CANCELED: Soul Searching: Writing the Biography of an American Religious Personality

A Conversation with Jenna Weissman Joselit and William Stell

Jenna Weissman Joselit has recently authored Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul, an engaging and compelling biography that goes beyond myth to reveal the complex life of a transformative figure in modern American Judaism. She will discuss the book and its production in conversation with William Stell, who is also at work on a biography of an American religious leader, The Moses of the Gay Liberation Movement, on Rev. Troy Perry.

Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies & Professor of History at the George Washington University, specializes in the history and culture of America’s Jews and in U.S. cultural history from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s. Her work, both within and without the classroom, pays especially close attention to the relationship between daily life, faith and identity. Weissman Joselit’s books include, most recently, Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul, a Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” biography (her first); Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments; A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America; A Parade of Faiths, and The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950, which received the National Jewish Book Award in History. A founding member of NYU’s Working Group on Jews, Media and Religion, Weissman Joselit has also been a Senior Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of American Religion (now Center for Culture, Society and Religion), on whose Academic Advisory Council she sits; a fellow at Yale University’s Center for Art and Material Culture and the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Judaic Studies. Most recently, she has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. For the past 25 years or so, Weissman Joselit has written a monthly column on American Jewish culture first for the Forward and then for Tablet. These days, she’s a contributing writer for the Jewish Review of Books, both its print and Substack editions. Over the years, her essays have also appeared in Sapir, the New Republic, TNR Online, Gastronomica, Material Religion and other scholarly publications.

William Stell *23 is a historian of religion and sexuality in the United States with additional expertise in disability studies and African American history. His first book, Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity, was published by Princeton University Press in 2026. A groundbreaking history of evangelicalism and homosexuality in the United States, Born Again Queer demonstrates that anti-LGBTQ positions within evangelicalism used to be much less dominant and much more vulnerable than they have been in recent years. He has two current book projects. The first, titled The Moses of the Gay Liberation Movement, will be the first scholarly biography of Rev. Troy Perry, a Pentecostal pastor from the Florida Panhandle who was the most famous gay activist in the nation in the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. His other current book project is a popular history of the role of religion in the LGBTQ movement from the 1960s to the 1990s.