Critical Jewish Studies Now

Has there ever been a more critical time to mount a critical Jewish studies? The contributors to this volume might answer yes and no. Yes, the rising fever of political and territorial violence demands a return to critical terms of knowledge: the ideas that challenge orthodoxies with irreducible questions. But also, no, the present crisis is not solvable by categories tethered to any stable past. Essay by essay, the authors present a Jewish studies always in formation that wields reflection and interrogation to resist singular timescales, geographies, or interpretations. 
—Lila Corwin Berman, Paul & Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, NYU

Does Jewish Studies have a future? Does Jewish Studies have a past? And how are past and future related to one another? This book offers an incisive and timely collection of cutting-edge essays engaging questions of past and future, memory and theory, and retrieval and innovation, re-thinking the study of Jews and Judaism. Radical and daring in scope, this book will become paradigmatic for how Judaism is understood and analyzed in the academy and beyond. A volume that will shock, inspire, and evoke a much-needed conversation.
—Shaul Magid, Harvard Divinity School

This book is a multidisciplinary discussion of the possibility of Jewish critique, addressing intersections between Jewish Studies and critical paradigms in this moment of crisis. It traces how dominant modes of critique at times reproduce supersessionist and progress-oriented perspectives that foreclose critical possibilities offered by non-linear temporalities and only partially representable pasts. The contributors explore unexpected resonances between Mizrahi critique and Black thought, between the Palestinian and Jewish questions, and between Jewish practice and queer disruptions of traditionalist continuity, among others.

Re’ee Hagay is an interdisciplinary scholar of sound, space, and the formation of difference in Jewish and global South contexts at Vanderbilt University. He teaches in the Anthropology and Jewish Studies departments. 

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.