Public Speaking

I offer a range of talks for the general public that can be given individually or as a set of teaching sessions over a weekend. Some are traditional lectures while others are interactive sessions that actively engage the audience using a handout with excerpts from historical and literary texts in Hebrew and Yiddish (with side-by-side English translation).

For synagogue settings, I am more than happy to offer a d’var Torah on Friday night or Shabbat morning and/or lead services. I am a lay leader in my own Conservative community and have led Shabbat and High Holiday services at Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and independent congregations.

Lecture Topics

Madmen, Possessed Women, and Town Fools: The Mentally Ill in Jewish Eastern Europe

East European Jewry was no more or less neurodiverse than any other human community. Then why did so many people in the early twentieth century—both Jews and non-Jews—take it for granted that Jews were more prone to madness and neurosis than their neighbors? And what was traditional Jewish society’s understanding of mental illness and cognitive disorders? We will examine a variety of historical sources in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the role of mentally ill people in Jewish society in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.

The Cholera Wedding: A Magical Ritual to End an Epidemic

This session explores the history and meaning of a peculiar ritual that emerged among East European Jews in the 19th century: to stop the spread of an epidemic, the community would marry its most vulnerable and marginalized members—orphans, beggars, and the disabled—to each other in a wedding held in the cemetery. We will examine an array of historical and literary sources that illuminate this hidden corner of Jewish life.

A Home for the Homeless? The Jewish Poorhouse of Eastern Europe

This lecture explores the hekdesh (poorhouse), one of the grimmest institutions in East European Jewish society. This ubiquitous establishment, which often doubled as a sick house for the destitute ill, was home to a motley crew of itinerant and local beggars, vagrants, madwomen and madmen, chronically ill people, and poor orphans. We will examine the development of the hekdesh from its origins in the Middle Ages to its modern transformation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  

Creating Moscow’s New Jewish Museum: A View from the Inside

In 2012, the Federation of Jewish Communities, the national Chabad umbrella organization for all of Russia, opened a state-of-the-art Jewish museum in a north Moscow neighborhood. As a member of the academic advisory council for the museum for five years, I participated in the planning processes of the museum from a very early stage. I will describe early visions for the museum, explain the collaborative process of conceptualizing the exhibits, and discuss the scholarly, religious, and political considerations that came together to create the final product.