Join us for a Faculty & Graduate Student Research Colloquium, led by Dr. Laura Leibman. This event is part of the Program in Jewish Studies' 2025 Bender Visiting Scholar Program. 

Branded as impure, Jewish sex workers and traffickers were banned from burial in Jewish communal cemeteries in New York, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Constantinople, and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In response, Jewish criminal organizations across the Americas created their own burial societies and cemeteries where members could be buried with religious rites and honor. While their cemeteries in Brazil and Argentina have garnered extensive scholarly interest, the cemeteries in New York have gone virtually unstudied. In this colloquium Leibman discusses her fieldwork in the “pimps and prostitutes” cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens, NY in Summer 2024 through the lens of space, honorifics, and familial connections. She argues that the New York cemeteries of the impure both mirror and refute concerns about death and Jewish purity in the nearby city of the living.

Laura Arnold Leibman is the Leonard J. Milberg '53 Professor in American Jewish Studies. Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the author of the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph, Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and the Saul Viener Book Prize, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.

Photo Description: Mourning the Dead at Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma ("Cemitério das Polacas"), Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 1934. Photo courtesy Felipe Parada.