Black Studies and Jewish Studies in Conversation:
Judith Weisenfeld, “Race, Religion, and Black Jewish Identity in the Early Twentieth-Century U.S.”

I conversation with Jenna Weissman Joselit.

In this talk Judith Weisenfeld explores the theologies, practices, and politics of early twentieth-century congregations in the U.S. in which members claimed Ethiopian Hebrew identity and navigated race and religion among Black Christians and Jews of European descent.

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author most recently of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, and of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997). Her current research focuses on the psychiatry, race, and Black religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States.

Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies & Professor of History at the George Washington University, is the author, most recently, of Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments. A monthly columnist for Tablet, whose work has also appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic, Gastronomica and Material Religion. She is currently writing a cultural biography of Mordecai Kaplan for Yale University’s Jewish Lives series.

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