CBH Talks: Jewish Brooklyn: Identity

Join us for this program in our series exploring the history and lived experience of Jews in Brooklyn. This time we look at identity.

Rooted in both continuity and change, being on the outside and inside, the new and the old, Brooklyn Jewish identity spirals back to the Diaspora and forward to the digital. Join Bruce Feiler, author of seven New York Times bestsellers and one of the country’s preeminent writers about religion, as he moderates this conversation with former New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, author of The Pious Ones: The World of Hasidism and Their Battles with America; Brooklyn born-and-raised Yiddish performer Eleanor Reissa; and Rabbi Matt Green of Congregation Beth Elohim, named one of Jewish Week’s 2020 “36 Under 36” young Jewish leaders. A selection of highlights from the Center for Brooklyn History’s Brooklyn Jewish History Collection presented by Outreach Archivist Ariane Loeb sets the stage!

Special thanks to The David Berg Foundation for their generous support of CBH’s Brooklyn Jewish Life Collection Project.

Participants

Joseph Berger was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for over 30 years, writing about education, religion, and the kaleidoscope that is New York City as well chronicling many of the events that have shaken Israel and the Middle East. For the previous 14 years he had been a reporter for the New York Post and Newsday. In 2011, he was honored with the Peter Kihss Award for a distinguished career given by the Society of Silurians, the city’s oldest press club. He retired from The Times in December 2014 and is writing a biography of Elie Wiesel that will be published by Yale University Press in 2022. He is the author of four books, including Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust, a memoir about his family's experience as refugees in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, The Pious Ones; The World of Hasidim and their Battles with America, and The World in a City: Traveling the Globe through the Neighborhoods of the New New York, an intimate insider's tour of a NYC transformed by immigration and gentrification.

Eleanor Reissa is Brooklyn born and bred; a victim/beneficiary of the public school system from K through college (cum laude).  In spite of that (or because of it) she has had a life beyond her own imagination.  She became a Tony nominated director, a Broadway actress, a prize-winning playwright, an artistic director of the world’s oldest Yiddish theater company, a soon-to-be published author, a singer in every major venue around the world and in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and smaller venues like Joe’s Pub and Michael Feinstein’s 54 Below.  Simply, she became a story-teller in English and Yiddish and is the daughter of her parents who lived through the Holocaust.

Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, the presenter of two primetime series on PBS, and one of the country’s preeminent thinkers, writers, and speakers about religion. His book Walking the Bible describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. Abraham recounts his personal search for the shared ancestor of the monotheistic religions. Where God Was Born describes his trek visiting biblical sites throughout Israel, Iraq, and Iran. Bruce is the host of two primetime series on PBS: Walking the Bible and Sacred Journey with Bruce Feiler, in which he retraces pilgrimages in France, India, Japan, Israel, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. His newest book is Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age.  A native of Savannah, Georgia, Bruce lives in Brooklyn with wife and their identical twin daughters. 

Rabbi Matt Green is the Assistant Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE) in Park Slope. He is also the director of Brooklyn Jews, CBE’s community of young Brooklynites looking for connection to Jewish culture, time, and ritual. Matt received a B.A. in History from the University of Michigan and was ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, where he was a Tisch Fellow. In 2015, Matt won the Be Wise entrepreneurship competition at HUC for his project, Grindr Shabbat, and was recognized as one of New York Jewish Week’s 36 Under 36 in 2018.