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The 2026 Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington with Rafael Neis
The two lectures free and open to all but Registration Is Required. For more information about the workshop please contact aliyahv@uw.edu
Have “Men” and “Women” Always Existed? What the Talmud Can Tell Us
Tuesday May 12, 2026, 7pm Pacific - register here: Registration Required
We often assume that the categories “man” and “woman” are stable and self-evident. Indeed, ideas about the timelessness of gender may also underpin the refrain that “trans and nonbinary people have always existed.” This framing asks us to support the right of contemporary gender-diverse people to exist and flourish, in part, by recognizing that they, too, have an ancient lineage. In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis presents an altogether different approach to gender. Through a journey into Talmudic texts composed in late ancient Iraq, they invite us to set aside what we think we already know about gender categories. Doing so, Professor Neis argues, will illuminate how the ancient rabbis sought to invent, classify, and make meaning of the diverse plurality of human and other beings.
2. Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images – Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art
Thursday, May 14, 2026, 4pm Pacific - register here: Registration Required
Walk through the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, and you would have been surrounded by images of all kinds—human figures, animals, hybrids, and creatures that blur the line between the familiar and the fantastic. These images appeared everywhere: in streets and homes, bathhouses and synagogues, public buildings and sacred spaces. Art historians have traditionally taken upon themselves the role of assigning gender or species designations to such images in ways that replicate modern gender and sexuality concepts (especially of “male” and “female” or “masculine” and “feminine”). In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis explores a handful of examples from late ancient Jewish art in the Roman Galilee and Sasanian Iraq. Instead of sorting these images into boxes like “human,” “animal,” or “hybrid,” or even “male,” “female,” and “queer,” they invite us to see the complex ways in which ancient artists and communities imagined species, divinity, and gender. The result is an account of ancient Jewish visual culture that offers a more expansive representation of kinship, difference, and the sacred.
3. Before Gender: Trans Methods for Jewish Studies and Ancient History
Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 12 pm* Pacific
If gender history first entailed the retrieval of women’s history, and then turned to analysis of how masculinity/men and femininity/women have been constructed over time, historians now consider gender beyond this binary. A significant amount of work has gone into discerning the presence of “trans,” “nonbinary,” and gender-varied people in the archive. In this workshop, we will adopt a different, experimental approach. We will venture to abandon the project of cisgender history altogether and refrain from projecting the categories of “male” and “female” onto the past. Turning to late ancient Jewish sources from Sasanian Mesopotamia and Roman Palestine — and to the demonized figure of Lilith in particular — we will consider what such a gender-agnostic perspective can surface.
a short article and primary sources will be circulated prior to the event
please contact aliyahv@uw.edu for more information about the workshop
with Rafe Neis
April 22, 29, May 6: Tuesdays 3pm ET, noon PT
Is the idea that humans are made in God's image (b'tselem elohim) really THE supreme Jewish value? What are the downsides of this seemingly progressive concept? Who and what is excluded (historically and in the present)? In an age of climate catastrophe what Jewish alternatives exist? Join me in exploring these questions in an ancient Jewish archive of rabbinic, mystical, and magical sources.
Spoilers: the rabbis weren't as wild about the human-as-image of God as you might think, jewish zoology and biology blurred the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, even to the extent of queering sacrosanct ideas some people may have about human reproduction and gender.
Artist Talk - North Carolina Museum of Art
Join us for Cocktails and Conversations, a series exploring contemporary art and the NCMA’s renowned Judaic Art Gallery. We welcome Rafe Neis, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar of ancient history and Talmud who lives and works in Ann Arbor. They will share their work exploring Talmudic attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and how art and scholarship meet in their practice.
kinDRAG: Closing for US and Our Kinds
Conversation with the artist led by Neda Ulaby, followed by performance (AnimalAdLibs), followed by community party.
L-R: Stefany Anne Golberg, Rafe Neis, and Neda Ulaby
Art show - KIN: US and Our Kinds
Neis draws together a menagerie of queer beings who dwell outside of normative gender and species. Across painting, printmaking, comics, and installation, images of rogue zoology and extravagant gender congregate. “KIN” engages ancient visual culture, classical and Jewish texts, and comics. Neis's art embraces a love for mark-making along with a disregard for the putative boundaries between abstraction and figuration.
September - December 204, at the Institute of Research on Women and Gender’s Lane Hall Gallery
KIN + LOVE = Art Opening Reception
Join the opening reception for a two-person show, with artists Rafael Neis and Anne Vetter, at the Institute of Research on Women and Gender’s Lane Hall on Tuesday, September 17, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm.
Neis and Vetter’s exhibits will be on view from September 3 - December 6, 2024. A reception with the artists will take place on September 17 at 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm.
The fall exhibits are presented with support from IRWG, the Department of Women's & Gender Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Humanities Institute, the History Department, IPAH, Classical Studies, Contexts for Classics, and the CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.