That Old-Time Religion

Posted on July 11, 2021 by Luke Ford

Elliot R. Wolfson writes in 2010 about David Gelernter’s 2009 book, Judaism: A Way of Being:

* Gelernter ascribes to Orthodoxy an air of authenticity, implying that all other denominations are weaker or compromised versions of the “real” thing. But it is not clear to me that this assumption can be justified either by rational argument or by appeal to historical precedent. Orthodoxy, whether ultra or modern, is itself a sociological taxonomy that cannot be assessed in isolation from the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist denominations. The depiction of Orthodoxy as Judaism “at full strength” and “straight up” naïvely presumes the prejudice that the Orthodox community is the most legitimate instantiation of the tradition. More importantly, Gelernter’s language reflects an uncritical view regarding Orthodoxy’s ahistorical perspective on the historical development of its own tenets and rituals.

* I also concede Gelernter’s point that Judaism is, first and foremost, a way of being in the world. But this is hardly a difficult argument with which to concur. It is rather conventional to insist that, traditionally speaking, religious praxis, and not theological or philosophical dogma, has been the ultimate ground of Jewish piety and devotion. At most, Gelernter is to be given credit for delivering this old idea in a new bottle, namely by placing the emphasis on the visual dimension of Judaism and by understanding thought itself to be a process of envisioning. To apprehend the existential aspect of Judaism, in other words, one must learn how to see, and the author is an excellent guide on the visual journey into the rhythms of Orthodox ceremonial life.

* The “this-worldliness” of Judaism needs to be counter-balanced by its otherworldliness (which at times has even fostered an ascetic renunciation of the carnal on the part of pietists and mystics), just as the otherworldliness of Christianity and Islam needs to be counter-balanced by their this-worldliness (expressed in sociopolitical terms by the theocratic desire to build a kingdom of God on earth that will mimic the celestial realm).

* Gelernter is entirely correct to begin his analysis with the theme of separation. There is no question, as practitioners and scholars have long noted, that Jewish identity (sociologically, anthropologically, psychologically, and theologically) is determined by a strong sense of difference vis-à -vis other nations. Indeed, the biblical term for a member of the Hebrew nation is ivri, one who has come from the “other side” of the Euphrates, a geographical demarcation that eventually assumed metaphysical import in that it marked the Jew as the consummate Other. The concept of holiness and the “unifying idea” of Jewish ritual law likewise are closely linked to the idea of separation.

* What Gelernter has not dealt with are the more thorny implications of this dimension of Judaism. Predictably, he notes that “Judaism called on Jews to be separate,” and “anti-Semitic neighbors have often forced them to be separate”; consequently, we can think of the separation between Jew and Gentile as a “collaborative effort.” But there is no serious grappling here with the dark shadows of this separation, such as the expressions of a deeply negative view of the Gentile in some traditional Jewish sources, including rabbinic and kabbalistic literature. …But no mention is made of the fact that the representation of the Gentile in the same zoharic Kabbala—as I have demonstrated in Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (2006)—is the most acerbic in all of Jewish literature. There it is said repeatedly that the soul of the Jew derives from the holy side of the divine—in this sense, the word adam is attributed paradigmatically to the Jew alone—while the soul of the Gentile derives from the unholy side of the demonic.

…the skewed depiction of the whole of the tradition that results from an unwillingness to tackle some of the more problematic consequences of the Jewish emphasis on isolation and separateness. The aforementioned perspective in zoharic homilies has had an enormous impact on subsequent rabbinic authors and their often deplorable representation of the non-Jew.

* Even if for most of their history Jews did not have the means to execute physical violence against Christians in a manner comparable to how Christians treated Jews, the use of texts (liturgical, exegetical, speculative, and polemical) to mount a sharp attack on Christianity is well documented, at times reaching a feverish pitch in the portrayal of Esau as the evil twin brother of Jacob, and Edom as the demonic counterpart to Israel.

* At the conclusion of the chapter on perfect asymmetry, Gelernter grants that one cannot deny that in the biblical and rabbinic milieu, “men dominated women physically, legally, and economically.” Furthermore, no one can refute that the “public face” of Orthodox Judaism is male, and hence “those who believe that equal treatment for women demands that men and women be interchangeable will find that Orthodox Judaism falls short in many other ways.” After making this concession, however, he pulls back and offers what I find to be a rather astonishing claim: “Yet those who prefer tolerance to intolerance will find it easy to acquit normative Judaism of antiwoman bias. The role women play in Judaism’s daily life is too central and too charged with religious and poetic meaning to allow such a charge to stick.” To render the reluctance to accept the gender hierarchy as intolerant is neither prudent nor credible; in fact, it may itself smack of intolerance. The subsequent appeal to the survival of Judaism as a religious system in order to protect it against criticism is not a particularly resilient or astute tactic. Survival as such is not proof of moral or religious rectitude.

Posted in Orthodoxy | Comments Off on That Old-Time Religion

The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship

Posted on July 11, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2014 book by Aaron W. Hughes:

* In 2007 I published a slim and what I hoped would be a provocative volume entitled Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline. This work functioned as a genealogical and analytic exploration of the study of the study of Islam. What, for example, are the various assumptions, ideological agendas, and political implications involved in those who have studied and continue to study Islam professionally? These manifold processes, I argued, are what ultimately make the discipline—its written and unwritten rules—possible. Russell McCutcheon, the editor of the series in which that book appeared, encouraged me at the time to try to do something similar for Jewish studies, my other and primary disciplinary home. His exposure to Jewish studies had been primarily negative, thinking—not incorrectly—that Jewish studies tended to be peopled largely by Jews who studied their own religious tradition in a rather self-congratulatory and apologetic manner. The result, according to him,
is that Jewish studies has largely established itself as a fortified ethnic enclave within larger departments of religious studies, becoming, as it were, a problematic subfield within a larger and equally problematic discipline.

