Panel Discussion: What Makes a Jewish Life?

Hasia Diner is Professor Emerita, New York University where she served as the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History. She also directed the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and edited the Goldstein-Goren Series at NYU Press. The author of numerous books in the fields of American Jewish history, American immigration history, women's history, and food history, several of which were award winners, she held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shelby Cullom Davis Fellowship at Princeton and a Fulbright. She will be an adjunct professor at the Harvard Divinity School.

Marjorie N. Feld is professor of history at Babson College where she teaches courses on U.S. social history, gender, labor, and food justice. Her first book, Lillian Wald: A Biography won the Saul Viener Book Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society. Feld's most recent book, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, was named one of National Public Radio’s “Books We Love” for 2024. For Fall 2025, Feld is a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a new project on sustainable Jewish farming.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was in inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Derek has published a dozen books, most recently Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled "The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History". Derek is a past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University where he also directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and chairs the French Department. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library, he his the author of five books, including Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2010), The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago, 2016), The Betrayal of the Duchess (Basic Books, 2020), and most recently Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, published in Yale's Jewish Lives Series in 2024.

Brenda Wineapple is a National Book Critics Award finalist whose most recent book is the national best-seller, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation-- "history at its most delicious,” said The New York Times Book Review on its front cover and named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker, among other publications. Her other books include Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (a "landmark study") as well as Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, both named best books of the year by The New York Times, and the award-winning White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, as well as a National Endowment Public Scholars Award, she was recently a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Review of Books and, previously, was Washington Irving Professor of modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College and executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Currently a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY, she is completing a biography of Fiorello La Guardia for the Yale Series of Jewish Lives.

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Brookline Booksmith, thriving in the heart of Coolidge Corner in Brookline, Massachusetts, since 1961, is one of New England’s premier independent bookstores. We offer a vast selection of books, ranging from current bestsellers to the most eclectic titles. We are also known for our beautiful and inspired gifts. Customers buy and sell gently used books in our treasured Used Book Cellar and enjoy our bountiful bargain book selection. We host award-winning events series (including our groundbreaking Transnational Literature Series), offering more than 300 author talks, community conversations, and book clubs annually. Find more at brooklinebooksmith.com!

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

United Parish Brookline, 210 Harvard Street, Brookline, United States