Monday, 11/30/2020: Adi Shiran on Maimonides’ Interpretation to the Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart

Please join us for a joint meeting of the Jewish Studies Workshop and the Islamic Studies Workshop, with a presentation by:

Adi Shiran (PhD Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

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“Not All Minds Are Meant To Be Free: The Textual History of Maimonides’ Interpretation to the Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart”

With a response by:
Dr. James Robinson (Professor, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

Monday, November 30, 2020 at 5:30 PM Central (via Zoom)

To join the Zoom meeting, click here

(Meeting ID:  920 1814 3708 / Password: hardheart)

*no paper to be read in advance of the workshop*

Monday, 11/16/2020: Mendel Kranz on Jaques Hassoun and the Politics of the Arab-Jew in Postcolonial France

Please join the Jewish Studies Workshop for a presentation by:

Mendel Kranz (PhD Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

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“Jacques Hassoun and the Politics of the Arab-Jew in Postcolonial France”

With a response by:
Stephanie Kraver (PhD Candidate, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Monday, November 16, 2020 at 5:30 PM Central (via Zoom)

Mendel’s paper, to be read in advance of the session, is available for download below. The password to the document will be emailed to the Jewish Studies Workshop email listserv. If you would like to be added to this listserv, please click the “Subscribe” tab above..

To join the Zoom meeting, click here

(Meeting ID: 998 5631 3068  / Password: hassoun)

Pre-circulated Paper: kranz_JS_workshop

Monday, 10/19/2020: Yiftach Ofek on Gershom Scholem and the Jew as Anti-Bourgeois

Please join the Jewish Studies Workshop for our first event of the 2020-21 academic year, a presentation by:

Yiftach Ofek (PhD Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

“Gershom Scholem: The Jew as Anti-Bourgeois”

With a response by:

Matthew Johnson (PhD Candidate, Germanic Studies, University of Chicago)

Monday, October 19, 2020 at 5:30 PM Central (via Zoom)

Yiftach’s in-progress dissertation chapter, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available below. The password to the document will be emailed to the Jewish Studies Workshop email listserv. If you would like to be added to this listserv, please click the “Subscribe” tab above.

To join the Zoom meeting, click here.

(Meeting ID: 915 0389 6725  / Password: Scholem)

Pre-circulated Paper: Ofek_Yiftach_Scholem

Autumn Schedule: University of Chicago Jewish Studies Workshop

The Jewish Studies Workshop is excited to share our schedule for the autumn quarter! Meetings will occur virtually from 5:30 – 7:00 pm CST on Mondays (**please note the slight change from the time previously announced; meetings will start at 5:30 pm instead of 5 pm).
Advanced copies of papers and Zoom links will be pre-circulated via the Jewish Studies Workshop listserv and made available on our website here. Additionally, if you are interested in presenting at the workshop in the winter or spring quarter or if you would like to be added to our listserv, please email us at barenstein@uchicago.edu or telem@uchicago.edu. We look forward to seeing you soon! 
 
Best,
Ben and Ido
 

Jewish Studies Workshop Schedule Autumn 2020 

October 19: Gershom Scholem and The Problem of Bourgeois Society (Working Title)

Yiftach Ofek (PhD Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

 

November 2: Nostalgia for the British Mandate in Contemporary Israeli Culture

Chen Bar-Itzhak (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford University)

 

November 16: Jaques Hassoun and the Politics of the Arab-Jew in Postcolonial France 

Mendel Kranz (PhD Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

 

November 30, Joint Session with the Islamic Studies Workshop:  Not All Minds Are Meant To Be Free: The Textual History of Maimonides’ Interpretation to the Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart

Adi Shiran (PhD Student, Divinity School, University of Chicago)

 

Tuesday, 5/26/20: Anna Band on the representation of the Pension in the works of Shimoni, Bergelson, and Agnon

Please join the Jewish Studies Workshop for our final event of the 2019-20 academic year, a presentation by

Anna Band (PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago)

“At Home in Berlin? The Representation of the Pension in Modern Jewish Literature”

Tuesday, May 26, 2020 at 5:00 PM Central (via Zoom)

Anna’s in-progress dissertation chapter, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available on this website. The password to the document will be emailed to the Jewish Studies Workshop email listserv. If you would like to be added to this listserv, please click the “Subscribe” tab above.

To join the Zoom meeting, click here.

