A Celebration in Honor of Vanessa Ochs

In honor of Professor Vanessa Ochs' retirement this spring, the Jewish Studies Program and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion will be hosting a lunch colloquium and evening panel, followed by a reception.

Along with Prof. Ochs, Dr. Ayala Fader of Fordham University and Dr. Michal Kravel-Tovi of Tel Aviv University will be our honored guests for the evening panel on the 26th.

Evening Panel and Reception

Date: Wednesday, April 26
Time: 5–8pm

Lunch Colloquium

Date: Thursday, April 27
Time: 12pm
Location: NCH 236

Participants

Vanessa Ochs

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Rabbi Vanessa Ochs, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, was the first director of Jewish Studies Program and has remained a core member. She teaches such topics as Jewish and Abrahamic feminism, Jewish ritual, ethnographic fieldwork in religion, and spiritual writing.

She serves as Chair of the Professional Consulting Committee for UVA Chaplaincy Services and Pastoral Education at the UVA Health System. In addition to serving as a consultant to many Jewish organizations and publications, she has been a faculty member in the Bronfman Youth Fellowship.

Her books include The Passover Haggadah: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2020), Sarah Laughed (JPS 2011), Inventing Jewish Ritual (JPS, 2007, winner of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award), The Jewish Dream Book (with Elizabeth Ochs. Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003), Safe and Sound (Penguin, 1995), and Words on Fire (HBL 1990).

For her writing, she was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. For her continued research on Jewish Sensibilities, she was named the inaugural Jonathan Woocher Fellow by the Lippman Kanfer foundation. In her research, Ochs investigates new Jewish ritual, Jewish feminism, the Passover Haggadah, Jewish Sensibilities and Jewish material culture.

Ayala Fader

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Dr. Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her areas of research include the anthropology of Jews, law, ethnographic methods, and language and social justice. Fader is the cofounder of the long-running Seminar on Jewish Orthodoxies at Fordham’s Jewish Studies Program, and she was recently elected fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research. She is also the founder of the Demystifying Language Project, which works to make linguistic anthropology a social justice resource for public high schools. Her books include Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Michal Kravel-Tovi

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Dr. Michal Kravel-Tovi is an associate professor of socio-cultural anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her previous projects focused on messianism and failed prophecy among Chabad Hasidism and on state-run Jewish conversion in Israel. She is the co-editor (with Deborah Dash Moore) of Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) and the author of When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017), which received a Clifford Geertz Prize Award from the American Anthropological Association as well as a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from AJS. Kravel-Tovi’s most recent projects include “Accounting of the Soul: The Social Life of an American-Jewish ‘Continuity Crisis’,” and “Speaking of the Unspeakable: Sexual Violence on the Haredi Agenda,” an ethnographic project concerned with an emerging “Haredi MeToo movement” among ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel.

Moderator: Anna Levin Rosen

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Rabbi Anna Levin Rosen serves as the Rabbi and Executive Director at UChicago Hillel. Having served UChicago Hillel for ten years, Anna’s work is part of the fabric of the University. Rabbi Levin Rosen has a Rabbinical Degree from Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, where she earned Masters in Hebrew Letters and Educational Administration. She received her BA from University of Virginia in Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Jewish Studies.