In the upcoming academic year, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies will focus on the theme of “Jewish/Queer/Trans,” under the leadership of head fellow Bryan Roby, University of Michigan.

 

In this theme year, we aim to explore in the broadest possible ways how queer/trans studies intersect with studies of Jews, Jewishness, Judaism, and indeed Jewish Studies itself, from the full range of humanistic, artistic, activist, and social science perspectives. We have assembled a group of scholars, writers, and artists that will allow us to explore this set of fundamental issues across the temporal gamut of ancient to the present and in Middle Eastern, African, Asian, European, and American societal contexts.

The Fellows will consider the ways in which Jewish Studies might thicken queer and trans studies. At the same time, we wish to inquire into how queer and trans studies might aid the interrogation of foundational categories deployed in Jewish Studies. In doing so, we seek to challenge social hierarchies, notions of sacred/profane, religious conceptions, political movements and structures, knowledge paradigms, and communal boundaries: all key elements in the history of studies of Jews and Judaism. That is, how can insights from queer and trans studies enrich and complicate our understanding of the dispersed, diverse, and shifting histories of Jewish sexual cultures and gender systems, as well as social, cultural, and racialized formations of Jewishness more broadly. We are particularly interested in approaches that create dialogue among the sub-fields of Jewish Studies, queer and trans studies that go beyond merely applying
theoretical models to Jewish Studies. 

 

The 2024-2025 Frankel fellows and their fields of research are:

 

Rafael Balling, University of Washington, "A Story of Their Own: 20th-Century Jewish Trans Narratives in German and Yiddish"

Jonathan Branfman, Stanford University, “Passing Fancies: Jewish Specters and Chimeric Liberation in U.S. Passing Films”

Marce Butierrez, National Archive of Remembrance, Argentina, “The Lost Feygele Files: Repairing Queer and Trans Jewish Legajos”

Jessie DeGrado, University of Michigan, “Their Way is Queer”: Religion as Gender Transgression in Ancient West Asia”

Gil Engelstein, Northwestern University, “Split at the Root: The Jewish Question of Gay Liberation, 1970-1990.”

Sheer Ganor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “A Place to Misfit Into: Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar”

Anna Hajkova, University of Warwick, “Quartet: Story of Survival”

Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington, “Transgender People and the Nazi State”

Golan Moskowitz, Tulane University, “Jews and Drag: An American Cultural History, 1900-2020”

Rafe Neis, University of Michigan, “Multiplicity: Jewishness and Gender in Late Ancient West Asia”

Iris Rachamimov, Tel Aviv University, “Coccinellim: The Trans Community and the
Transformations of the Israeli Gender Order in the 1970s and 1980s”

Sivan Rajuan Shtang, Brandeis University, USA; Sapir Academic College and Shenkar Academic College, Israel, “Queer Feminist Mizrahi Art”

Bryan Roby, University of Michigan, “Queer Jewish Futurities in Afro-Asian Israeli Poetry”

Adi Saleem, University of Michigan, “Jews, Muslims, and the Coloniality of Gender and Sexuality”

Simone Stirner, Vanderbilt University, “Give Us Our Roses: Queer Memory after National Socialism”

Max Strassfeld, University of Arizona, “Disciplining Life: The Life Cycle in Rabbinic Literature”

Oren Yirmiya, University of California, Berkeley, “Beyond the “Hoo/Hee” Binary: Studies in Third-Sex, Nonbinary, and Gender-Fluid Hebrew Literature.”