Jael Silliman

Jael Silliman is an author, scholar, and women’s right activist. She has recently developed Recalling Jewish Calcutta, a digital archive that is a rich multimedia resource on the Calcutta Baghdadi Jews. She currently works as a consultant on gender and development, women of color and reproductive rights, and gender and environment issues. She lives in New York City and Calcutta. She is widely held in libraries worldwide.^[1]

Early Life and Education

Silliman grew up in Calcutta, India and attended Loreto House. She earned her B.A. in History and Politics of South Asia and China from Wellesley College, and M.Ed. in Planning and Administration for International Development from Harvard University. She went on to do her M.A. in History from University of Texas-Austin, and her Doctorate in Education is from Columbia University.

Career

On completing her doctorate, Silliman became a Program Officer at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and managed the Sustainable Agriculture Portfolio, the Population portfolio which she transformed into a Reproductive Rights Portfolio and introduced grants on Gender and Environment issues. She then moved to the University of Iowa where she became a tenured Associate Professor of Women Studies. In 2002, Silliman began a six-year term as the Program Officer for reproductive rights at the Ford Foundation, for its Human Rights Unit.

She has several publications to her credit, having co-written Undivided Rights: Women of Colour Organizing for Reproductive Justice with Elena Gutierrez, Loretta Ross and Marlene Gerber Fried, and co-edited Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization with Anannya Bhattacharjee. Apart from writing several academic papers on transnational feminist issues, women's rights and reproductive rights, she has also worked on issues relating to the Calcutta Jewish community. Most recently, she has developed Recalling Jewish Calcutta, a digital archive which has brought to attention the rich cultural heritage of the Jewish community in Calcutta. She collaborated with the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University; Trinity College, Dublin and National University of Ireland, Maynooth for the creation of this website. She has been awarded the Fulbright Program scholarship, and her most recent publication is her debut novel titled The Man With Many Hats.

Selected books

• Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice, with co-authors Elena Gutierrez, Loretta Ross and Marlene Gerber Fried (Cambridge, South End Press, 2004)
• Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization, co-edited with Anannya Bhattacharjee (Cambridge, South End Press, 2002)
• Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope(Lebanon, University Press of New England, 2001, in arrangement with Seagull Books)
• The Man With Many Hats

References

External links

• Niyogi, Subhro. "Jews leave a digital footprint on Kolkata". The Times of India. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
• Ghosh, Kamalika. "The disappearing Jewish community of Kolkata". Business Standard. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
• Marks, Zach. "The Last Jews of Kolkata". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
• Tandon, Rahul. "The Last Jews of Calcutta". BBC Religion and Ethics. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
• Recalling Jewish Calcutta