Once Out of Nature & Family: A Virtual Author Talk with Joy Ladin
Please register to attend this program using the form below, you only need to register once per household for all digital JMM events. You will automatically receive a Zoom link for the program once you have completed registering. Live captions will be provided during the presentation. For questions, please contact Noah Mitchel at nmitchel@jewishmuseummd.org or 443.873.5178.
Join the JMM for a Zoom program with author Joy Ladin about her two recently published works, her essay collection Once Out of Nature, and her poetry collection Family.
Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist, poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021, she held the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University; her gender transition and return to teaching in 2008 made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Joy is the author of twelve books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning revised second edition of The Book of Anna and ten books of poetry. Her work was featured in the 2021 JMM exhibition A Fence Around the Torah: Safety and Unsafety in Jewish Life.
Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender was written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's “transgender tipping point,” and 2021, as anti-trans laws began multiplying, these essays offer constructive, compassionate ways to think and talk about how the growing awareness of transgender and nonbinary people is changing gender for everyone. Ladin, the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, a nationally known speaker on transgender identities and issues, and founding figure in trans poetry and trans theology, has lived through and contributed to gender's bitterly debated and still unfolding transformation. Drawing on her experiences as a trans parent, spouse, teacher, and author rather than talking points, buzz words, or jargon, these essays speak honestly and insightfully about how gender is changing, the conflicts and anxieties these changes cause, and what they can teach us about who we are, who we can be, and what it means to be human.
Family is Ladin's most autobiographical and socially engaged poetry collection to date, Family is an intimate exploration of private and public loss, resilience, and love whose emotional center and recurrent motif is the death of her mother. Family begins with “haiku suites,” an invented form through which her mother's dementia and her own growing disability are glimpsed by the light of a blossoming world. The lyric narratives that follow portray a widening family circle that also includes estranged children, God, targeted trans women, and Trump-era America. The book concludes with “Autobiography of My Whiteness,” a reckoning with Ladin's belated awareness of her place in America's racial hierarchy that connects the entangling of whiteness and love in her childhood relationship with her mother to recent police shootings of black and brown children that reveal, behind the veil of whiteness, the ongoing violence at the heart of her American family.