Photo by Richard Howard

Welcoming a New Rabbi

Not long before students landed back at Wellesley this fall, Dena Bodian arrived on campus to join the Religious and Spiritual Life team as Jewish chaplain and campus rabbi. She comes to Wellesley from Colgate University, where she spent seven years advising the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and atheist student groups as the associate university chaplain and director of Jewish life. At Colgate, in addition to leading programming for the Jewish community, she participated in campus-wide initiatives such as Yes Means Yes, a campaign to encourage positive conversation about sex and prevent sexual violence, and Inter-Group Dialogue, an initiative to explore the complexities of social identities (gender, religion, race and ethnicity, class, and more) and improve communication across differences. Bodian spearheaded the research, writing, and publication of a volume on the history of Jews at Colgate, and served as president of the National Association of College and University Chaplains. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and received rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie, Ill.

O Beautiful!

If the strains of “America, the Beautiful” automatically make you want to yell “SISTERHOOD,” the U.S. Postal Service has just the stamps for you. Inspired by the iconic poem by Katharine Lee Bates, class of 1880, it issued a line of “O Beautiful” stamps on July 4 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Bates, who taught English at Wellesley from 1885 to 1925, wrote the famous lines on a 2,000-mile train ride across the United States, en route to spend a summer teaching at Colorado College. The stamps show 20 scenes from across the U.S.—ranging from “spacious skies” in Tennessee to “mountain majesties” in Oregon. Melinda Ponder ’66, author of a 2017 biography, Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, served as a consultant to the stamp designers, providing historical context about the writing of the poem and song.

Sustainability in the Bag

Call it a small step toward making Wellesley’s carbon footprint smaller. This year, as part of a pilot program, bags designed by Nicole Zhao ’20 were given to all residents of Caz and first-years across campus to use for collecting recyclables in their rooms. The aim is to get more paper, cans, and bottles into the dual-stream recycling bins located throughout the residence halls. In 2017, the College community collected roughly 141 tons of recyclable materials.