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Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 351



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Susan L. Mizruchi, ed., Religion and Cultural Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 269 pp.

Moritz Steinschneider, the great nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholar, is reported by Gershom Scholem to have said that the goal of his scholarship was to give Judaism a decent burial. Attitudes of this sort, in various guises, have so infiltrated and informed the study of culture in the twentieth century that religion and cultural studies now seem a contradiction in terms. From the rise of the race-class-gender triad to Edward Said's tendentious distinction between "religious" and "secular" criticism, scholarship has by and large refused to take religion seriously. And yet, as Mizruchi points out, religion thrives—certainly in America, the primary focus of this excellent interdisciplinary volume. Not all the essays share a point of view, and they range widely—from vodou rituals to alien abduction narratives, from the "netaphysics" of cyberspace to a box of Wheat Chex—but together they argue for a thorough revaluation of the explanatory role of religion and a liberation of cultural studies from the stranglehold of (in Jack Miles's wonderful phrase) "suffocating secular orthodoxy."

 



—Michael P. Kramer

Michael P. Kramer is the author of Imagining Language in America and coeditor of the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature . He chairs the English department at Bar-Ilan University.

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