(Meeting ID: 991 2256 5918  / Password: 672776)

 

 

Tuesday, 5/19/20: A discussion of Lévinas’s talmudic readings with Prof. Andrew Bush (Vassar)

The Jewish Studies Workshop is delighted to (virtually) host

 Andrew K. Bush (Professor, Department of Hispanic Studies and Program in Jewish Studies, Vassar College)

to lead a discussion of two talmudic lectures by Emmanuel Lévinas.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020, 5:00 PM Central Time, via Zoom

The readings will be posted to this website. Note that this is a seminar-style event, not a lecture, so participants should read the texts in advance. The Zoom link will be emailed to the Jewish Studies Workshop listserv; to be added to the listserv, please visit the “Subscribe” tab of this website.

Andrew K. Bush is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Jewish Studies at Vassar College. He joined the Vassar faculty in 1983 after receiving his PhD in comparative literature from Yale University. At Vassar, he helped design the Jewish Studies Program, for which he was the first director, and has taught in various interdisciplinary programs including American Studies and Urban Studies. He teaches courses on Peninsular literature, Jewish textuality, the Holocaust, and German-Jewish culture, among numerous other topics, and he has served as director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Spain. Currently, Prof. Bush is a co-editor of the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” book series from Rutgers University Press, in which he published Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction in 2013. His other publications include The Routes of Modernity: Spanish-American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Associated University Presses, 2002).

Below, we have included a note from Prof. Bush to introduce the readings and discussion.

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First, I am no Talmudist.  Lévinas himself typically began his Talmudic lessons at the annual conferences of French Jewish intellectuals by saying that it gave him pause to speak to an audience in which some were true scholars of the Talmud—how much more so, I.   But neither need one be a Kabbalist to study Scholem.  Lévinas, too, is an exemplary figure for a theory of Jewish Studies in his engagement with and transformation of what he calls “the Jewish Reading of Scriptures” in another of his Talmudic lessons (“De la lecture juive des Écritures,” in L’au-delà du verset).

In “The Youth of Israel,” Lévinas is more explicit than usual in articulating his understanding of the hermeneutic underpinnings of Talmudic commentary and also in situating the philosophical cast of his own approach in relation to that tradition.   The lecture also introduces some of Lévinas’ consistent philosophical issues, above all, his critique of ontology in favor of ethics (here, under his typically idiosyncratic heading of “disinterestedness”), hence, of the freedom of the self of Western politics in favor of covenantal responsibility.

I choose “Cities of Refuge” as a way of focusing on the relationship between teachers and students as the embodiment of the hermeneutic process of continuation (perhaps what Scholem would call Kabbalah, reception, and Derrida hospitality, which he himself receives from Lévinas and transforms).  The notion of refuge may well have changed for most of us, now that it is the common experience of the quarantine, which makes “Cities of Refuge” pertinent in a new way.  I am aware that the same conditions also make it hard to continue in any sense—that is to find the material and mental space to read, attend, think clearly about anything other than how to disinfect the groceries—so I could limit the study of “Cities of Refuge” to just a few of its pages, focused specifically on the student-teacher relationship: sections 4, 5 and 10 (pp. 40-43 and 46-48, in the English version), which are keyed to paragraphs 1-2, 3-4, and 7 in the extract from the Talmud distributed by Lévinas on the occasion and cited in full at the beginning of the text.

One possible link between the two Talmudic lessons would be to think of the youthfulness of youth as the student-ness of the student, at any age.  Another possibility would be to seek what the Talmudic rabbis call a harmonizing verse—in this case, American Jewish poet Philip Levine’s “What Work Is.”  It will appear, I think, to be not only different in kind, but outside the scope of Lévinas’ concerns, though quite close to us in its representation of unemployment.  The task, then, is to see if we can stretch the tent pegs far enough to invite Levine in: “We may be sure that they are being extended through us,” writes Franz Rosenzweig, “for could anything be allowed to remain outside permanently?”

 

 

Tuesday 5/5: Ben Arenstein on place and cosmopolitanism in Yitzhak Shami

Please join the Jewish Studies Workshop for a presentation by

Ben Arenstein, PhD Student in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago:

“Notions of Place and Cosmopolitanism in Yitzhak Shami’s Nemakath HaAvoth

Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 5:00 PM Central (via Zoom)

Ben’s paper should be read in advance of the workshop, and is available below. The password to the document has been emailed to the Jewish Studies Workshop listserv, and the link to the Zoom meeting will be emailed to the same listserv prior to the workshop. If you would like to be added to this listserv, please click the “Subscribe” tab above.