After graduating, Ladin was hired as a professor of literature at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, where she continues to teach. She finished her doctoral degree in five years, completing a dissertation on modernist American poetics and the work of Emily Dickinson. Motivated by her love of teaching, Ladin continued her graduate education to earn a Ph.D. In exchange for a stipend, she was asked to teach, and her first assigned class was “Man and Woman in Literature.” She was initially resistant but eventually experienced teaching as an authentic way of connecting with people that did not entirely depend on her gender. Although Ladin published sporadically during this ten-year period, she decided to pursue poetry full-time and returned to earn an M.F.A. After graduation, she moved to San Francisco with her wife and worked in a clerical job at the State Bar of California. Ladin left home at sixteen years old to attend Sarah Lawrence College, where she majored in creative writing and social science.
Ladin has also said that Judaism kept her alive during her childhood while she struggled with gender dysphoria. Her interest in the rituals of Judaism and attending synagogue provided a socially acceptable language for her to articulate her (gendered) differences from her non-observant family. Ladin’s creative theology, therefore, has its roots in her childhood.
While Ladin received some formal Jewish instruction as a result of her mother’s efforts, she has also stated that because she did not receive a strong Jewish education, she was able to invent the Judaism she needed. To foster her children’s Judaism, Lola Ladin encouraged Joy to attend both synagogue services and Hebrew school. While Ladin’s father was largely detached from Jewish ritual and tradition, Ladin’s mother was committed to an ethnic Jewish identity. Irving Ladin’s family were labor organizers with connections to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Both her parents came from non-observant Jewish households, and both were children of immigrants.
Joy Ladin was born in 1961 to Lola and Irving Ladin in Rochester, New York.
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