Please join the Jewish Studies Workshop at 5pm on Thursday, April 18th in Swift 200 for a workshop with Professor Lana Povitz (Assistant Professor of History, Middlebury College). She will be presenting work in progress from her forthcoming biography of Shulamith Firestone, and Maggie Goldberger (PhD Student, Divinity) will be responding.

Gifted with creativity and insight, Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012) was a prime mover in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s: a writer, theorist, organizer, and artist. Join Lana Dee Povitz to discuss a chapter-in-progress from her forthcoming biography of Firestone. The chapter uses oral history and private archival material to explore the place of sex, love, and romance in Firestone’s life, set against the evolving landscape of radical feminist thought in New York City circa 1969. Like so many feminists then and since, Firestone struggled to balance her need for autonomy against her desire for love. The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone’s landmark book published in 1970, was inspired in no small part by her lived experience of heterosexual relationships as a site of power and powerlessness.

Lana Dee Povitz is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Middlebury College. Her first book, Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, was published by UNC Press in 2019. Learn more at www.lanadeepovitz.com.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, has been circulated via the Jewish Studies email list, which you can subscribe to at https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/home. If you plan to participate in the workshop, and have not received the paper, please contact Kirsten Collins at kirstenc@uchicago.edu

Please join us at 5pm on Monday, April 15th in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Rachel Katz

PhD, Divinity School, History of Judaism

Arama As Intervention: Anti-(Intellectual) Elitism and Jews as a Separate Species

Despite professed departures from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, most contemporary scholars of medieval Jewish thought continue to deploy their object of study as political shield and remain invested in constructing/imagining medieval Jewish thought as compatible with meritocratic liberalism. They do so even as they know the data suggest otherwise and even as material and political circumstances of both academic Jewish Studies and Jews across the globe have changed drastically. In this article, I attempt to render this political investment apparent in two parts. In the first part, I look at trends in contemporary scholarship in the field: how it talks about its object of study, what sorts of material it tends to focus on, and what material it has not focused on. I argue that contemporary scholarship on medieval Jewish thought aims to depict its object as simultaneously universalist and intellectually elitist. In the second part, I present a (systematically?) neglected yet canonical medieval text, Isaac Arama’s Aqedat Yishaq, as foil to this prevailing scholarly image of medieval Jewish thought. Against the idea(l) of medieval Jewish thought as universalist-cum-intellectualist, Arama couples a critique of intellectual elitism with a comprehensive theory of Jews as separate and superior species.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: arama):Katz_Prooftexts

Please join us at 5pm on Monday, April 1st in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Jesse Noily

MA, Divinity School

“Your Dew is the Dew of Morning”
Rabbinic Eschatology and the Erotics of Resurrection

Despite the theological and social centrality of the belief in bodily resurrection to Jewish life beginning in late antiquity, the precise mechanism of resurrection as represented in the Hebrew Bible was ambiguous enough to allow for much rabbinic speculation. The present paper takes as its subject a specific tradition which explained resurrection principally through an erotic interpretation of Isaiah 26:19: “For Your dew is like the dew of morning [or: light, herbs], You make the earth cast out the spirits of the dead.” Finding exegetical precedent in late antique documents like the Babylonian Talmud and the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, this tradition suggests a euphemistic reading of “dew” [טל ] as the semen of God which serves to impregnate the earth and revive the bodies buried therein. Combining agricultural imagery with a heteroerotic metaphysics, the rabbis who endorsed this reading envisioned the resurrection of the dead as an outcome of God’s passionate romance and copulation with the world.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: eschatology): Noily-Your Dew [Draft 2.25]

Please join us at 5pm on Monday, March 18 in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Ranana Dine

PhD Candidate, Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School

An Obligated Sight:

Vision in Emmanuel Levinas, Mara Benjamin, and Joseph Soloveitchik

Jewish thought is known for its focus on text and textuality, and in some cases, for an antipathy towards the visual and art. In this paper I turn to three seminal authors in Modern Jewish philosophy – Emmanuel Levinas, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Mara Benjamin – to argue that Jewish notions of obligation, a key concept in Jewish philosophy, require a conception of obligated sight. Although these three authors disagree about the nature of Jewish obligation – where it stems from and how it operates – they all agree that obligation is an embodied phenomenological reality of Jewish life. Therefore, they all have articulations of the way sight operates in a world of obligated bodies, even if they are unaware of or ambivalent to the prevalence of vision in their own accounts. The way one sees and what one sees, how one interacts with visual objects and understands visual experiences, are understood and made sense of through a lens of obligation for these thinkers. Considering Jewish vision as obligated vision gives is a powerful insight for doing Jewish ethics, particularly for doing Jewish ethics with visual objects and artwork.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: sight): RDineObligatedSightStandalone-1

Please join us on Monday, February 26th at 5pm via Zoom for a presentation by:

