Image courtesy of Meryl Schenker Photography
This past May, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies was honored to host University of Michigan’s Professor Rafael Neis for our 2026 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture series. Neis – a scholar and artist whose work is reshaping conversations about rabbinic literature, gender, trans-ness, and visual culture – presented two public lectures, a colloquium for Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students, and a zine-making workshop with undergraduate students.
Neis’s scholarship examines the culture of the rabbinic movement in antiquity, placing rabbinic texts in conversation with the broader worlds of the late ancient Mediterranean. Trained in Jewish Studies, religious studies, law, and visual art, Neis brings an unusually expansive and interdisciplinary lens to the study of ancient Judaism, which was apparent to this year’s Stroum Lectures attendees.
Stroum Center faculty at this year’s first Stroum Lecture. Image courtesy of Meryl Schenker Photography
Sasha Senderovich, Stroum Center faculty member who served on the Stroum Lecture committee, reflected after this year’s events:
“This was an extraordinarily rich week of learning from and with Rafael Neis… [who] made a compelling case for rethinking the very foundations of how we come by our knowledge and assumptions about gender in a dizzying array of disciplines, illustrated with compelling examples from Talmudic sources and art history / archeology of ancient Palestine and Mesopotamia. (And peppered, I must add, with some excellent jokes, a deployment of a number of voices and accents, and illustrated with Rafe’s own art.)”
Both public lectures are now available on the Stroum Jewish Studies YouTube channel in our Stroum Lectures playlist.
The first lecture, Have ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ Always Existed? What the Talmud Can Tell Us, reconsidered one of our most basic assumptions: that the categories of “man” and “woman” are timeless and self-evident. Turning to rabbinic texts, Neis argued that the sages wrestled with bodies, identity, and social roles in ways that do not map neatly onto modern frameworks. By bracketing what we think we already know about gender, lecture-goers discovered a rabbinic tradition that is more curious, complex, and inventive than we might have expected.
The second lecture, Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images – Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art, shifted from text to image. Through close attention to striking examples of ancient Jewish art, Neis probed what becomes visible when we resist sorting figures into familiar categories such as human or animal, male or female.
This year we were especially grateful for an additional two events focused on our Jewish Studies students, a colloquium entitled “Before Gender: Trans Methods for Jewish Studies and Ancient History,” and a zine-making workshop that provided a more informal opportunity for students to engage with Dr. Neis not just as a scholar but as a talented artist.
Art making at Professor Neis’s student-focused zine-making workshop. Images courtesy of Meryl Schenker Photography
Students and faculty engaging with Professor Neis during their lunchtime colloquium
Together, the week of events opened space for rethinking identity, embodiment, trans-ness, and the sacred in late antiquity. Professor Neis’s lectures will come out as a book with UW Press in the near future, resuming the publishing tradition that includes titles by notable Jewish Studies scholars Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Paula Hyman, Anita Norich, and others.
About the 2026 Stroum Lecturer
Rafael Neis is a scholar and artist. Neis is the Jean and Samuel Frankel Professor of Rabbinic Literature and is appointed in the Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. As Faculty Director of Arts Learning at Michigan’s Arts initiative, Neis supports campus-wide art-integrated pedagogy. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species, was published in 2023 by University of California Press. Their artwork has been featured in shows and in many publications.
The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies is a nationally-renowned series of public lectures, which has brought Jewish studies luminaries from around the globe to the University of Washington for more than fifty years. Made possible through the support of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures Endowment, this annual series is a cornerstone program of UW’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and has led to impactful conversations, groundbreaking scholarship, and award-winning publications. You may view the full Stroum Lectures archive here and review corresponding books published by University of Washington Press here.