* I recall being early for a panel at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) and finding myself part of a conversation in which the panelists and some audience members—all roughly my own age—reminisced about the same Jewish summer camp they used to go to—their shared songs, counselors, and so on. Having grown up in a non-Jewish environment, I felt uncomfortable and unable (and unwilling) to enter their conversation of “Jewish geography” (i.e., who knows whom or is related to whom). Several months later, I was having lunch with a friend and fellow non-Muslim Islamicist, and for some reason, our conversation turned to whether he had ever thought of moving institutions. He informed me that he had, but that he now worried that Islamic studies was becoming too much like Jewish studies in the sense that soon no one who was not a Muslim would be wanted to teach Islamic studies.

* The history of the academic study of religion… is predicated on a set of largely Western and Christocentric categories that are subsequently retrofitted onto other cultures and earlier times with the express intent of carving out, examining, and describing a set of world “religions”. Today, such categories are largely employed for the sake of articulating a set of vague similarities (e.g., prayer, belief, spirituality) between various religions with an eye toward some form of liberal Protestant ecumenicism. As others have well shown, this ecumenicism is often predicated on the claim that religious experience is somehow sui generis or unique and that differences between religions are based on the assumption that “the political,” “the cultural,” or “the ideological” impinges upon that which is perceived to be an almost ubiquitous access to the so-called “spiritual”.

* This assumption unfortunately discourages much interdisciplinary work. If religionists start from the assumption that religion is that which informs all other aspects of human creativity, there becomes no good reason to examine this creativity from other disciplinary perspectives.

* This speculation about religion is perhaps best on display in a recent popular book by Stephen Prothero entitled God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter (2010). It is important not to assume—as Prothero does, as indeed so many in the discipline do—that a specific religion is
tantamount to a culture’s, for lack of a better term, épistémè. In other words, we cannot assume that if we read thirty-five pages on Judaism or Confucianism and then find ourselves at a later date in Jerusalem or Shanghai we will somehow become magically equipped to understand our foreign surroundings. Religion does not tell us about
or help us understand culture (although interestingly understanding culture does provide us with the tools to understand “religion”). In like manner, religion does not tell us about or help us understand local political issues (again, though, the political and the ideological frequently give us insight into the so-called “religious”).

So what does religion tell us about? The study of religion is, I maintain, an exercise in falsity. It means extracting one cultural or social formation from an intricate and conjoined matrix and then labeling it “religion.” This “religion” is subsequently held up as the essence of the people from whom it was extracted. We should also keep in mind that most languages do not even have the word for religion and that this further adds to the falsity of the endeavor.

* over 95 percent of those who teach Jewish studies are ethnically Jewish. This is a huge number and, I would argue, is unparalleled in other fields and areas within the larger discipline of religious studies. I doubt, however, that such numbers are aberrant for other ethnic or area studies.

* The majority of scholars who study Buddhism or Islam, for example, are neither Buddhist nor Muslim.

* The tension between showing Jews to be part of and “influenced” by the larger cultures in which they dwelt and the impulse to make Jews sui generis is one that…runs throughout much of the scholarship on Jews and Judaism.

* In 1996 there erupted a controversy at Queens College in the City University of New York (CUNY). The dean of the college had just appointed Thomas Bird, a Russian and Yiddish literature professor, as the head of the interdisciplinary Jewish studies program. Although Bird was a scholar of Yiddish language and culture, and a longtime activist on behalf of Soviet Jews, he was not Jewish. Samuel Heilman, Bird’s colleague and an Orthodox Jew, objected to his appointment. He reasoned that because Bird was not Jewish, did not know Hebrew (even though he knew Yiddish), and had not published articles in mainstream Jewish studies journals, he was unqualified to direct the Jewish studies program (Greenberg 1996). Little over two weeks into his new and now highly contentious position, Bird resigned, citing what he called “primitive religious bigotry.” He claimed that “it is impossible not to conclude that the attempt to trash my academic record and standing in the community through insinuation and omission is anything other than a fig leaf for objections to my being a gentile” (Greenberg 1996).

At the height of the controversy, just after Bird had resigned his position, Heilman, the principle accuser, published a short essay entitled “Who Should Direct Jewish Studies at the University?” Therein he mentioned that he was less interested in whether or not Bird was Jewish than the fact that he did not have a PhD (although an associate professor, he was still a doctoral candidate at Princeton). In particular, Heilman writes, “If the university singles out Jewish Studies and appoints a person to head it who does not come from that ethnic group, at a time when all its other ethnic studies programs are headed by members of those ethnic groups, who does not have the same high academic qualifications as those in other programs, and when the administration chooses not to appoint as Jewish Studies director one of the many professors on campus who hold the highest academic degrees and have distinguished reputations and records in Jewish Studies, and read and understand Hebrew in favor of someone who does not, then there ought to be some compelling reason for that decision.”

