Jews and Science

Jews and Science examines the complicated relationship between Jewish identities and the evolving meanings of science throughout the history of Western academic culture. Jews have been not only the agents for study of things Jewish, but also the subject of examination by “scientists” across a range of disciplines, from biology and bioethics to anthropology and genetics. Even the most recent iteration of Jewish studies as an academic discipline—Israel studies—stresses the global cultural, economic, and social impact of Israeli science and medicine. The 2022 volume of the Casden Institute’s Jewish Role in American Life series tackles a range of issues that have evolved with the rise of Jewish studies, throughout its evolution from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary, and now finally as a discipline itself with its own degrees and departments in universities across the world. This book gathers contributions by scholars from various disciplines to discuss the complexity in defining “science” across multiple fields within Jewish studies. The scholars examine the role of the self-defined “Jewish” scholar, discerning if their identification with the object of study (whether that study be economics, criminology, medicine, or another field entirely) changes their perception or status as scientists. They interrogate whether the myriad ways to study Jews and their relationship to science—including the role of Jews in science and scientific training, the science of the Jews (however defined), and Jews as objects of scientific study—alter our understanding of science itself. The contributors of Jews and Science take on the challenge to confront these central problems.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/casden/1013/thumbnail.jp

New Illnesses—Old Problems, Old Illnesses—New Problems

This present collection of essays concerns the representation of illness in literature

Jewish Writers in Contemporary Germany: The Dead Author Speaks

The question I wish to address in this essay is really quite simple: Given the fact that there are Jews who seem to play a major role in contemporary German Kultur (at least that narrower definition of culture, meaning the production of cultural artifacts, such as books—a field which, at least for Englemann, was one of the certain indicators of a Jewish component in prewar German culture)—what happened to these Jews (or at least the category of the Jewish writer ) in postwar discussions of culture? Or more simply: who lulled the remaining Jews in contemporary German culture and why? Why is it not possible to speak about German-Jews in the contemporary criticism about German culture? And, more to the point, what is the impact of this denial on those who (quite often ambivalently) see (or have been forced to see) themselves as Germans and Jews, but not as both simultaneously