Kutler Lectures

media release: The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents The 2024 Stanley I. Kutler Lectures in American Jewish History, by Samira Mehta, University of Colorado Boulder

Zoom option available for both lectures!

Tuesday, September 24, 7:00pm, Pyle Center: “The Interracial, Interfaith Family in Today’s American Jewish World”

The Vice President’s family serves as a reminder that Jewish families are increasingly religiously and racially pluralistic. This talk takes Kamala Harris’s family as an opportunity to consider the dynamics of the interracial, interfaith family. American Judaism has long thought of the interfaith family dynamic as one of a minority culture (Judaism) negotiating a majority culture (white Christianity). The interfaith, interracial family upsets that power dynamic, creating, at the very least, a dynamic between two minority cultures, and more often, something even more complicated and complex. This talk will explore those complexities, and suggest that in fact, while the interfaith, interracial family is in some ways unique, it also offers a lens through which American Judaism might view interfaith families more broadly.

Zoom option available – click here to register

Wednesday, September 25, 4:00pm, Pyle Center: “Debating Birth Control and Abortion in American-Jewish Life”

In our current moment, Jewish groups are challenging rollbacks of reproductive rights on religious grounds. This talk thinks about how Jewish religious, medical, and feminist leaders have talked about reproductive health and American law over the past 75 years—where they have thought of Jews as unique, when they have seen themselves as part of the American body politic, and how they have navigated when those two needs have come into tension.

Zoom option available – click here to register

For more information about these lectures, please visit: cjs.wisc.edu/event/kutler24

Samira K. Mehta is an associate professor of women and gender studies and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as the director of Jewish studies. Her research and teaching focus on intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her newly released book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023), appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America, examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures.