inner African: Blacks, Jews, and the Problem of the Color Line

Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. She is author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004, digital 2020), and of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (2020; pb 2022), the 2020 National Jewish Book Award winner in the category of Biography. With Rebecca Cypess, she co-edited Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018), winner of the outstanding book prize from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society, and with Halina Goldberg, Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (2023). Forthcoming is her co-edited volume, A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History.

Professor Sinkoff is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including from the Mellon Foundation, the IIE Fulbright Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Andre E. Brooks-Key is an associate professor and program coordinator of African and African American studies at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he teaches courses in African American social and political thought, Africana religion, and the Black male experience. He earned his Ph.D. in African American studies from Temple University. His research focuses on Black Jews and Hebrew Israelites and the phenomenon popularly regarded as Black Judaism. As a former participant observer, he has written extensively on the theological and cultural meanings of the practices of Hebrew Israelites. He is currently working on a full-length manuscript on the perception of Hebrew Israelite religious identity in American Jewish communities. Brooks-Key is also a contributing writer on the intersection of race and religion for Religion Dispatches.
Abstract: Black Jews and the Problem of Ortho-ethnicity

Anna Duensing is a historian who specializes in African American history, transnational social movements, and the evolving global politics of white supremacy in the twentieth century. She received her Ph.D. in history and African American studies and a master’s certificate in public humanities from Yale University. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, where she is working on her first book, Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition.
Abstract: “‘We Should Have Had a 'Nuernberg' After the Civil War’: Black American Holocaust Reckoning and the Evolving Politics of Analogy, 1945-1951

Rachel Gordan is an assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida, where she is the Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society. Her first book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2024 and was awarded a 2023 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award by the Association for Jewish Studies. As a scholar of American religion, Gordan researches Judaism and Jewish culture from the early 20th century to the present, with a particular focus on the immediate post-World War II era, middlebrow culture, and American Jewish literary history.
Abstract: “Ain’t no such thing as a white Jew”: Understanding the Jew in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History, Emerita, at Trinity College in Connecticut. Newly retired, she taught courses on African American history, the Civil Rights Movement, and twentieth-century social and political history both at Trinity College and the Cheshire Correctional Institution. In addition to numerous articles and anthology chapters, she has written three books: “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1991); Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton University Press, 2006); and, To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). She co-wrote “A Day I Ain’t Never Seen Before”: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement in Marks, Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2023) with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker Joe Bateman, and edited A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (Rutgers University Press, 1998). Her ongoing research focuses on twentieth-century debates over civil liberties and hate speech among civil rights agencies and she is also engaged in issues of race and mass incarceration.
Abstract: Israel/Palestine as Flashpoint

Jonathan Karp is an associate professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University of the State University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and editor or co-editor of seven volumes, including Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America (Purdue University Press, 2023); World War I and the Jews (Berghahn Books, 2018) with Marsha L. Rozenblit; and The Cambridge History of Judaism in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) with Adam Sutcliffe. His work explores the roles that Jews have played in modern economic life and the images and stereotypes that have accompanied them. His forthcoming book is Chosen Surrogates: Jews and Blacks in the Business of American Popular Music. Karp is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. From 2010 to 2013 he served as executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Abstract: Jews as Historians of the Black American Experience

Emanuela Kucik is an associate professor of English and Africana studies and director of the Africana Studies Program at Muhlenberg College, where she was recently named the inaugural Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives. She is also cofounder and codirector of Muhlenberg’s new Graduate School Preparatory Program for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Kucik was the 2021 recipient of Muhlenberg’s Ruth and Joel Spira Prize for Distinguished Teaching and the 2023 recipient of Muhlenberg’s Robert C. Williams Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Research. Her interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of genocide, race, human rights violations, and literature. Her forthcoming book, The Black Blood of Genocide (Columbia University Press), focuses on how Black populations have used the concept of genocide to write about, and fight against, anti-Black violence after the Genocide Convention of 1948 rendered genocide illegal under international law. Black Blood was selected as one of the inaugural books to launch a new publishing partnership between Columbia University Press and Howard University. Kucik received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Princeton University, along with a Doctoral Graduate Certificate in African American Studies. 
Abstract: Words of Witness: Hans Massaquoi, the Power of Memoir, and Tools for Black-Jewish Allyship