This is a strange claim. Since other area studies at his university happen to have directors or chairs that are the same ethnicity, gender, or color as the administrative unit they lead, Heilman thinks that Jewish studies should be no different. If others are engaged in identity politics, he reasons, so, too, must Jewish studies. Heilman also faults Bird for the fact that he does not know Hebrew and, in so doing, makes the problematic assertion that Hebrew somehow represents the authentic Jewish language. Bird’s lack of knowledge in Hebrew—at least in Heilman’s worldview—seems to disqualify him from administering a program in Jewish studies. This creates two problems. First, would Heilman have put up such linguistic objections if Bird was Jewish? That is, would Heilman object to a Jewish director of Jewish studies who did not know Hebrew? Second, and relatedly, Heilman
ignores the fact that Jews throughout their long and diverse history have not only spoken but also articulated Judaism using Greek, Aramaic, Arabic, and countless European vernaculars. The result is that all these languages could just as easily be regarded as “Jewish” languages (Hughes 2012). Heilman, in other words, is making a number of normative judgments that should make us uncomfortable: not only does he attempt to articulate what is authentically “Jewish” and “not-Jewish,” but he engages in a slippery argument that those most qualified to direct (and presumably teach) Jewish studies are Jews. He nowhere says, however, what kind of Jews. Are Reform Jews better than secular ones? Does this, then, make Conservative Jews better than Reform? Or, are Orthodox (or, even, ultra-Orthodox) the most qualified because they are somehow deemed the most “authentic”?

Although in principle he states that his objection is with Bird’s academic credentials, it soon becomes evident that this is not all that Heilman has in mind. For, in addition to the above statement, he claims that Jewish studies faculty “can and do also serve as role models for students and the larger Jewish community, embodying what it means to take Jewish life and culture seriously.” Presumably by this latter comment—that a director of Jewish studies needs to “take Jewish life and culture seriously”—Heilman means that one can only do this by being Jewish and that a non-Jew cannot presumably undertake such activity or at least do so with any degree of competence. Again, this creates a host of uncomfortable distinctions: does a Jew who is shomer shabbas (i.e., follow all the legal restrictions of the Sabbath), for example, take Judaism more “seriously” than a Jew who does not? The repercussions of such statements are problematic on a number of levels.

Whether he knows it or not, Heilman, trained as a sociologist, invokes a well-worn trope in religious studies, that of taking Judaism (or, religion in general) “seriously.” This trope—and all of the unchecked assumptions that it implies—forms the subject matter of this chapter. What Heilman clearly verbalizes, a position that I have heard articulated in numerous other settings, is that non-Jews should not or cannot study Jews or Judaism.

* Since the academic study of religion purports, according to some, to study that which is most dear and precious to people (i.e., their “inner” and “spiritual” lives), there exists the dangerous assumption that only those who have had the same kind of “inner experiences” are uniquely qualified to study and write about the religion in question.

Such an assumption, however, is predicated on a number of nebulous concepts that are impossible to verify or subject to any sort of intellectual scrutiny. What, for example, is an “inner experience”? Even if we could ascertain what it is, who would be in a position to adjudicate what counts as an authentic “inner experience” and what counts as an inauthentic one? The answer to questions such as these is political and ideological, not natural or scientific. Such “experiences,” moreover, are often assumed to be irreducible as opposed to culturally or ideologically constructed. This means that religion in general—or religions (e.g., Judaism) in particular—is assumed to possess an essence that cannot be reduced to other material or historical forces. …[M]any have no qualms about taking this manufactured and ideologically charged concept of experience and then claiming that it exists naturally in the world.

* Not only has [David] Gelernter defined Judaism’s essence as that which corresponds to Orthodoxy, not surprisingly his own denominational commitment, but he goes on to project its essence into the spiritual core of Western civilization. In an appendix entitled “What Makes Judaism the Most Important Intellectual Development in Western History?” he writes that Judaism “[h]as given moral and spiritual direction to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim society, and indirectly to the modern and postmodern worlds. But not only that. Judaism formed our idea of God and man, of sanctity, justice, and love: love of God, family, nation, and mankind. But not only that. Judaism created the ideal of congregational worship that made the church and the mosque possible. But not only that. Much of the modern liberal state grew out of Judaism by way of American Puritans, neo-Puritans, and quasi-Puritans who revered the Hebrew Bible and pondered it constantly.”

This essence of Judaism, moving effortlessly throughout human history, is the origin of virtually everything that we are supposed to hold dear in the modern world. No mention is made that such ideas took shape through a synergy of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” ideas—indeed to such an extent that it is probably impossible to pull them apart and
decipher which is which. Many of the pieties and platitudes that we find in works such as Gelernter’s are more appropriate for the synagogue than the academy. For it is ultimately in the former that matters such as identity creation and maintenance are never questioned, but assumed as given, something handed down from generation to
generation.

Identity politics with a chaser of neo-conservativism (to keep Gelernter’s alcoholic metaphor) will only end badly for Jewish studies. Once one claims to know the essence of a tradition, what it is and what it is not, inquiry gives way to apologetics, and scholarship gives way to ideology.

Gelernter’s work is not a disinterested or objective work of scholarship, even though the Yale University Press imprimatur may make it appear otherwise. Rather, it is a highly partisan account of Judaism based on and funded by very interested constituents outside of the academy. Perhaps if a Jewish theological press had published it, I might not take it to task in the manner that I have here. However, the fact that it is written by a nonexpert and financed by a neoconservative philanthropist seeking to make inroads for right wing causes in Israel and in Jewish studies in America potentially sets a very dangerous precedent.

Although Gelernter’s argument is different from the likes of Heilman, it nonetheless emerges from the same privileged sphere. There is an essence to Judaism that only Jews are able to access owing to their birthright or commitment to a particular denomination. Those outside the privileged sphere—non-Jews, non-Orthodox—have no or
little existential access to it. This, I submit, is all that is wrong with Jewish studies at this particular moment. And unless Jewish studies confronts this, it risks being relegated to the back room of area studies and becoming confined to the dark domain of identity politics.

* There is no such thing as “true” Jewishness, just as there cannot be any such thing as “true” Muslimness, “true” Christianness, or any other such entity. Jewishness, like any other identity formation, is continually imagined (and reimagined), invented (and reinvented), and produced (and reproduced).

