Knotted thread, middle game: an envoi

The epilogue weaves a conceit into a set of final reflections about Jewish Studies in its counterlived aspect as un fil renoué, a motif from Emmanuel Levinas’s late philosophy. It also returns to a formulation from one of his earlier essays we have briefly touched upon by reconsidering the question of affiliative belonging. A brief reflection on Bruce Robbins’s notions of secular vocation and professional identity segues to a final section, the most conventionally manifesto-like portion of the book. We return full circle to Sacvan Bercovitch, whose Emersonian reflections on the “alternative possibilities” discoverable in chess’s middle game, alongside those of Stanley Cavell, offer a final heuristic for JS.

Interchapter III “Past its own aim, out to another side”

Does the pitchfork betoken phallocentricism? Heaney’s own text leaves that particular subtext fairly undisguised, what with the tool’s “smoothness, straightness, roundness, length and sheen.” Yet readerly discernment would seem to dictate that poet, speaker, or both have already recognized the fact right along with us....

Interchapter II The Dialectics of Ownership

“Your Jewish Studies is not our Jewish Studies.” Unpacking my academic library in some humbler version of Walter Benjamin’s famous self-accounting, thus was I welcomed to a private college by a standard-bearing member of its academic Jewish Studies faculty. “Guilds and their vicissitudes,” I’m sure I reflected to myself, softening the edginess with obliging humor. As the great Jewish satirist Victor Borge used to say, “It’s your language; I’m just trying to use it.” Promptly filed away as a mordant piece of ...

Jewish Studies and the Pitchfork

Appealing to thinkers not immediately associated with the customary frontiers of JS at a reflexive level allows this chapter to amplify and thicken the inquiry. The intent is to readJewish Studies, to stage its current situation, and to project an imagined future for it. An epigraph from Benjamin’s One-Way Street about productively “losing oneself in a city” is enlisted with a particular audience in mind: practitioners anchored in the archive and the Science of Judaism, for whom the business of JS comes down to method. Disciplinary practice may always seem a far more compelling desideratum for its work than any desire to shift the terms of debate to the matter of community. That ambition is explained in some detail, with particular reference to postmodern philosophy: for it, too, will call for quite a different schooling and, accordingly, a new set of bearings. What may look like calculated destabilization—using the prism of lyric poetry, for example—becomes the power of leaping toward another foundational place—or, Talmudically speaking, standing on one foot. Indeed, that image for learning Torah will be enlisted as one of several heuristic figures in a constellar series that seeks to reimagine Jewish Studies à venir.

Interchapter V Bildung and Built-ins

Hebrew school from the childhood years in New York City. Dickens and Tolkien, the social protests of 1968, experienced at eleven years of age in the Bronx. In the 1970s, liberal arts college, where mentors in music theory and composition and, later, literary studies, were teaching. Friendship with peers and teachers who were adolescents at the time of the Rosenberg affair, a vision, dazzling for a newcomer, of a fellowship that professes the Humanities and of a vocation to which one can attach oneself by spirit and heart as much as by training. A stay in the 1980s on the West Coast, and an apprenticeship in teaching composition. Harvard, Stanley Cavell. The theoretical ...

Bildungsheld or Pícaro, Canon and List: A Heterotopology for JS

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS is especially pertinent here: “Jewish Studies has emerged as an autonomous field that is strictly speaking neither secular nor religious, but academic.” The chapter turns, therefore, to the precedent of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Frankfurt, whose short heyday in the 1920s has bequeathed a model for extra-academic Jewish education, subsequently refashioned by others. What would JS look like if it weren’t tied to the institutional vicissitudes of academicized knowledge practices, if the reproduction of the academic system and social field, the magister-discipulusrelation, were not its determinative economy? Is, or can Jewish Studies be, a kind of heterotopia within the university’s borders? What would it mean for JS—as Rosenzweig envisioned for his students in Lehrhaus—to bring the outside in? As counter-example to Neusner’s essays in chapter 3, Rosenzweig’s essays determine this chapter’s focus. Implications of the chapter’s title, with its tension between hero and adventurer and closed or open catalogue, are taken up in the concluding pages.

Interchapter IV Speaking of JS; and Its Vicissitudes

Speaking of JS to JS can be hit or miss. Two occasions on which I was asked to do so offer instructive lessons. The first talk was pitched to a composite audience of colleagues in Jewish Studies and literary studies. Such conditions of “bilingualism” stand out most starkly at institutions where an affiliative history bridging two distinct constituencies remains only emergent. The presentation was built on the central figure of reading as a tactile practice: books as the felt objects of palpable hands in relation to interpretive will and the rabbinic tradition, more specifically, where the question also intersects intriguingly with criteria for canonicity....

Jewish Studies as Lever

After a compressed history of modern JS centering on the figure of Gershom Scholem (no mean metaphorist himself), this first of two linked chapters adds to the initial figuration of Jewish Studies (counterlife, report, adhesion, four questions, satire) a further constellation of images pertaining to location and movement/force: the boundary, ruins, the city, the lever. In parallel with the sequence of figures is a polyphony of carefully curated voices whose reverberant and interdiscursive effect offers one paradigm, in the context of JS, for a more dialogically inflected humanities. Both this chapter and the succeeding one endeavor to think the project of Jewish Studies adventurously, by considering genres over and above disciplines, emergent rather than settled questions. In thus reframing some of the field’s organizing assumptions, my particular interest is to “work the frame” itself: to mobilize borders, to set forth inside relative to outside “as a problem,” and, in echo of the ever-insistent answerabiliy Bakhtin assigns to art, to pursue the latent interrogativity of JS.

Introduction

Beginning with an epigraph from Nietzsche that calls philologists to the essential but often overlooked task of setting forth philology “as a problem,” the introduction poses the same challenge to Jewish Studies and its practitioners—from its philological and historicist origins in nineteenth-century Germany to its current state in North American colleges and universities. Two animal fictions by Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to an Academy,” as personalized by two Jewish Americanists in professions of critical faith, jointly set the stage for an exposition of the book’s twofold title. This is followed by a brief history of the field and an initial consideration of its several dilemmas in content as well as form. The chapter concludes with four overarching questions posed to and for JS and a brief outline of the rest of the book.

Ventilating the Tradition: Rashbam and the Coen Brothers

With a performative and unlikely coupling of rabbinic commentary and postmodern filmmaking that pivots around the vagaries of storytelling, this chapter aims to circulate air not only within the crowded spaces it has explored in the previous four chapters but also inside the classical textual precincts that JS has traditionally made its own. If this book had been authored by a different category of disciplinarian—historian, social scientist, or theologian—this final chapter would most likely not be juxtaposing an eleventh-century Northern-French Torah commentator and twenty-first-century American filmmakers or the contrasting narrative strategies of renarration and denarration in Genesis 24 and A Serious Man, respectively. By performing just that sort of interreading, Jewish Studies as Counterlife concludes on the note on which it began, picking up the thread of a Jewish Studies story that hasn’t quite materialized or been recounted with a level of invention that matches its own unfolding.