Virgins in brothels: gender and religious ecotypfication

“Charlotte, we’re Jewish” says Cher in the opening scene of Mermaids, as she passes her adolescent daughter, Wynona Ryder genuflecting ecstatically at her private shrine to St. Perpetua. Charlotte abandons her worship of the martyr with a rather dramatic effect on her nascent sex life. What might it be about a young Christian woman tortured to death in the arena in third century North Africa that would so attract an American Jewish teenager as a model and ego ideal? In this lecture, I will investigate the figure of the virgin girl in both traditions, first as an ego-ideal for men and then as one for women, with startlingly different conclusions to the two analyses

Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

This paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity

Philological Investigations:The Concept of Cultural Translation in American Religious Studies

&#8217;Jedenfalls aber ist unsere philologische Heimat die Erde; die Nation kann es nicht mehr sein. (Our philological home is the earth. It can no longer be the nation.)&#8217; Erich Auerbach, &#8216;Philology and Weltliteratur&#8216; (1952) For many years, Daniel Boyarin has been engaged in a project to discover how or why it makes sense to speak of &#8216;religion&#8217; as existing or not at a given time and place. In this project, Wittgenstein has proven to be an increasingly consequential compagnon de route. Boyarin takes the Philosophical Investigations not so much as a work of academic philosophy but as an attempt to describe how language actually works, how human beings produce meaningful speech and writing. The central question treated in this presentation is adequacy of terms drawn from Euro-American languages to describe the cultures of alter. In order to adumbrate some answers to these questions the thinking of Talal Asad about cultural translation is pitted against that of J. Z. Smith.Daniel Boyarin, ‘Philological Investigations: The Concept of Cultural Translation in American Religious Studies’, lecture presented at the conference Untying the Mother Tongue: On Language, Affect, and the Unconscious, ICI Berlin, 11 May 2016, video recording, mp4, 45:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160511-1

Unheroic conduct: the rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man

In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel , this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis

Carnaval à Soura : Bakhtine et le Talmud de Babylone

Using the Mikhail Bakhtin dialogical theory, my concern here is with a double‑faced phenomenon: one face is simply the presence of narratives that celebrate the lower body and actively portray the Rabbis in grotesque, compromising, or ethically problematic light. The second face is the literary choice to produce and have only one book in rabbinic Babylonia, the Babylonian Talmud, in which precisely cheek by jowl we find the same Rabbis as the producers of all that is ethical, religious, and fine in the tradition

Carnal Israel: reading sex in Talmudic culture

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism - that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church - Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body - specifically, the sexualized body - could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage.This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today