* The central question in the academic study of religion is how to understand properly the various texts, actions, behaviors, rituals, and so on that practitioners describe as “religious.” The professional religionist is presented with a great deal of religious “data” and must decide how to explain them, interpret them, and ultimately classify them.

This gives way to a fairly vociferous debate known as the “insider/outsider problem.” An insider approach—alternatively called an emic approach—is one that tries to understand religion from the perspective of religious practitioners. It involves looking at religious texts and religious rituals in order to find out the significance of these for practitioners and subsequently describes their contents and performances to others. Many who privilege the insider perspective believe that there is something unique about religion and religious experience that can never be reduced to something else (e.g., culture, society, politics) or explained away. The insider approach represents, in sum, the effort to understand religious thought and behavior primarily from the point
of view of religious persons.

The outsider perspective—or alternatively, the etic approach—is one that refuses to explain religion using the categories and terms of reference that religious people use. As such, it attempts to import categories from the outside in an attempt to interpret or explain religious data. This can be reductionist; witness Sigmund Freud’s desire to “reduce” religion to psychological function and explain it using the language of psychology or Emile Durkheim’s reduction of religion to social processes. Increasingly, such approaches tend to question the very appropriateness of the term “religion,” preferring instead to see this term as a “Western” imposition. Rather than regard religion as something internal to the individual, there is a preference to regard religion as a human creation, the site of various contestations and collaborations over ideas and terms that have been signified as divine or transcendent.

* Is [Jewish studies] an advocacy unit on campus—functioning as a resource for Jewish students, rallying support for Israel, and addressing anti-Semitism if and when it rears its ugly head? Or is it but one among many academic disciplines, in which case the scholar of Jewish data maintains an objective distance from his or her data and seeks to find engaged and engaging conversation partners with fellow academics in cognate disciplines.

* The debate between Heilman and Bird also reveals the tensions over what the goal of Jewish studies ought to be. Is it, as many believe, to show the Jewish contribution to Western civilization? The institution in which I used to teach (SUNY, Buffalo), for example, defines its mandate as “focused on teaching and scholarship related to the contributions of the Jewish tradition in the development of Western civilization.” However, many others prefer to argue that we can never articulate “Jewish” ideas, let alone “Jewish” contributions, because such ideas always respond to and are in conversation with the “non-Jewish” civilizations in which Jews live.

* …the “Jewish Question” (Ger: “Judenfrage”; Fr: “la Question juive”) was the name given to describe the negative attitude toward the apparent and persistent singularity of the Jews as a people against the background of rising political nationalisms. Many pamphlets, treatises, and monographs were put forth to address this “Jewish Question” with an eye toward solving it. Such solutions included assimilation, emancipation, national sovereignty, deportation, and most severe of all, ultimate extermination.

* …religious studies has been constructed largely by means of excluding those religious forms that threaten the order and stability of Protestantism: Judaism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Pentecostalism, among others, which have largely become “relegated to the world of sects, cults, fundamentalisms, popular piety, ritualism, magic, primitive religion, millennialism, anything but “religion”.

* Unlike the world of nature, which functions as the locus of the sacred, [Mircea] Eliade argues that the city exacerbates the dislocation of modernity. Eliade, thus, seems to be working with the traditional romantic stereotype that argues that cities are places of sin, corruption, and greed; whereas it is only in the countryside that one encounters authentic forms of religious expression (Orsi 1999, 3–13). Implicit here is the assumption that city life is frantic, frenetic and unstable, a place of moral depravity where different religions and ethnic groups bump against one another and mix and mingle. The result is that city life is traditionally characterized as a place of alienation, of strangeness, and of inauthenticity. Rural life, on the other hand, is associated with
simplicity and a purity of place, where concepts such as multiculturalism and complex religious forms are absent. Rural life and peasant religion is an intersection of wholeness and of authenticity.

Although many claim that nothing anti-Semitic can be found in Eliade’s postwar writings, it seems quite clear that his tidy distinctions between the sacrality of religion and the profanity of history, and between rural simplicity or authenticity and urban complexity can easily be read in such a manner that problematizes Jews and Judaism. Judaism, for example, is traditionally held up as the historical religion par excellence because it conceives of God as an actor in history. Moreover, as mentioned above, Jews were notorious for their urban existence in Europe. Also telling is the fact that Eliade, for the most part, largely ignored postbiblical forms of Judaism.

* From its origins in the nineteenth century, the academic study of Judaism has largely been bound up with the apologetical desire to show that Jews and Judaism were normal. From its inception, we see that the study of Judaism has not necessarily been an academic enterprise, but primarily an existential and a political one. This is significant because, prior to the application of academic approaches to Judaism, both rabbinic chosenness and Christian supersessionism had tended, albeit for different reasons, to deny Judaism a history. Whereas the former located Judaism’s superiority in a set of timeless and sacred texts (e.g., Bible, Talmud), the latter sought to show its inferiority with the claim that after the advent of Jesus, Jews possessed neither a history nor a territory. Land, power, and providence—it is important to remember—were intimately connected to one another: to lack one was necessarily to lack the others. The fact that Jews possessed neither a home nor any political or other power could be and was connected to the later anti-Semitic notion that Jewish existence was parasitic, needing other nations and languages to sustain it. Not surprisingly, then, history, and its use of rhetoric and
methods, became an important tool for both those who wanted to claim that Jews did indeed possess a history (and, thus, were normal) and for those who wanted to deny such claims.

Those Jewish thinkers responsible for this new understanding of Judaism, writes Leora Batnitsky, did not so much secularize Judaism as redefine the tradition as a religion (2011, 36). That is, the individuals to be discussed below sought to mold Judaism into a set of claims that could easily fit within the modern, Protestant category of
religion. …The nineteenth century was a time, then, in which Jewish scholars/reformers sought to make Jews normal by transforming Judaism into a religion in this Protestant and European sense of the term.

