Beyond Binaries: Jewish Suriname Through the Photographer's Lens | Dr. Laura Leibman

This talk took place on March 2, 2022 and was sponsored by the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas.
Sometime around 1930-35, Philip Samson had his photo taken at a portrait studio in Paramaribo Suriname wearing a kotomisi and angisa, the traditional dress and headgear of Afro-Surinamese women. At the time, Samson was the “Hulpchazan” (Assistant Hazzan) at the Ashkenazi Neve Shalom Synagogue on Keizerstraat. I use this photo of Samson to start a conversation about how photographs tend to be used in Jewish studies in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Perhaps more than any other form of art, photos are often taken unquestioned as documentary evidence or used to illustrate truths about Jews during specific eras. I argue we should be suspicious about that impulse. Early photographs from Suriname played an important role in navigating and creating racial and ethnic categories, and Jews were a crucial part of the early Surinamese photography industry, a role that has largely been unacknowledged. Through photographs and costumes like the kotomisi, Surinamese Jews helped create, navigate, and challenge racio-ethnic categories.
Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, VP of Program (AJS), and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her latest book Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.