Jewishness and the Human Dimension

Notes

notes Introduction 1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Milton, Balch and Company, 1934), 23. 2. Gayle Rubin, ‘‘The Traffic in Women,’’ in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1958), 153–154. 4. These two senses of ‘‘culture’’ might map usefully, if imperfectly, onto the distinction between ‘‘cultural anthropology’’ and ‘‘philosophical anthropology.’’ 5. Dewey, Art as Experience, 13. 6. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds., Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 475–493. I am grateful for permission to reprint. 7. First published in Cardozo Law Review 26:3 (2005), 119–138. Chapter 1 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Racism’s Last Word,’’ Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–299. 2. I know: the ‘‘correct’’ citation is to Denise Riley, Am I That Name? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 3. Derrida, ‘‘Racism’s Last Word,’’ 292. 4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 95. 5. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 6. I pause in this list to suggest an instructive contrast between Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘strong’’ version of identification with the ancestors (as he wrote, ‘‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins’’) and our own 137 contemporary David Biale’s marvelous attempt, in the edited volume Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), at making them less strange. Of course, Biale’s book is not structured according to ancestry , but rather in line with a model of cultural translation that makes, for example, Alexandrine Jews in the third century or Ferraran Jews in the sixteenth our contemporaries. 7. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4. 8. Latkes are vegetable pancakes—here, clearly referring to the potato pancakes that are a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish food for the holiday of Hanukkah . Hamantashen are the traditional Ashkenazi pastry for the holiday of Purim. Years ago, the subject of which was to be preferred, on any grounds whatsoever, became the subject of annual mock debates staged each year at the University of Chicago, in which academics from various disciplines have deployed the rhetorics of their special fields to brilliant parodic effect. The tradition continues and has, I believe, spread. See Ruth Fredman Cernea, ed., The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 9. Edmond Jabès, Le Livre de l’hospitalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 55. 10. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 11. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993). 12. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 13. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 15. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, ‘‘The Confrontation of Orality and Textuality : Jewish and Christian Literacy in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Northern France,’’ in Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, ed., Rashi, 1040–1990: Hommage à Ephraim E. Urbach (Paris: Editions Cerf, 1993), 551. Chapter 2 1. This remains a confused question, partly because anthropologists sometimes remain defensively possessive about ‘‘their’’ culture concept, while scholars writing from training or housing in literature departments sometimes seem casually voyeuristic as they dip into analyses of daily culture outside the academy. In any case, it was within the Modern Language 138 notes to pages 16–26 Association, sometime in the early 1990s, that I was able to help establish a Discussion Group on Jewish Cultural Studies. 2. Herbert Gutman is the author of Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (London: Blackwell, 1977) and The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), among other works. 3. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 4. See Harvey Goldberg, ‘‘Coming of Age in Jewish Studies, Or Anthropology...