Joy Ladin will describe her complex experiences of growing up Jewish and transgender identities in various Jewish communities, from the upstate NY conservative shul in which she became bar mitzvah to Orthodox Yeshiva University, where she has taught for 16 years. She will focus on how these two identities have shaped and enriched one another over the years, and what each has taught her about the other.

Joy Ladin holds the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University, and, in 2007, became the first (and still only) openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. A poet, memoirist, and essayist, she long worked at the intersection of gender identity, religious tradition, and literature. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and prompted conversations about trans and Jewish identities around country. Her most recent book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, a Lambda Literary Award and Triangle Award finalist, is the first book-length work of trans theology from a Jewish perspective. Recognized as a founding exponent of trans poetics, she has published nine books of poetry, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists and, most recently, The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, among other honors. She serves on the Board of Keshet, an organization devoted to full inclusion of LGTBQ Jews in the Jewish world. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available at JewishLive.org/multitudes; links to her writing are available at joyladin.wordpress.com.