Naomi Seidman

Jackman Humanities Professor

On Leave

July 01, 2024 to June 30, 2025
naomi.seidman@utoronto.ca

Cross-Appointments

Department for The Study of Religion

Areas of Interest

Interests

  • Literature and Secularization
  • Translation Studies
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Eastern European Literature and Culture
  • Orthodox Judaism
  • Religion and Gender

Selected Publications

  • A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (1997)
  • Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (2006)
  • The Marriage Plot, or How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016)
  • A Revolution in the Name of Tradition: Sarah Schenirer and Bais Yaakov (2019)
  • The Navel of the Dream: Freud’s Jewish Languages (forthcoming)
  • “Gender and the Re-Making of Modern Jewry,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 8, eds. Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels (2018)

Biography

Professor Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her fourth book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, won a National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies in 2019. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Seidman is presently completing a study of the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud's writings during his lifetime. Her podcast on leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, Heretic in the House, was recently released by the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Education

PhD

Awards