Book Talk | Schneur Zalman Newfield | Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidim

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, April 29 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Schneur Zalman Newfield. They will discuss his new book, Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey Out of Hasidim, with Steven Michael Lukes and Iddo Tavory.

Schneur Zalman Newfield was raised in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn and attended Lubavitch yeshivahs in Chicago, Miami, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He participated in Lubavitch outreach activities in Russia, China, and Singapore.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brooklyn College and a PhD in sociology from New York University.   He taught sociology courses for two years in six medium- and maximum-security New Jersey state prisons through the NJ-STEP consortium.  He is now Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College (CUNY).  His academic book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020), explores the lives of Lubavitch and Satmar men and women who decided as young adults to leave that way of life. Newfield is also a host on the New Books Network podcast, interviewing scholars from a diverse range of academic disciplines.

Steven Lukes is Professor of Sociology at NYU. His books include Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, Power: A Radical View, Moral Relativism, and The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas. His writings and teaching range across political sociology, political theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Iddo Tavory is Professor of sociology at NYU and studies the interactional and experiential patterns through which people come to construct and understand their lives across situations. His books Abductive Analysis and Data Analysis in Qualitative Research (both with Stefan Timmermans) provide a pragmatist account that allows researchers to make the most of the surprises that emerge in the process of research. His book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identity and social worlds. His book (with Sonia Prelat and Shelly Ronen) Tangled Goods explores the relationship among goods in pro bono advertising, and theorizes the coordination of different forms of worth in action. Iddo is currently writing a theoretical manuscript on culture and interactionism and a book based on an ethnography of an advertising agency in New York.