Laura Arnold Leibman

Check out this lovely review of my new book by a scholar I admire so much, Jenna Weissman Joselit! https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7072/history-wit...

In The Art of the Jewish Family, I examine five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850...

What sets apart college-level writing from the kind of research papers you did in High School? In this video you will learn about the four main parts of th...

Although others have spoken at length about Saki's magnificent academic accomplishments and the extremely important way he shaped the field of American liter...

Deep in the Surinamese jungle lies the ruins of what was once the prospering plantation town of Jodensavanne--Jew's Savanne. Just past the bricks that made ...

For early Americans and Europeans alike, cosmetics carried spiritual and moral messages. In this post I look to three examples of the use of cosmetics for se...

What can baths tell us, then, about the everyday lives and challenges women faced in early America? In this post, I move beyond an architectural analysis to ...

This past spring, I taught a digital humanities course on American Dead and Undead. The premise of the course was fairly simple: we shouldn't study the dead...

Last week's American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) Biennial Scholars Conference on "Jews and Judaism in the American World of 'Difference'” marks an impor...

Why is it that Christian Fundamentalists have had better kitsch than Charedi Jews? Will this always be the case? To answer this question, I turn to one segme...

Do you dress your religious beliefs? Some American religions (Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, to name a few) include doctrines about how practitioners should clot...

The Kabbalah Project (#KabbalahProject) is meant as a creative response to Alexander Gorlin's book, Kabbalah in Art and Architecture. Rather than taking an ...

The Kabbalah Project (#KabbalahProject) is meant as a creative response to Alexander Gorlin's book, Kabbalah in Art and Architecture. This post contains lin...

Eclectic low-income housing by Dutch Jewish architect Michel de Klerk. Museum Het Schip, Amsterdam. See more images on twitpic. de Klerk was one of the fou...

Notice how the color of the tiling in this 19th century mikveh mimics the beautiful color of the water below. This mikveh was added to the Portuguese Synago...

One of the lovely elements of the older houses (and some newer) in the Old Canal Rings in Amsterdam is the use of stone tablets to identify the goods or serv...