This weekend marked the fifth annual Gender and Human Rights lecture and conference at Brandeis University. Named for Diane (Dina) Markowicz, a student with a passion for social justice who tragically passed away while enrolled at Brandeis in 1976, the weekend program was started by Diane's sister Sylvia Neil (who clearly shares the family gene for human rights activism) in her late sister’s memory. The program was also intended to honor Brandeis’s tradition of integrating scholarship and social action, where thinkers “who are self-consciously Jewish and proud use that identity to achieve human rights and justice for all.” The keynote speaker, Israeli-born activist Anat Hoffman of Women of the Wall and the Religious Action Center of Israel, clearly embodied those ideals in her speech entitled “From the Back of the Bus to the Top of...

Continue reading