Zachary Taylor

PhD Candidate, Religious Ethics

University of Chicago Divinity School

The Universal and Particular: Spinoza vs. Mendelssohn on the Natural Law and “Ceremonies”

Numerous scholars have commented on how, in his Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn reckons with the Spinozist critique of Judaism articulated in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In the Tractatus, Spinoza calls into question several fundamental aspects of Judaism as interpreted and practiced in his day—for example, the revelatory status of the Hebrew Bible, the nature of God’s covenant with Israel, the point and purpose of ritual practices required by the Mosaic Law (what Spinoza calls caeremoniae, or “ceremonies”), and the traditional authorship of biblical texts. While Jerusalem by no means constitutes a point-by-point response to Spinoza, Mendelssohn clearly has in mind both Spinoza’s fate as an excommunicated Jew and the critique leveled in the Tractatus. In this paper, I will focus on the differences in how Spinoza and Mendelssohn understand the function and relevance of “ceremonies” in Judaism. In particular, I query why, despite both thinkers’ commitment to the metaphysics of natural law, Spinoza’s interpretation of the natural law excludes the possibility of Jewish particularity vis-à-vis “ceremonies,” while Mendelssohn’s interpretation reserves a place within Judaism for what he calls the ceremonial law (Zeremonialgesetz).

I contend that three key points of contrast explain why Spinoza and Mendelssohn hold such different positions on the status of ceremonies despite their shared commitment to natural law metaphysics: (i) their antithetical interpretations of God’s election of Israel; (ii) Mendelssohn’s worry about idolatry compared with Spinoza’s worry about superstition and how ceremonies relate to their respective concerns; and (iii) Mendelssohn’s intersubjective epistemology compared with Spinoza’s individualist one. With these points of contrast in view, we can better understand why Mendelssohn rejects Spinoza’s repudiation of ceremonies and affords them such a central role in Judaism. Concomitantly, this comparative analysis will also accentuate how, despite his commitment to the universality of the natural law, Mendelssohn nevertheless strives to affirm Jewish particularity.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, can be accessed here (password: ceremonies): ZTaylor Jewish Studies Workshop Paper 2024

The Zoom link for the workshop has been sent via email to the Jewish Studies Workshop list.

Please join us on Monday, February 12th at 5pm in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Ido Telem (PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature):

Tasting Revival: Aesthetic Judgement, Critical Authority and Political Thought in David Frishman’s Literary Criticism

In 1905, Hebrew literary critic David Frishman published a tribute to Friedrich Schiller in the paper, commemorating the centennial of the German poet’s death. More than a eulogy, Frishman’s piece also included a scathing admonition of the Jewish reading public, whom Frishman criticized for their diminished interest in Schiller, interpreting this as indicative of a broader decline in Jewish feeling, thinking, and judging—a lost standard of taste. Drawing from the conceptual history of taste in Enlightenment thought and its more recent critiques, I trace how Frishman employed the notion of taste not merely as an allegedly universal human capacity, which he argued the Jewish readership lacked, but also as a means to articulate a distinct Hebrew sensibility, or Hebrew taste. Frishman’s insistence on taste in both these forms, I argue, is fundamental to his aesthetic and political thought, and provides a fresh perspective on debates surrounding aesthetic autonomy in the Hebrew cultural revival.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: frishman): Telem.FrishmanTaste.JSWorkshop

Please join us on Monday, 01/15 at 5pm in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Zalman Rothschild

Bigelow Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago Law School

“Multiculturalism and the Right of Exit”

This article argues that as important as it is to preserve the distinctive identities of insular religious communities, it is equally if not more important to ensure that the participants that make up such communities have a meaningful ability to exit from them should they wish to. The article spotlights several concrete impediments to the “right of exit” in one large insular religious community, the Hasidic community in New York. It lays out not only how internal communal practices—including and most notably the lack of secular education— hamper members’ ability to exit but also how the state and courts contribute to its curtailment.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: exit): rothschild-multiculturalism and the right of exit

Please join us on Monday, 11/27, in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Kirsten Collins

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Divinity School

“The Chastity of Critique: Law, Biopolitics, and Biblical Hermeneutics in Confessions of the Flesh”

Why does Foucault drop the idea of race and turn toward religion in his work on the foundations of the modern state and subject? Drawing “Society Must be Defended” into conversation with Confessions of the Flesh and archival sources, I show how the hermeneutic of the self that Foucault finds in early Christian texts on virginity is premised on a hermeneutics of the text—specifically, a supersessionist figuration of Judaism as a religion of flesh and law. Drawing on J. Kameron Carter among others, I argue that Foucault finds, in his Christian sources, a structure of critique critical to both the maintenance of the state and resistance, and that examining the place of Judaism in Confessions of the Flesh can allow us to trace production of race from religion, and the limits of the critique that we depend on to recognize it.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, can be found here: collins-chastity of critique-JSW-1