Jane Gordon is Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967-1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2006) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2006). Gordon’s current work focuses on problems of legitimacy in democratic societies: she is currently completing one book that aims to refashion Rousseau’s concept of the general will through the resources offered by W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness and another, with Lewis Gordon, that develops a social and political theory of disaster in the modern age. Gordon is particularly interested in how best to measure and count communities that have been designated religiously, about ways in which best to understand members of communities of color who are deliberately returning to Judaism, and in how to most accurately and effectively educate contemporary Jews and non-Jews about the creolized past and present of vibrant Jewish communities.