MONDAY 03/18: Ranana Dine on Vision in Jewish Thought

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

MONDAY 03/04: Andrew Atwell on Moral Imagination and National-Religious Hesed

Please join us at 5pm on Monday, March 4th, in Swift 201, for a presentation by:
Andrew Atwell
PhD Candidate, Divinity and Anthropology, University of Chicago

Resuscitating Torah: “Judaization,” Moral Imagination, and National-Religious hesed in Central Israel
In the wake of an explosion of violence in Lod in May 2021, the city’s “Torah seed” group has come under increasing attention and criticism within and beyond Israel/Palestine. While this national-religious Israeli Jewish activist group has typically been analyzed in terms of political ideology, religious coercion, and gentrification, such frameworks elide the group’s emphasis on social uplift and integration as an ethical project rooted in an expansive hesed (charity, loving-kindness, volunteering, covenantal faithfulness). Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, in this paper I focus on a central aspect of the group’s hesed: “strengthening Jewish identity.” These efforts have been criticized as attempts at “Judaization” and “religionization.” However, rather than seeing such interventions as will to power masked by claims of ethicality, I take the group’s self-characterization seriously, but argue that such efforts act from a moral imagination that is nonetheless shaped by political inclinations, histories, and relations of power. I suggest that while the central role of national-religious publics in ongoing upheavals in Israel’s theopolitical landscape is often read in terms of political ideology, religious coercion, and histories of racism, adequate explanation of the diverse attachments driving these upheavals also requires sustained attention to the moral imagination.
The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, is available here (password: hesed): Andrew Katzenstein Atwell – Resuscitating Torah – AJS 2023

MONDAY 02/26: Zachary Taylor on Spinoza and Mendelssohn

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.

MONDAY, 2/12: Ido Telem on David Frishman

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

 

WEDNESDAY, 01/31: Ofer Ashkenazi on Photography and Migration

Dear colleagues,
Please join us this Wednesday, January 31st, at 4pm or a joint session of Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe and the Jewish Studies Workshop. We will be discussing an article by Ofer Ashkenazi (Associate Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem):
“Home as a Symbol of Migration: The Optimistic Melancholy of the Meyer Family’s Photo Album”
Professor Leora Auslander (Associate Chair, Department of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity, and Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization in the College and the Departments of Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity and History) will give a response.
Please reach out to rceb@uchicago.edu,  tgoldsmith@uchicago.edu or kirstenc@uchicago.edu with any questions. We look forward to seeing you there!

MONDAY 01/22, 5pm: Zalman Rothschild on Hasidic Communities and Secularism

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

MONDAY 11/27, 5pm: Kirsten Collins on Judaism and Virginity in Foucault

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

Monday, 11/13, 5pm: Seth Joachim, “Ethical Icarus”

Please join us on Monday, 11/13/2023, at 5pm in Swift 201 for a presentation by:

Seth Joachim

MA, University of Chicago Divinity School

“Ethical Icarus? Levinas Through the Eyes of Teachers”

At first glance, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics may appear superficially incoherent with human nature. Even as an idealized account of how humans ought to act, the great demand of the Other in Levinas’s ethics would seem to suggest that it would be impossible to ignore the suffering of others. And yet, everyday anecdotal experience demonstrates the ease with which people walk past the basic call to help from others on the street. Another reading might suggest that the way gazes are averted from those in pain suggests just how earnestly individuals attempt to avoid the exact relation to which Levinas’s ethics refers. In contrast, teachers are an ideal case to demonstrate how certain individuals choose to commit the support of others. Through teachers as a test case, this paper asserts the continued relevance of Levinas’s ethics while also suggesting the role of rational choices to impact one’s engagement with others.

The paper, to be read in advance of the workshop, can be found here: Joachim (password: levinas)

Monday, 10/30/2023, 5pm: Raphael Magarik, “Paradise Circumcised: How Milton Became Secular”

Please join us at 5pm on Monday, October 30th in Swift 201 and via zoom for a presentation and discussion by guest speaker:
 Raphael Magarik
Assistant Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago
“Paradise Circumcised: How Milton Became Secular”
salkinson.jpg
Isaac Salkinson, whose 1871 Vayegaresh et Haʾadam is the first translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost into Hebrew, is a curious character: a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary in Pressburg and Vienna, who also made major contributions to Hebrew letters, translating not only Milton and the New Testament, but also (for the first time) two plays of Shakespeare. I use Salkinson’s translation as a test case for the theoretical claim, advanced by Gil Anijdar, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin inter alia, that modern secularization recapitulates Christian supersession. Paying close attention to the shibbutsim (allusive phrases) that distinguish the maskilic style of his translation, I argue that Salkinson secularizes both Milton and the canon of classical Jewish texts, often foregrounding their discontinuity and conflict. Debates over the nature of the secular have often paid insufficient attention to indispensable literary questions of figuration, metaphor, and allusion. The essay also forms part of a broader project about how, from the second half of the nineteenth century on, re-imagining Milton as somehow “Jewish” became a crucial tool of modernizing the great English poet, freeing him from his constraints of time and place and ensuring him a status as an icon of secular world literature.
The paper, to be read in advance, can be found here: Magarik
The password has been emailed to the workshop list.

Monday 10/16/2023: Ranana Dine on Photographic Representation of Jewish Death

Link

Photograph by Dan Balilty for “How Many Funerals Will Come Out of This One,” in The New York Times, February 17th, 2021.

 

Ranana Dine

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Divinity School

Capturing Corpses: The Advent of Photography and Depicting Jewish Death”

 Photography and death have had a significant relation ever since the invention of the technology in the mid-19th century. Post-mortem photography was used to construct the “good death” for Christians in the Victorian era and served as a tool for memory. Within Jewish history, however, photography of the dead has mostly meant to signify Jewish suffering. In some cases the act of photographing the Jewish dead body itself has been a form of violence, working to construct the Jewish “bad death.” Although death photography serves a purpose – it can inform the viewer of something significant and even incite moral outrage and action – we should ask what story these photographs construct. Photography of Jewish corpses often tell a narrow story of a bad death or even create that bad death itself. We should consider turning to other images of Jewish death that can tell a more complete story of relationality,community, and care in the face of death.

Precirculated paper: Dine