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