2025 Conference on the Jewish Left
About the Conference on the Jewish Left
Founded in 2024, Boston University’s annual “Conference on the Jewish Left” gathers together scholars, students, and global partners of the Jewish left. At a time when foundational principles of justice and democracy are under attack, the conference provides an educational space to bridge the academic-community divide, and to explore the Jewish left’s values, institutions, and impact. The conference aims to tackle pressing public questions and to empower the next generation of leaders to make a real-world difference in the critical challenges facing humanity and the earth today.
Attendees can register to attend the conference in-person or via livestream.
Schedule
📍 Place: Boston University
🗓️ Date: February 28, 2025
⏰ Time: Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Discussant: Shaul Magid
Discussant: Elyse Semerdjian
Discussant: Anat Biletzki
Discussant: Sarah Anne Minkin
Joanna Ware (Jewish Liberation Fund)
Discussant: Rabbi Becky Silverstein
Discussant: Hasia Diner
About the Speakers
Jeremy Menchik
Jeremy Menchik is Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science, and Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 ISA award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, Party Politics, International Studies Review, Politics and Religion, Indonesia, and South East Asia Research as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Simone Zimmerman
Simone Zimmerman is an organizer and strategist based in Brooklyn. She is currently the director of Media & Special Projects for the Diaspora Alliance, an international organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its misuse. Her personal journey is featured in the film Israelism, about a younger generation of American Jews who have been transformed by witnessing the reality in the West Bank and connecting with Palestinians. Zimmerman is a co-founder of IfNotNow, a board member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Action, and on the Advisory Board of Jewish Currents Magazine.
Omer Bartov
Omer Bartov is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, he has written widely on war crimes, interethnic relations, and genocide. Recent books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023), elected a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Bartov’s essays and commentaries on the current crisis in the Middle East have been featured in many national and international outlets. He is presently engaged in two book projects tentatively titled “Israel: What Went Wrong?” and “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine.” His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published last year in the United States and Israel.
Adam Seligman
Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in this country, in Israel and in Hungary where he was Fulbright Fellow. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970’s. His many books include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), Inner-worldly Individualism (1994), The Problem of Trust (1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (2000) , with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (2000) Modest Claims, Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (2004), with Weller, Puet and Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008) and most recently, with Weller Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience and Ambiguity (2012). His Über die Herausforderung der Verschiedenheit und die neue Wertereligion (with L. Woodhead), and Oaths and Vows: Words as Genesis (with M. Schnitter) are forthcoming this 2024 year. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2020 he was recipient of the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize of the University of Tubingen. He is Founding Director of CEDAR – Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion (www.CEDARnetwork.org) which leads seminars every year on contested aspects of religion and the public square in different parts of the world and has established permanent programs in Japan, Indonesia, Uganda and Kenya. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Yousef Munayyer
Yousef Munayyer is Head of Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. He also serves as a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies and was previously Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Some of his published articles can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Policy, and others. Dr. Munayyer holds a PhD in International Relations and Comparative Politics from the University of Maryland.
Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage is the 2022 winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Her animations have been nominated for three Emmys and won an Edward R. Murrow Award. She was a 2024 fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library researching her upcoming book, ‘Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund.’
Community Organizers
Audrey Sasson
Audrey Sasson is the Executive Director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, and the organization’s first Mizrahi leader to serve in the position. She has nearly 30 years experience building the left, as a community organizer, social worker, and campaign director, on issues ranging from immigrant worker struggles and tenant rights to sustainable economies and racial justice. Prior to joining the JFREJ staff as ED in 2017, she served on the JFREJ Board of Directors for six years while working both in the Jewish social justice field at American Jewish World Service and in the labor movement at the United Food & Commercial Workers’ Union. She holds a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Social Work from McGill University. She was born in Montreal, Canada, to parents of Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Egyptian descent. When she’s not organizing, she enjoys visiting national parks and hanging out with her nephews.
Joanna Ware
Joanna (Jo) Ware (she/her) is the Founding Executive Director of the Jewish Liberation Fund. As an organizer, facilitator, and educator, she has spent over 15 years working with organizations – inside and outside of the Jewish world – to bring forth a more just, whole, and liberatory world. Joanna has worked as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant, Adaptive Leadership teacher and practitioner, community organizer, and popular educator at the intersections of identity, power, leadership, and social justice. For many years, she worked for LGBTQ equality in the Jewish community, as a core member of Keshet’s program team.
About Rabbi Rebecca Zimmerman Hornstein
Rabbi Rebecca Zimmerman Hornstein
Rebecca is the Executive Director of the Boston Workers Circle and an experienced grassroots organizer and political educator with a passion for building movements for justice grounded in Jewish community and history. She has a B.A from Macalester College and rabbinic ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Rebecca’s previous professional roles include working as the organizer for the North Shore Labor Council (AFL-CIO) where she fostered solidarity among union members to build power for all working class people, and working as T’ruah’s rabbinic peer educator. She has been a leader in work to organize the North American Jewish community for immigrant justice, for Palestinian equal rights and against the rising threat of white nationalism. She is an alumnus of the JOIN for Justice Organizing Fellowship and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship. She currently lives in Lynn, Massachusetts with her partner, Jonathon, and puppy, Mishka. Reach Rebecca at rebecca@circleboston.org.
Featured Musicians
Magid Ensemble
Join Magid Ensemble for a vibrant evening of live klezmer music, Yiddish song, dancing, and immersive storytelling. Their highly acclaimed production, Shterna and the Lost Voice, invites audiences on a captivating journey into the rich world of Yiddish folklore. This immersive experience follows Shterna on an epic hero’s quest, brought to life with a live original klezmer score and an exquisite papercut crankie. The Magid Ensemble (“magid” meaning “storyteller” in Yiddish) is a multidisciplinary group creating new work that integrates folk art, traditional oral storytelling, and original klezmer music. The ensemble consists of award-winning musicians and composers Mattias Kaufmann, Raffi Boden, and Rachel Leader, storyteller Weaver, and visual artist Kiah Raymond. For more information, visit: magidensemble.com
Sponsors
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