STROUM LECTURES 2025 | Jewish women in antiquity: untold stories of leadership, enslavement, and desire with Bernadette Brooten
Tuesday, May 6, 7:00 pm PDT - 8:30 pm PDT
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies is proud to announce our 2025 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture series, featuring Bernadette Brooten from Brandeis University.
Lecture 1: Gender of Leadership in Ancient Synagogues
Tuesday, May 6th, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. | UW Campus, Thomson Hall 101
Could it be that some women held official positions in ancient Mediterranean synagogues? And where did women, men, and non-binary persons sit in these synagogues? Join us as visiting scholar Brooten discusses ancient burial and other inscriptions and what we can know about gendered or non-gendered space.
Lecture 2: Christian and Jewish Women Desiring Women in the Early Roman Empire
Thursday, May 8th, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. | Zoom
Whereas the Tanakh does not prohibit or condemn sexual relations between women, the New Testament does. Brooten will discuss why, as well as compare ancient Jewish and Christian responses. Although not present in Jewish sources, the names of women who desired other women appear in texts from an ancient Egyptian monastery. Jewish and Christian leaders overlap in condemning marriages between women, raising the question of what they meant.
About the speaker
Bernadette J. Brooten, Ph.D., Dr. Theol., is the Kraft – Hiatt Professor emerita at Brandeis University. She is also Director for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project (https://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/). She researches enslaved and slaveholding women in early Christianity, female homoerotic desire, and texts on female-female marriage in the Roman world. Publications include: Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (1982; 2020); Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (1996; 2020); and, with Jacqueline L. Hazelton, editor: Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (2010). Fellowships include: MacArthur, Fulbright, Harvard Law School, and Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.
The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies are an annual series of talks given by luminaries in the field of Jewish Studies, hosted by Stroum Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. For more than thirty years, through the generosity of Samuel and Althea Stroum, Jewish Studies has been able to bolster public scholarship around Judaism. View highlights from the past thirty years, learn more about the history of the lectures, or view the full archive.