Hannah Zaves-Greene, PhD
Author, Able to Be American: Disability in US Immigration Policy and the American Jewish Response

Epilepsy. Heart disease. Varicose veins. “Feeble-mindedness.” In 1891, Congress unambiguously codified the popular sentiment that “defects” like these should preclude admission to the United States. Expanding the eugenics-rooted restrictions of the 1882 Immigration Act, the new law conflated illness, poverty, and disability with criminality and “moral turpitude,” starkly revealing Congress’s vision of the “ideal” American. Simultaneously, American Jews sought security and acceptance in the United States. In confronting this American culture of exclusion, rooted fundamentally in eugenic evaluations of immigrants’ bodies and minds, American Jewish women and men boldly asserted that they too had the right, knowledge, and ability to shape the meaning of American national belonging and, indeed, the fabric of the country itself.

Continuing medical education credit will be available for those in attendance.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Program, and Palliative and Supportive Institute

Catalog of Opportunities Event

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Litian Swen is a scholar of Christian missions in China.

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Feldman explores the postcolonial afterlives of Rebbe Nachman of Breslev (1772–1810) through ethnographic research conducted with communities reviving Breslev Hasidism in Montréal, Paris, Jerusalem, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. In the twenty-first century, digital platforms have facilitated the emergence of a transnational Francophone Breslev movement, generating new religious identities among French Sephardic Jews and West African converts alike—communities shaped by the enduring legacies of French colonial rule.

Across these settings, Rebbe Nachman’s eighteenth-century teachings are reinterpreted as practices of spiritual repair that respond to histories of religious and cultural erasure, whether through French laïcité, racialization, or Christian missionization. Breslev joy (simḥah) is discursively configured as “anti-Occident,” imagined as the antithesis of French secular modernity and mobilized as a theo-political resource. Dr. Rachel Z. Feldman is an Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. She specializes in the anthropology of Judaism, messianic movements, digital religion, contemporary Israel/Palestine, and gender studies.

Her book Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2024) received a Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion (2025), as well as a Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award (2023) from the Association for Jewish Studies

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Mary Moon, MTS
MD candidate, University of Pittsburgh

The Rev. Gaea Thompson, MDiv
Manager, Pastoral Care, UPMC Presbyterian/Montefiore Hospital
Diplomate Supervisor for Clinical Pastoral Education, College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

Jonathan Weinkle, MD, FAAP, FACP
Clinical Assistant Professor, Family Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Chief Medical Officer, Squirrel Hill Health Center

AI is reshaping how patients seek answers, how physicians spend their time, and how we make meaning from illness. But what happens to human presence when the algorithm enters the room?

This talk explores AI at the intersection of healthcare, spirituality, and the search for meaning. We'll open with a brief look at how AI is currently viewed across religious traditions and what the rise of the "digital-first" patient means for the people who sit at the bedside. Then, we'll hear from clinical care and chaplaincy on the front lines: how AI is changing their work, what patients are sharing, and what presence looks like in an age of large language models.

Whether it's a patient turning to a chatbot before a chaplain, or an AI scribe freeing a physician to finally make eye contact — this is a conversation about what technology reveals about what we need most from each other.

Continuing medical education credit will be available for those in attendance.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Program, and Palliative and Supportive Institute

Catalog of Opportunities Event

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Lara-Sophie Boleslawsky (University of Texas-Austin) on her dissertation-in-progress on Bultmann, anti-Judaism, and his Jewish students.

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Sami Ahmad
MD/PhD candidate
University of Pittsburgh

Continuing medical education credit will be available for those in attendance.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Program, and Palliative and Supportive Institute

Catalog of Opportunities Event

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