Event

Featuring the 2022-2023: Gruss Professor of Talmudic Law, Nomi M. Stolzenberg
 
Virtual Attendance is Available
 
Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Stolzenberg tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows.

The lecture will be followed by a reception. Dietary laws will be observed.

Nomi M. Stolzenberg joined the USC Gould School of Law faculty in 1988. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish and co-directs the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, which involves scholars and students from throughout USC’s campus.

Stolzenberg’s scholarly publications include the frequently cited “He Drew a Circle that Shut Me Out’: Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of a Liberal Education” (Harvard Law Review), “The Profanity of Law” (in Law and the Sacred, Stanford University Press) and "Righting the Relationship Between Race and Religion in Law" (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies). With David N. Myers, she has just published AMERICAN SHTETL: THE MAKING OF KIRYAS JOEL, A HASIDIC VILLAGE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK (Princeton University Press, 2022), a book-length exploration of the Satmar community which established its own municipality and school district, the constitutionality of which were challenged in multiple lawsuits. Her most recent works focus on issues of religious accommodation and political theology and she is currently at work on developing a theory of "faith-based discrimination." 

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