"REPRODUCING JEWS: A CULTURAL ACCOUNT OF ASSISTED CONCEPTION IN ISRAEL" IS THE TOPIC OF A TALK BY SUSAN M. KAHN ON MONDAY, APRIL 16, AT BARD COLLEGE
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY-The Jewish Studies, Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Religion Programs at Bard College are sponsoring a talk, "Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel," by Susan M. Kahn on Monday, April 16. The discussion, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6:00 p.m. in Room 102 of the Olin Humanities Building.
Susan M. Kahn, the senior research director of Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University, is the author of the recent award-winning book Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Kahn's research grew out of her review of statistics showing that there are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world. She attributed this not to high rates of infertility, but to the centrality and political importance she feels the Jewish community has placed on reproduction. Reproducing Jews is an ethnographic study of the social uses, cultural meanings, and contemporary rabbinic responses to Israel's methods of artificial reproduction.
Kahn is adjunct assistant professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. She received an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her book Reproducing Jews has been awarded the 2001 National Jewish Book Award, the 2000 National Jewish Book Council Award in Women's Studies, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's 1998 Musher Prize for an outstanding dissertation on Jewish life in Israel or America. Kahn grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a third generation Jewish New Englander. She spent six years living, studying, and working in Jerusalem.
For further information, call Rona Sheramy at 845-758-7090 or e-mail [email protected].
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