Event Details:

Continuation from Sept. 18 event (available on YouTube)

Full title: The Leonard Gilman Symposium on “Jewish perspectives of reproductive rights: Jews, religious liberty, and reproductive freedom in the United States”- Part 2

Dr. Gillian Frank will discuss the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion and liberal religious repro activism in Michigan from his forthcoming book A Sacred Choice. It centers Jewish history by using Michigan’s 1970 prosecution of an Illinois based rabbi (and the attempts to extradite him) for abortion counseling and referral. He uses this story as a jumping off point to broader questions of abortion & pastoral counseling and abortion travel. Gillian Frank is a historian of sexuality and religion and a visiting affiliate fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion. He is the author of numerous academic articles on the histories of sexuality, gender and religion (which have appeared in venues like the Journal of the History of Sexuality, American Jewish History, and Gender and History) and public facing scholarship (with bylines in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Jezebel and Slate). He is co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (UNC Press: 2018). Frank is currently at work on a manuscript called A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade (forthcoming UNC Press). You can listen to his podcast Sexing History--co-hosted with Lauren Gutterman--which explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present, wherever you stream your shows.

Representative Elissa Slotkin is currently in her second term as Congresswoman for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, which includes all of Ingham County, all of Livingston County, and the Northern portion of Oakland County. Rep. Slotkin has spent her career in national service. She served in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be a Middle East analyst, working alongside the U.S. military during three tours in Iraq as a militia expert. In between her tours in Iraq, Rep. Slotkin held various defense and intelligence positions under President Bush and President Obama, including roles at the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In 2011, Rep. Slotkin took a senior position at the Pentagon and, until January 2017, she served as Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

Attorney General Dana Nessel is a former criminal prosecutor and civil rights attorney, Dana Nessel was sworn in as Michigan’s 54th Attorney General on January 1, 2019. She has taken a lead in consumer protection, environmental protection, as well as worked to protect elders from abuse. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Wayne State University Law School.