* [The] modern discipline of history (Geschichte) is largely the invention of the nineteenth century German university. …[They] used history as a way to imagine and shape national identity. …The primary social function of the university was connected to the rise of nationalism and the creation of a class of intellectuals to disseminate nationalist ideology.

* History accordingly played a key role in both imagining and forging together a national community. Imagined by professional scholars in the nineteenth century, historical research was not simply a form of cold or disinterested research (even though this is precisely how it was often portrayed), but a quest for national glory and self-recognition. This often involved locating a pristine past that could function as the vehicle for contemporary regeneration.

The “discovery” of Jewish history, perhaps not surprising given the fact that Jews adopted the theoretical methods and models produced by the likes of Herder and Fichte, coincided with the “discovery” of the histories and national identities of various European states. Much like their non-Jewish colleagues were doing for the glory of their own nations, Jewish intellectuals sought to create and forge an identity for Jews using the tools that the discipline of history provided them. This meant trying to create a Jewish Volk independent of rabbinic claims that Jews existed outside of history owing to their chosenness and anti-Semitic claims to deny such a history because Jews lacked a state of their own. The rise of Jewish history was, in many ways, an apologetical enterprise, one that both responded to and took place against a complex backdrop of religious reform, political emancipation, and anti-Semitism.

* Their vision was not simply academic, but political: Jewish self-improvement through scholarship would ideally lead to full political emancipation. Their desire to implement this vision was revolutionary. They desired nothing less than a new conception of Judaism, one that could be historicized as a religious civilization and one that, reconfigured, would lead to reform within the tradition and political emancipation for it from without.

* Common to both Geiger’s and Graetz’s constructions of Jewish history was the desire to make Judaism rational…

* Whereas in Germany, the scholar of Judaism had articulated the political desires of larger European Jewish communities, in Israel and America the Jewish community saw itself reflected in the scholar of Judaism, who was now expected to uphold Jewish values and concerns. Framed somewhat more theoretically: in Germany, the scholar
spoke for the community, and in America (and, to a lesser extent, Israel), the community spoke through the scholar. Perhaps it could even be said that in Germany scholars had expectations that were too high for their community, whereas in America, the situation was the opposite: communities had expectations that were too high concerning what Jewish studies was and what those scholars who engaged in it could realistically achieve.

* the migration out of Europe to Israel and America coincided with a change in scholarly language: from German to Hebrew in Israel, and from German to English in America. Such changes necessarily created a different set of political and ontological emphases.

* Jews were no different from other Europeans: a past was imagined and subsequently constructed to be magnificent—one in which all infelicities were neatly excised—that would in turn provide the seeds for contemporary renewal and the creation of a future. This was intimately connected to the rise of the modern university and the programmatic creation of all of the modern humanities and social sciences to make this past accessible.

* when Leopold Zunz approached the University of Berlin in 1848 with a well-thought-out proposal for creating a Chair in Jewish History and Literature, the faculty responded that they were not in the business of training rabbis…

* Is it the goal of Jewish studies to train those engaged in apologetics or to produce critical scholars? Does the academic study of Judaism produce caretakers or critics?

* The study of Judaism in the non-Jewish German academy, in contrast, was only important when it was reduced solely to the Old Testament. This meant that much intellectual energy on the part of Jewish scholars of Judaism went into apologetical and emancipatory concerns (Wiese 2005, 81), the major focus of which was an examination of the period after the canonization of the Bible. This academic study of postbiblical Judaism, from its very inception, was not simply a scholarly enterprise. It sought, on the contrary, to dispel German prejudices against Jews and Judaism in order to legitimate both the religion and its practitioners in their eyes, and to make the case for political and legal emancipation. This meant showing the contributions that Jews and Judaism had made, among other things, to monotheism, to ethics, and to making the case that Judaism functioned as the bedrock from which the other monotheisms would eventually spring.

* the switch to Hebrew as a language of scholarship coincided with a turn inward.

* Much like their German Jewish counterparts, American Jews also regarded university recognition as the pathway to achieve social and cultural inclusion…

* Jewish scholarship tended to be supported primarily by Reform Jews, many of whom sought both to legitimate and to strengthen themselves in the face of more traditional denominations. Many of the latter were either not interested in or were outwardly hostile to the higher criticism of university Semitics. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish Semitics in these select institutions thrived, largely owing to “American Jewish communal subventions”…

* As scholars interested in professional fame produced highly technical studies on obscure areas of study, the community became less interested in supporting such study.

* Jewish studies departments, then, could function as definers of identity for Jewish students on campus, as places that celebrated Jewish contributions to Western civilization, and as a sign that Jewish topics had finally arrived on American campuses. Yet, this connection between identity and scholarship is, as we have seen throughout this study, always a problematic one. It assumes, for example, that identity is fixed and stable, and that Jewish studies is in the business of teaching about Jewish identity as opposed to showing how it is just as constructed as any other identity formation. Since the 1960s, when the study of Judaism had become increasingly entangled with area/ethnic studies and given Israel’s victories in the Middle East, Jewish studies took a tremendous turn inward.

* What does it mean to be both “like and unlike” other groups, religions, or cultures? This is surely the claim that every area or ethnic studies program makes of its particular subject matter. If Jews and Judaism are like other groups they can presumably be understood using the same methods used to analyze those other groups. If, however, they are “unlike” them, this means that Jews are somehow sui generis and accordingly must be understood on their own terms, something that amounts to little more than a quasireligious or theological claim.

