Sunday, September 18th, 11:00 am, International Center Conference Rooms 303 and 305,  427 N. Shaw Lane,

11:00 am-1:00 pm roundtable. 1:30-3:00 pm Lunch will be provided to participants and attendees outside the International Center, in between the Center and Wells.

*This event will be in person and livestreamed on YouTube

Featuring distinguished historians discussing the history of Jews and reproductive freedom in the United States who will each speak about the ways forward for reproductive freedom in Michigan in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Attendees are invited for lunch on the MSU campus.

Dr. Rachel Kranson is the director of Jewish studies and an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (Honorable Mention, Best First Book Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2017) and a co-editor of A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America (finalist, National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies, 2010). Her current book project, Religious Misconceptions: American Jews and the Politics of Abortion, traces the history of American Jews’ engagement in the struggle for reproductive rights and access.

Ronit Y. Stahl is associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the religious diversity cluster of the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. Currently a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics, she is working on a new book, Troubling Conscience: Religious Freedom and Health Care in Modern America, which examines the long history of religious hospitals, government funding, and conscience rights in the United States. She is the author of the award-winning Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. 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 present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Her book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2023. Mehta also is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College. Harvard University, and Emory University.