BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//NextToU//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VEVENT UID:f9eb71e7-b720-4947-a304-26c0d9c19a0a@nexttoyou DTSTAMP:20261105T151725Z DTSTART:20261110T230000Z DTEND:20261111T000000Z SUMMARY:Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey\, “Sacred Storytelling as Lived Religion in Contemporary Jewish American Women’s Fiction" DESCRIPTION:Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey (she/her) is a Lecturer in the Univer sity of Colorado Boulder English department and Continuing Education divi sion. Her recently completed dissertation examines how contemporary Jewis h American novelists reconceptualize and generate religious thought and p ractice. Her work\, published in Studies in American Jewish Literature\, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion\, and forthcoming in Shofar\, examines intergenerational and transtemporal intimacies between characte rs. She identifies in literature the reverential\, textual\, and collabor ative practices that cultivate new social ties between characters across time\, and she interprets those ritualized forms of contact—mediated via letters\, diaries\, genre fiction\, and alternative media—as religious\, in that they bring symbolic or spectral ancestors and living readers into relationship.\n\nThis talk discusses a trope in popular contemporary nov els by Jewish American women writers. Protagonists befriend Jewish ancest ral figures through historical salvage\, matrilineal inheritance\, and in tersubjective storytelling. For instance\, Rachel Kadish’s 2017 bestselli ng novel\, The Weight of Ink\, presents a twenty-first century woman’s ar chival work as sacred labor that elicits feelings of heightened intimacy with a previously unknown\, seventeenth-century Jewish scribe. An array o f novels liken narrative custodianship to a gift between friends\, and te xtual practices—careful interpretation\, thorough research\, shared findi \n\nhttp://next-to-u.app/events/f9eb71e7-b720-4947-a304-26c0d9c19a0a URL:http://next-to-u.app/events/f9eb71e7-b720-4947-a304-26c0d9c19a0a END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR