L’dor v’dor in Hebrew or “from generation to generation” in English refers to the responsibility of passing down history and values.

That’s what happened when Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Stephanie Pridgeon brought award-winning director Sandi DuBowski to �ֲ���ý to screen his critically acclaimed 2024 documentary Sabbath Queen and meet with students in several classes.

Pridgeon’s research and teaching expertise are on Jewish and Latin American film, where she often focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. When she was a freshman in college, 22 years ago, she saw Trembling Before G-d, DuBowski’s 2001 groundbreaking documentary about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews trying to reconcile their religion and sexual identities and was fascinated by it. That film, Pridgeon says, “stuck with me all these years.”

When she saw Sabbath Queen last year she realized it was thematically something of a follow up to Trembling Before G-d. When DuBowski visited Maine to screen the film at SPACE Gallery in Portland last May, Pridgeon had an opportunity to be his interviewer for a Q&A with the audience. That’s when she got the idea to invite DuBowski to �ֲ���ý, to give her students a chance to see his work and discuss it with him.  

The feature documentary was filmed over 21 years. It follows Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie on an epic journey. He’s the dynastic heir of 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis. Two of his relatives, a first cousin and an uncle, were elected Chief Rabbis of Israel and served lengthy terms in these powerful positions. Arguably, his destiny was linked to the traditional, and as the film shows, he was torn between embracing that destiny and rejecting it.

Over those 21 years of being filmed by DuBowski , Lau-Lavie becomes a drag-queen rebel, a queer bio-dad and the founder of Lab/Shul—an everybody-friendly, God-optional, artist-driven, pop-up experimental congregation. The New York Times reviewer called Sabbath Queen a “fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.”

DuBowski’s work struck a chord with Pridgeon’s student, Ellie Millard ’26 of Harrison, N.Y., a double major in environmental studies and Hispanic studies who is taking Pridgeon’s Jewish Latin American film class. “The film is incredibly interesting,” Millard says. “Because it is the first time that I am seeing anyone from an Orthodox Jewish background coming out and being openly vulnerable about their sexuality and gender expression in media.”

Millard credits Pridgeon with “allowing students to experience a diverse range of media.”

The gratitude goes both ways. “Being able to bring Sabbath Queen to campus and discuss it and Sandi’s other films with my students has been really just a huge privilege for me,” Pridgeon says. “It felt like a really beautiful kind of full-circle moment.”

Generation to generation. 

DuBowski’s visit was co-sponsored by the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Hispanic studies, religious studies, SPARQ, Multifaith Chaplaincy, gender and sexuality studies, humanities division, and interdisciplinary studies division.

So much has changed.

”In about seven days, we converted it to an online environment with faculty who had largely never taught in that environment and students who had largely never learned in that environment,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavellero.

But some things haven’t changed, say these �ֲ���ý professors, who, from their new off-campus workspaces, share insights and takeaways after two weeks of teaching their students remotely.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

The strong bond between students and their professors hasn’t weakened. “I still care about my students — as individuals, people on an intellectual and personal journey,” says Su Langdon, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “I still want them to succeed.”

And the students are still diving into schoolwork.  “I am still teaching a community of students that are enthusiastic about learning the Japanese language,” says Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks is impressed. ”I’ve got to give it to them,” she says of her students. “They’re pulling through … They are absolutely stepping up to the plate.”

The faculty who appear in this �ֲ���ý News video, in order, are:

• Rebecca Fraser-Thill, Visiting Instructor in Psychology
• Joshua Rubin, Lecturer in Anthropology
• Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese
• Michael Rocque, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jonathan Cavallero, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies
• Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology
• Su Langdon, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics
• Stephanie Pridgeon, Assistant Professor of Spanish

For many of us, a testimony happens in a court of law, or perhaps in a church.

For people who study Latin America, like Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon, testimony also refers to a literary genre born from violence and authoritarianism in the 20th century.

A testimonio is “an oral, written, or transcribed firsthand account of political violence and social issues,” Pridgeon says. “It’s a text whose social currency and cultural value are based on the fact that the person witnessed something firsthand.”

During Banned Books Week in 2017, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon talks about confiscated books in Argentina. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

A famous example is I, Rigoberta Menchú, a recounting of one woman’s experience of violence during the Guatemalan civil war, as told to a Venezuelan anthropologist. Menchú is a K’iche’ Maya human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Pridgeon’s research on testimonios focuses on the value a testimonio has when the line between fact and fiction blurs. For example, how much value does a testimonio have when its accuracy is called into question, as was the case with I, Rigoberta Menchú? What happens when artists merge testimonio and documentary filmmaking to show the limitations of both?

Overall, testimonios offer a glimpse of the intersection of personal identity and politics. “How are people going against what people have assumed about them, based on having been a political prisoner or an insurgent or part of one political faction or another?” Pridgeon says.

“It gets into some pretty juicy issues of identity politics and the ways in which people understand themselves vis-à-vis broader coalitions, alliances, or political blocs.”  

Japanese writer Jun Ishikawa faced censorship under two different regimes.

In the 1930s, the nationalist Japanese government fined him for publishing a story that criticized militarism. A decade later, U.S. forces occupying the country told him to remove parts of a short story depicting an American soldier fraternizing with a Japanese woman, rendering the story nonsensical.

In other words, censorship was a “trans-war phenomenon in Japan,” said Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Helen Weetman.

Weetman presented on censorship pre- and post-World War II Japan on Wednesday as part of Banned Books Week, a national campaign to protest censorship and promote the freedom to read. To mark the week, �ֲ���ý Ladd Library held a series of presentations on censorship outside the United States in the 20th century.

It was a departure from last year’s series, which explored censorship in the United States and locally. Focusing on censorship around the world allowed the �ֲ���ý community to consider a broader range of reasons why governments, organizations, and individuals try to prevent books from being published or read.

Stephanie Pridgeon, visiting assistant professor of Spanish, presents on censorship in Argentina in the 1970s and 80’s as part of Banned Books Week. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“In the United States, it’s much more about sex and religion, and in other countries it has more to do with politics,” Juraska said. “It’s an interesting difference of what tends to get banned where. It tells you something about the culture that we live in.”

In Germany in the 1930s, the initiative to suppress certain books came not from the Nazi government but from student organizations, said Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki. Students led the charge to collect and burn books by authors with an “un-German spirit,” many of whom were Jewish.

Book-burnings took place around the country on May 10, 1933. In Berlin, the students were encouraged by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki presents on book-burning in Nazi Germany on Sept. 28 as part of Banned Books Week (Emily McConville/�ֲ���ý College)

“What always gets me when I look at the photographs of this event is the happy, smiling faces of the students,” Kazecki said. “They were so happy to participate in this event.”

In Argentina in the 1970s and 80’s, censorship also helped a military junta maintain power, said Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon.

Book burnings were also common there: At one point, in a quest to eradicate books that were not in keeping with nationalism and Catholicism, the regime collected and burned 1.5 million books from a single publisher, Pridgeon said. People suspected of subversion would often come home to find their bookshelves ransacked.

“At the same time books were being burned, they were also used as evidence of political activists’ subversion,” she said.

In Japan, in addition to censoring Ishikawa, the U.S. occupation government after World War II cracked down on materials that promoted militarism and nationalism, going so far as to have children black out parts of their textbooks with heavy ink, Weetman said.

Then, as Japanese political discourse tipped to the left, the occupation government began to censor suspected Communists, socialists, and unionists as well.

The censors were trying to suppress not only views the U.S. considered unfavorable, but also the existence of censorship itself.

“It’s essential that you make no reference to the fact that censorship is occurring, so you cannot refer to censorship,” Weetman said. “You also cannot largely refer to the occupation itself. It’s not that nobody does, but it’s discouraged.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Helen Weetman discusses the history of censorship in Japan during Banned Books Week. (Emily McConville/�ֲ���ý College)

The totalitarian regimes in Argentina, Germany, and Japan eventually fell, the U.S. occupation of Japan ended, and — as within the United States — censorship became less severe in the later 20th century. Each country is reckoning with its past, and censorship, or the memory of it, is a factor in those reckonings.

Pridgeon said one former detention center in Argentina, now a museum and memory center, projects images of confiscated books on its walls — an expression of memory that is still fraught.

“The superimposition of this image comes as part of a broader movement that is deliberately seeking to re-insert politics and ideology into what had previously been presented as an ostensibly depoliticized space of human rights and memory,” she said.

Many book-burning sites in Germany have also become spaces of commemoration, Kazecki said.

At the location of the infamous 1933 book burning in Berlin, a plate of glass allows passersby to look underground into a set of empty bookshelves, enough to hold the books that were burned. On May 10 of each year, a man in Munich blowtorches the grass over a spot where books were burned — “I think it is necessary to remember without covering history with grass,” he has said.

On many of the plaques marking book burnings throughout the country, there is a quote from Heinrich Heine, a 19th-century writer who protested a symbolic book-burning in 1817: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

A final presentation on LGBT and religious themes in international censorship by Visiting Assistant Professor of English Tiffany Slater will take place on Oct. 2.