Three speakers will discuss “The New Jew: How Sports Shaped Jewish Identity & the Zionist Movement” on Wednesday, March 4, at UF’s Smathers Library.  

This free lecture will take place from 3 to 7 p.m. at Price Judaica Suite at 1508 Union Rd. in Gainesville. To reserve a spot, click here.    

This talk explores how athletic clubs, competitions, and public debates about the body helped define ideas of nationalism, community, and the “New Jew.” By looking at everyday sporting culture on playing fields, in newspapers, and in urban life. Gain a fresh perspective on how modern Jewish and Israeli identities developed.

The speakers include Dr. Ofer Idels, Dr. Rachel Gordan and Dr. Roy Holler and the event is sponsored by the UF Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies.

Idels is the Belzberg Fellow in Israeli Studies at the UCalgary. He is the author of “Zionism: Emotions, Language and Experience” and “Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine.”

Gordan, the moderator for this event, is the Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Florida. She received her PhD from Harvard University in North American Religions; her BA from Yale in American Studies, and her MAR from Yale Divinity School. After receiving her PhD, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and at the University of Toronto, before teaching at Boston University and Brandeis in 2016-2017. As a scholar of American religion, she researches Judaism and Jewish culture from the early 20th century to the present, with a particular focus on the immediate post-WWII era, middlebrow culture, and American Jewish literary history.

Holler, the commentator for this event, is an Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Florida. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his BA in English from the City University of New York. His current book project, Passing and the Politics of Identity in Israeli and African American Literatures, explores the phenomenon of passing in a comparative context. Roy’s work on Israeli and African American literatures earned him the 2020 Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Prize by Columbia University and Fordham University.