Traci Parker is an associate professor of African American history in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is the author of Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and The New Civil Rights Movement Reader: Resistance, Resilience, and Justice (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). She is currently writing Beyond Loving: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Black Freedom Movement, on activists’ romantic relationships in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. She is also editing a collection of essays on marriage in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States. Parker holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.
Abstract: Interracial and Interfaith Intimacies: Black and Jewish Romantic Relationships in the Black Freedom Movement

Aimee Pozorski has authored Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (Continuum, 2011), Falling After 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014), and AIDS-Trauma and Politics (Lexington, 2019).  She has edited or co-edited volumes on the topics of Philip Roth, American Modernism, and HIV/AIDS representation. With Maren Scheurer, she co-edits the peer-reviewed journal, Philip Roth Studies and has most recently published the Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (2023). She is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she also directs the certificate in Racial Justice.
Abstract: 1967's Unclaimed Experience: Philip Roth's Newark and the Legacy of Angela Davis

Ben Ratskoff is an assistant professor of modern Jewish history and culture in the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. He received his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2021. His dissertation, “Waltzing with Hitler: Black Writers, the Third Reich, and Demonic Grounds of Comparison, 1936–1940,” analyzed the idiosyncratic and ambivalent ways Black writers in the United States and French Empire perceived Nazism in real time and put antisemitism and White supremacy in relationship to each other. Ratskoff has published in various scholarly journals, including Jewish Studies Quarterly and Studies in American Jewish Literature, as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and the Funambulist.
Abstract: “Tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless”: Native Son and the Jewish Bigger Thomas

Allison Schachter is a professor of English, Jewish studies, and Russian and East European studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She researches modern Jewish culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in comparative perspectives. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012), traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin, she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern University Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2022 Modern Language Association’s Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. They are currently working on a translation of selected stories by Rokhl Brokhes.
Abstract: Lorraine Hansberry, Tillie Olsen: Black and Jewish Women Intellectuals, Race, and the Cold War

David Weinfeld is an assistant professor of World Religions at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. He received his Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History at New York University. His first book, An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism, was published in 2022 by Cornell University Press. He is currently working on a book on Southern Jews and the Lost Cause.
Abstract: Southern Jews and the Lost Cause

Justin Cammy is professor and chair of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College, where he teaches and researches Yiddish literature and the cultural history of Jewish Eastern Europe. In recent years he has held fellowships at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, the University of Michigan, and Yad Vashem. His critical edition and translation of Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg was awarded the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association.

James Goodman is the author of essays, short stories, and three books, Stories of Scottsboro (1994), Blackout (2003), and But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining The Story of Abraham and Isaac (Schocken, 2013). He is currently completing two books, one of which is on the life and career of Sidney Poitier, for Significations, a series of books on canonical Black figures curated by Henry Louis Gates. Since 1997, he’s been at Rutgers Newark, where he is a Distinguished Professor of History and head of non-fiction in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Hilit Surowitz-Israel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University. She is coeditor of Jews in the Americas, 1776-1826. She is currently working to complete her monograph, Americas Diasporas: The Creolization of Religion in the Colonial Atlantic World.

Rachel Devlin is a professor of history at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her scholarship centers on the cultural and social politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the United States after World War II. Her most recent book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools (Basic Books, 2018), considers the disproportionate number of girls and young women who filed lawsuits prior to Brown v. Board of Education, and who were desegregation "firsts" at historically white schools in the early 1960s. Devlin teaches courses on the postwar period in the United States, the history of childhood, the history of sexuality, and women and gender in American history.

David Greenberg is a professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is writing a biography of Congressman John Lewis for Simon & Schuster, for which he has won Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. He is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003) and Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016). Formerly acting editor of The New Republic and columnist for Slate, he now writes regularly for Politico, Liberties, and many other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale.

Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Language, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Media Arts, at Marymount Manhattan College. Her interests revolve around comics and visual narrative, contemporary feminist literature, and memoir studies as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish American literature and culture. She is author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, and co-editor of Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology. More of her writing can be found on tahneeroksman.com.

Michelle Stephens is the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and a professor of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She is also a psychoanalyst and served as dean of the humanities in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). She has published numerous articles on the intersection of race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. She has also coedited three recent collections in archipelagic studies: Archipelagic American Studies with Brian Russell Roberts (Duke, 2017); Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago with Tatiana Flores (Duke, 2017); and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). She was a founding series coeditor of Rutgers University Press's Critical Caribbean Studies book series and sits on the editorial advisory board of Rowman and Littlefield's Rethinking the Island book series.