* Perhaps indicative of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish studies scholars were Jewish, the earliest AJS conferences distributed benchers (small prayer books) with the AJS logo, courtesy of Ktav Publishing House. In addition, the birkhat ha-mazon (Grace after Meals) was recited at communal dinners (Loveland 2008, 7). And, as Loveland writes, although some AJS members expressed discomfort with the appearance of public religiosity at an academic conference, many argued for the continuation of the communal ritual (2008, 7).

The need for scholarly legitimation, on the one hand, and the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the Jewish tradition, on the other, is one of the tensions that runs throughout the academic study of Judaism.

* the supposition of the academic world [is] that a scholar is, relatively, objective, dispassionate, and—above all—committed to the impartial search for the truth and not to some antecedent convictions?

* Is it the goal of the scholar to uphold the values that the people of a particular religious community hold dear, a community to which she has largely devoted her academic life, or, is it to go about her labor without due regard for communal sensibility? This tension is particularly acute in Jewish studies where not infrequently the scholar of Judaism holds a position that has been endowed by someone in the local community, someone moreover who, if still living, often has particular ideas about what Judaism is and what scholarship should communicate to others.

* [Jacob] Neusner’s novelty is that he refuses simply to describe the contents of rabbinic texts, preferring instead to analyze and taxonomize them. In so doing, he argues that we ought to inquire into the social, material, economic, and historical conditions that made such texts possible in the first place. This movement from description to analysis, from contents to structure, signals an important marker in the developing relationship between the academic study of religion and Jewish data (see, e.g., Neusner 1979). These rabbinic texts are now to be approached using a set of issues (e.g., the social construction to reality) that those working with other
datasets in other religious traditions should be able to understand.

Posted in Aaron W. Hughes, Academia, Judaism | Comments Off on The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship

‘The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter’

Posted on July 9, 2021 by Luke Ford

From The Guardian: “It was Graham Greene who wrote that every writer has a splinter of ice in their heart. I think he was right: you have to have it, otherwise you would spend all your time worrying about the impact of your work on others and you would never write at all. At the same time, it cannot be easy to find yourself and your dead ex identifiable in a spectacularly successful piece of writing, when it would have been so easy to change some of the more recognisable biographical details (for which Roupenian apologised). Writers can only hope that the people they use as fictional fodder are as gracious and mature as Nowicki has shown herself to be.”

I remember one Friday afternoon in 2008. I got a phone message from Amy Klein saying she was publishing a Modern Love column about me in the New York Times the next day. I thought turnabout is fair play. I’ve written about Amy. She was my pinata. It was time for Amy to write about me.

Amy Klein was a character on the sidelines of my life. As the managing editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, she was almost a public figure in the Jewish community, and as she wrote first-person pieces, it felt right to give some occasional commentary. I felt freer to write about her as she also made her living writing about others. If she was important to me, I would likely not have written about her. I never thought about any kind of relationship with her and so I felt free to write whatever went through my head.

I’ve rarely written about family and relations. I’ve rarely written about girlfriends (except when I understood they wouldn’t mind much). I’ve rarely written about employers. I’ve rarely written about all sorts of people important to me precisely because I don’t want to hurt those relationships.

I don’t think non-writers realize how little writers often feel about people they write about. You don’t have to be triggered or upset or be filled with yearning to write about someone. I’ve written about thousands of people, few grabbed me intensely.

Most football players don’t think deeply about the people they hit on a football field, and I don’t think trial lawyers think deeply about the feelings of opponents in court. Similarly, most journalists don’t think deeply about the feelings of people they describe.

We don’t own our reputations. They reside in the heads of others.

Jack Shafer writes for Slate Aug. 27, 2007 about New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt's Aug. 26 column:

One of the flaws in Hoyt's thinking is his belief that one's reputation is a possession –like a car or a tennis racket — when one's reputation actually resides in the minds of others. A person can have as many reputations as people who know him or know of him. Positing that the top link in a Google search of a name equals somebody's reputation is silly, and Hoyt's column only encourages that notion.

If Google users conclude that an individual is guilty of fondling a child just because a Times story reported his arrest, that says more about their gullibility than it does about the inadequacies of the Web or the Times. The Times is wonderful, but it's not a vaccine against stupidity.

Whatever their shortcomings, search engines are a million times superior to human memory, which they are rapidly replacing. 

The Web also offers those wounded a variety of ways to manage their reputations and mitigate the offenses of the New York Times (and of other publications). 

By exaggerating the absolute power of the Times and Google to determine reputation, Hoyt's column encourages people to think of themselves as technopawns. (It also damages Hoyt's reputation in the process, but that's his problem.) I'm all for getting the Times to correct meaningful errors of fact in a decent interval, but if you want to secure a better reputation than the one that Google currently spits out, get busy and build it yourself.

Posted in Amy Klein, Literature | Comments Off on ‘The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter’

The Shield

Posted on July 9, 2021 by Luke Ford

Commentary: The reason The Shield is television’s greatest drama is that it holds to the most basic rule of drama: characters act, and those actions have consequences. Events happen, not to make a point to us, but from what the characters do. (The best kind of creator was described well in the 14th-century text The Cloud of Unknowing, and even better in Futurama: “when you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”) The most basic rule of The Sopranos is that its characters don’t act; as Todd van der Werff noted on the AV Club, it shows, over and over again, how people make the choice to not choose, to not change, to remain complacent. And because there are rarely any consequences to this, the show can go on forever. Even if you believe that Tony was finally killed for all he’d done (I do), Chase deliberately chose not to show the consequences of that, literally stopping the show before we could see what happened. That’s why The Sopranos’ ancestors are literary, not dramatic; it’s not a unified story moving from a first action to a last consequence but rather a series of sketches and short stories. Its nearest relatives aren’t the dramas of Shakespeare and Sophocles but the short stories of Dostoyevsky (who gets a shout-out from Dr. Krakower), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), and Bret Easton Ellis (The Informers).

