Module 3: Religion & Culture

Deidre Butler

Dr. Deidre Butler is Lead Researcher and Director of the Hear Our Voices Project.  She is also Director of the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor specializing in Jewish Studies in the Religion program at Carleton University. Butler is an award-winning teacher who teaches in the areas of modern Judaism, gender, sexuality and religion, and religious and philosophical responses to the Holocaust.  Professor Butler is a Fellow of the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University and has published on the topic of women’s artistic responses to the Shoah as well as the need to integrate women’s historical experiences of the Holocaust in philosophical and religious responses to that trauma.  She has interviewed and worked with Holocaust survivors since 2006.  Butler has developed oral history films with survivors including the full-length documentary Living History and all of the HOV oral history interviews in this project.  Her current research project, in collaboration with Professor Betina Appel Kuzmarov, is an interdisciplinary ethnographic project that investigates the phenomenon of Jewish religious divorce in Canada.

Jesse Toufexis

Jesse Toufexis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. His dissertation applies Possible Worlds narrative theory to eight short works of North American Jewish fiction, arguing that Jewish fiction writing is a collective world-building enterprise by authors at different times and in different places, serving as a virtual home for those authors and their readers.