Learning with Aviv

Join Rabbinic Fellow Grace Gleason and fellow 20s, 30s, and 40s for an evening of learning with Dr. Shira Schwartz. We will delve into a classic text from a queer lens, taking a look at a rabbinic story in the Talmud. This class is open and accessible no matter your learning background or identity.

Shira Schwartz is the Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a comparatist, her training enables her to integrate different methods, sources, periods and languages to explore questions and subject positions that lie between disciplines, like Orthodox female yeshiva students, and queer/trans ex-Orthodox Jews, or OTDees. Her research looks at education as a mode of reproduction and focuses on the construction of bodies in learning spaces in both antiquity and modernity. She is deeply curious about institutions and is invested in their betterment, both as a scholar and on the ground. She is also committed to placing learning more accessibly beyond the academy. To those ends, she has been active in a number of learning space design initiatives, public scholarship projects and educational leadership roles.