Storytelling is a fundamentally ethical activity, because we see characters making a judgment and then making the crucial next step: acting on that judgment, and then experiencing the consquences of that judgement. Did Corrine do the right thing in revealing Vic giving her the money? To answer that, we have to at least consider all the consequences of that act; we have to at least take a moment to ask if it was worth the death of Lem and of Shane’s family and of Shane. I don’t believe she’s responsible for all that, but we have to at least think about it. Because its characters act, The Shield creates an ethically complex world; because The Sopranos’ characters don’t act, its characters can be simply judged. Judgments can be pure, whereas ethics are always messy, because acting in the world always leads to consequences. (Only for God can judgment and ethics be the same thing.) In storytelling, the creator has to face the consequences too, but Chase created very few acts, and very few consequences, so he could create scenes like this one that judge without any risk or complexity.

The Sopranos has a different purpose than The Shield; many have called it the best critique of contemporary American life. I won’t dispute that for a moment. The first power of drama, though, isn’t to tell us about one country at one moment in its history. The first power, literally the Godly power, of drama, is to create people who feel alive, so that we in the audience feel no distinction between those on stage and those in our lives. Whenever an author chooses something else as the first power, to make a point, to teach us something, to provide social or political criticism, their drama becomes less alive. Any time we find ourselves thinking “this is a story that someone made up; what are they trying to tell me?” we are not feeling that first, living power of drama. The purpose of The Shield was always to show us what the characters would do next, what they would have to do next, and that is why, over and over again, it collapsed the distance between itself and us; that is why, over and over again, we empathize rather than judge. The Sopranos is judgmental, The Shield ethical; The Sopranos is lifelike, The Shield is alive.

MORE COMMENTARY: I didn’t finish up The Shield until some years after it ended. I can distinctly remember shotgunning the final season in a day and watching the last six episodes the way I have ever since, in one unbroken sitting. That first time through, I finished at something like 2am, and I just sat there stunned for I don’t know how long…. I was awestruck by how elegant and necessary those last five hours played out the events, how one after another the options for everyone closed off, and how it couldn’t happen any other way. It was like nothing I’d ever seen on television, and some years later it would send me back to the ancient texts to understand its power. At the time I was sure, though, I would never see anything like it again, and so far, ten years out, I’ve been right.

* I watched The Shield in the first place because I wanted to expose myself to new and interesting ideas, and like all the characters in the show I got exactly what I asked for. It shook my very worldview, and continues to shake it as I try and process what it all means even two years later. The Shield‘s relentless and unsentimental dramatic construction makes it sneakily one of the great philosophical works of fiction, not just in its day-to-day moral questions like “what’s the best way to police” or “is it right to strangle a cat to understand a serial killer” but in the sense of how you survive after answering them – to not just have a worldview, but live by it.

* The Shield has had a permanent impact on how I think about drama, storytelling, and morality. The ending is what brings all that home. …here it is for you to empathize with, and for you to empathize with in a dangerous way, a way that is rooted in choices and feelings rather than in psychology. The Shield is full of different kinds of people, but there’s never a diagnostic sense to it, never the sense that being a particular kind of person will keep you from doing a particular kind of thing. Or, for that matter, fate you to do it. I know when I watch it that I could do anything these characters do: that’s the terrifying responsibility and glory of being human.

* The Shield is a complete work in a way that isn’t supposed to be possible in long form serialized storytelling. You get the idea that if you gave the creators a time machine, gave them the chance to go back and rework narrative threads and characterization and foreshadowing, address all the problems of the show with total perfect hindsight of what the finished project would be, that (with the exception of a single misguided episode) they wouldn’t really change anything at all. The ending of The Shield is the culmination of a journey that has been advancing relentlessly for seven years, launched by the choices characters made in the very first episode. The Shield isn’t just a great series, it’s a miracle. A 65 hour long story without an ounce of fat. This is perhaps most remarkable when it comes to Shane, who does a thing that is monstrous and incomprehensible, but still feels right for his character, even though that character is never treated like a monster. He ends the show as both the most loathsome and most sympathetic. It’s a daring choice from an artistic perspective, all but impossible to pull off and even under the best circumstances alienating and devastating to the audience, but the show does it because it is the correct way for the story to end. There will be shows with better acting than The Shield, with higher production values, better cinematography, sharper dialogue. But there will never be another show that runs as long as The Shield and feels so complete.

* Breaking Bad at its best could match the suspense and the intensity, but The Shield’s relentless forward momentum and watching the characters making each decision, step by step, completely plausible at the time, even justifiable, down this dark, dark, road made the impact, the final destination, that much more powerful and overwhelming. That much more real and human. I don’t know if a show will ever blow my mind, my heart, and my guts like that again.

* The Shield isn’t just my favorite show, it’s a show where I’ve worked hard to make sure my name, such as it is, will always be associated with it; and it’s a show where a principal cast member killed his wife in front of their children. That has affected nothing about how I see The Shield, or what I have to say about it, because it’s a work that exists past the character of its creators and past the politics of its time, and our time.

* Shawn Ryan’s great, defining choice was to ask his question in a way that got him a narrative rather than an essay. Not “What is the terrible cost of using violence to gain security?” but “If someone uses violence to gain security, what happens?”

* What defines The Shield as part of its time for me is more its lack of self-consciousness… There’s much more of a critical consensus now about what kinds of entertainment are worthy and there’s a much more established stylebook. Slow pace, disorganized timeline, narrative ambiguity, withheld gratification.

