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This volume is a multidisciplinary discussion of the possibility of Jewish critique, addressing the intersection of Jewish Studies and the critical paradigms of feminism, postcolonialism, and postsecularism in this contemporary moment of crisis. Rather than focusing exclusively on a critique of Jewish Studies as a field, the volume explores the tensions between Jewishness and dominant modes of critique. In particular, the volume traces how these dominant modes at times reproduce supersessionist and progress-oriented perspectives, which foreclose possibilities for critique presented by non-linear temporality, only partially representable pasts, and other critical vectors. The contributors describe unexpected resonances between Mizrahi critique and Black thought, between the Palestinian and Jewish questions, and between Jewish lived experience and queer feminist disruptions of traditionalist continuity and cohesion, among others.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Staying With the Storm: Jewish Critique in a Fragmented World.- Part I. A Jewish Episteme?.- 2. Angelos Novus, a Midrash: Critical Jewish Studies and the University to Come.- 3. Broken Names: Sonofragmentary Reflections on the Cairo Geniza.- 4. Rouminance (with a waw).- 5. Reonsidering Jewish Feminism s Political Theology: The Struggle at the Western Wall, a Visual Perspective.- Part II. Jewish Difference in Relation.- 6. The Angel of OTD History.- 7. The Diaspora Politics of Memory: What the Storm Provides.- 8. Angels and Lost Overcoats: Letting Go of Certitude with Christa Wolf.- 9. You Are Not the Same: Primo Levi's Figures of Hybridity.- 10. Society Must Be Upended: Judaism, Race, Revolution.- Part III. Jewish Apocalypses.- 11. Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question.- 12.Israeli Ashkenazi Identity and Mizrahi Critique: A Du Boisian Reading.- 13. Other Angels/Planetary Conversions.
About the author
Re’ee Hagay is an interdisciplinary scholar of sound, space, and the formation of difference in Jewish and global South contexts. He is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches in the departments of Anthropology and Jewish Studies.
Itamar Haritan is an anthropologist of national identity, intergenerational kinship and memory, focusing on alternative genealogical imaginations in Israeli society. He is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University’s Anthropology Department.
Summary
This volume is a multidisciplinary discussion of the possibility of Jewish critique, addressing the intersection of Jewish Studies and the critical paradigms of feminism, postcolonialism, and postsecularism in this contemporary moment of crisis. Rather than focusing exclusively on a critique of Jewish Studies as a field, the volume explores the tensions between Jewishness and dominant modes of critique. In particular, the volume traces how these dominant modes at times reproduce supersessionist and progress-oriented perspectives, which foreclose possibilities for critique presented by non-linear temporality, only partially representable pasts, and other critical vectors. The contributors describe unexpected resonances between Mizrahi critique and Black thought, between the Palestinian and Jewish questions, and between Jewish lived experience and queer feminist disruptions of traditionalist continuity and cohesion, among others.
