Sarah
Leiter
Sarah Leiter
University of New Mexico
Gerald and Robin Silk Fellow
Research Topic
“Children of Songbirds”: Creating Community from Emergent Ancestral Jewishness
Bio
Sarah Leiter’s research focuses on questions of social identity and historical consciousness, particularly among Hispanic Catholic New Mexicans who have recently discovered their Sephardic Jewish ancestry. She is also interested in Jewish identification more broadly and has done ethnographic research at an African American Jewish temple in Chicago and among hopeful converts to Judaism in the capital of Brazil.
Leiter received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.
Selected publications
- “Spanish by Another Name? Racializing Sephardic Identity in Contemporary New Mexico,” Anthropological Quarterly 97.4 (2024): 285–318.
- “‘I Was the Only Goyim There’: Linguistic Imitation and Socialization among Sephardic New Mexicans,” Journal of Jewish Languages 11.2 (2023): 262–91.