* The Shield was always conscious of its audience; trying to be entertaining, funny, and exciting, in a way a lot of prestige television does not, but it never seemed to care what anybody thought about the creators themselves. It is not a show that tries to win you over with its good taste or its righteous politics. It isn’t trying to impress anybody and it’s not afraid of being enjoyed in the wrong way. I’ve always felt one of the defining traits of art (at least of popular mainstream American art) following 9-11 was a desire to be apolitical. To prioritize national unity over anything petty or divisive. The Shield both reflects and refutes this attitude. In it’s unwillingness to ever allow itself to become polemic. And because of course your show about police, and torture, and crime, and corruption, and race, is political. But the desire to explore these themes without lecturing the audience allows it to evolve alongside that audience.

* The show never feels like the writers were writing to a point; it always feels like they wrote the inevitable consequences of the actions the characters took. By prioritizing the storytelling, the sequence of action and consequence, over teaching its characters or its audience moral lessons, The Shield actually makes any lessons it has to teach land that much harder. (And as with the best drama, those lessons tend to be “Your actions have consequences and you are responsible for them.”)

* One of the rules of The Shield is that people just aren’t going to do what you expect, and often that will fuck up your whole day, even your life. (The other version of this “Things aren’t going to go exactly like you want them to sometimes.”)

* The Shield’s characters are not moral exemplars, they’re not likable and not meant to be, but dammit, they earn our respect. That’s what I mean by large characters: you can never look down on them.

* The way the conversation around television these days underlines a divide between “character-based” and “plot-based,” with the implication that the latter is “lesser,” and failing to understand it’s an unnecessary distinction. This ties into my frequent complains about how often modern prestige drama is just about characters who Have Feelings and Have Psychology: The Shield is “plot-based” because its characters actually take action, but that plot only matters because the characters matter, because they’re so boldly drawn, so strongly written and performed, and so strongly human, even if we don’t get the meticulous backstory and psychological portraits we might get from other shows.

* the power of The Shield is that it allows you to accept what is worst in you. Tragedy functions on an arc of knowing, from a single act, through its consequences, to the acknowledgement of them. It’s a demonstration of the Socratic rule know thyself, where the modern rule might be called fix thyself. The Shield, through showing its characters actions and their consequences and really nothing else, generates empathy for everyone, and in doing so generated empathy for all parts of me. I do think that storytelling makes us better people, and by that I don’t mean a nicer person or a more progressive person. Storytelling, like language itself, increases the scope of our world.

* It was very easy to say I didn’t want to be like Vic and Shane based solely on the first episode; it was impossible to say that based on “Family Meeting”. Every decision they made, Good or Bad, brought them to where they were at the end; I can see how decisions I thought were wrong or moronic at the time were the only right decision I could have made with the information I had at the time.

* The Shield taught me a lot of what I now know about choices and consequences. Often, now, I find myself thinking, You can do that, but you have to take everything that comes after. There is no clean way to live in the world, and The Shield emphasizes that. It isn’t just that you can’t shoot a cop in the face and get away with it, it’s that Claudette has to understand that when she exposes the problems in the DA’s office, she’s buying all those overturned convictions, too.

* TV is so much slower now, especially Marvel Netflix series, and I desperately want action, decision, consequence, not ideology or super long analogies-as-dialogue. (I slowly turned on the Fargo series as a direct result.) …I want to get back to plot and action as soon as possible.

* The Shield was the perfect thing to watch at a point in my life where I’d become more masculine, more internal and interested in alternative points of view, different kinds of moralities. It influenced my philosophies on these aspects while confirming some of them at the same time. The Shield is oddly perfect for autistics–it code switches constantly and contains a universal empathy and morality all at once.

* Commentary: The Shield’s characters all have a moral agency, whereas Breaking Bad’s characters all exist as followers or enemies of Walter. The Shield is a story of moralities in conflict, not a story of a bad man who brings everyone down.

* Comment: When someone takes power from you, you take it back from them; considerations of your duty as a cop (the modern principles of suspects’ rights and the limits of your power) do not apply here. And if you battle with monsters, you’re gonna end up at least a little bit of a monster. The Shield plays by some old moralities to match its old style of storytelling and goals for the audience. Drama is an older form of storytelling than the novel, and empathy is older than analysis. One of the ways The Shield goes for empathy over analysis is these larger moral points are never emphasized, never reflected on; they’re presented to us, and then we move on to the next beat of the plot.

* Comment: The Shield doesn’t just throw the consequences of moral ambiguity in our faces, it also throws the consequences of empathy in our faces.

Posted in LAPD, TV | Comments Off on The Shield

Why do England fans sing ‘Sweet Caroline’?

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Luke Ford

Report:

Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit “Sweet Caroline” has become a favourite anthem of England fans at this summer’s Euro 2020 tournament.

The song blared out over the Wembley speakers after last week’s 2-0 win over Germany, and fans around the country to celebrate Saturday’s quarter-final victory over Ukraine.

But how has an American song from the ’60s turned into an England favourite?

Wembley DJ Tony Parry made the decision to play “Sweet Caroline” after the win over Germany, and it went down a storm.

He told TalkSport: “I was going to play ‘Vindaloo’, but went with my gut.

“Even the German fans were belting it out in the end. It’s a song that all fans can enjoy.

“The match director said in my in-ear: ‘The world’s been closed for 18 months… let ’em have it’.”

Part of its popularity is very simple: it is a fun song to belt out in a group, with fans adding “so good, so good, so good” to the middle of the chorus.

Harry Kane was left speechless by the chants after the Germany win, while Gareth Southgate told the post-match press conference: “You can’t beat a bit of ‘Sweet Caroline’!”

Posted in Soccer | Comments Off on Why do England fans sing ‘Sweet Caroline’?