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By Night in al-Andalus: Nocturnal Liturgy among Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spain

This session explores the night not simply as an extension of the devotional day, but as a time invested with a singular religious potency. Focusing on medieval al-Andalus and moving between Jewish and Muslim materials, we will consider how the night emerges as a privileged sphere of intensified worship, heightened access to God, and deepened intimacy with the divine. The discussion will lead to a still more radical possibility: that in certain religious imaginaries, the night does not merely complement the day, but comes to surpass it in weight and significance.

Reimagining the Bible in an Age of Catastrophe

Jews have longed turned to the Bible to make sense of the disasters and injustices of their own era. This presentation will draw on my recently published book Disasters of Biblical Proportions to explore how Jews and others have reimagined the story of the ten plagues of Egypt to find meaning and redemption in the violence, trauma and heartbreak of war.

Suffering as a Religious Problem: Up Close, Sub specie aeternitatis, and On (the) Edge

This session will explore several “anti-theodical” strands in twentieth century Jewish thought.  We will pay particular attention to a putative ethical suspension of the rational, and a related privileging of the “view from within” over a “view from nowhere”.

Early Modern Historians at the Edge: Rupture and Continuation in Exile 

How did early modern Jewish historical writing cope with the experience of being pushed across the edge into an abyss of catastrophic rupture? How was it possible to write history in the moment itself? And how did historical writing seek to regain ground afterwards? We will compare historical texts that recorded the Chmielnicki Massacres (1648-49) as contemporary events with Menachem Man Amelander's account, written a century later in Amsterdam, to reflect on possibilities and impossibilities of writing exilic history "at the edge". ​ ​

On the Edge of Jewish Studies

Given that Jewish history and culture in principle includes the study of every culture in which Jews have lived and every human activity in which Jews have been engaged, there is in principle very little that does not belong to the purview of Jewish Studies. And yet I would suggest that we all work with our own sense of what "belongs" to this set of entangled academic disciplines and what does not, and of what subjects put us "on edge" about whether or not they fall within the purview of our profession. The margin — the very edge of the Jewish studies — has itself become a topic of research within Jewish Studies (e.g. Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? 2009). In this talk, I will discuss a set of academic disciplines and topics that straddle the edge of Jewish studies and reflect on their stakes (their edginess) to my understanding of my own work.

"What troubles you, Hagar?" Academia and Apologia in Hungarian Jewish Studies.  A never-ending story.  

This session will explore Jewish scholarship in Hungary (erets hagar) from liberal Habsburg times to the illiberal present, focusing on the historical myths that scholars have researched, imagined and propagated in order to align—or reconcile—the Jewish past with Hungary's shifting national narratives.       

Unshackling Interpretation: Rereading Slavery in the Talmud

Through close readings of talmudic passages, we will examine how the rabbis of late antiquity related to people at the edges of Jewish life and at the center of Jewish households--the enslaved. We will seek to cut through apologetic readings in both traditional Jewish life and in the academy that have obscured the central role of slaves in talmudic law and narrative and the questions that slavery raised for the rabbis.

Decision and Deferral: German-Jewish Thought and Carl Schmitt

Decision and deferral are two opposite responses to a situation “on edge.” In my talk I will discuss these responses in the context of early 20^th century German-Jewish thought as a reaction to the cultural crisis at the heart of modernism: the loss of belief in the premises of the Enlightenment, its philosophy, its aesthetics and its politics. Philosophically, it questioned the notions of progress, of the autonomy of the subject and the universalism of ethics based on rationality. Aesthetically, it rejected realism, the Kantian idea of art as “disinterested pleasure” and the ideal of Bildung as the primary path to an education of mankind. Politically, it challenged the Weimar Republic’s liberalism and its parliamentary order. As a result, many of the major German-Jewish thinkers turned to messianic ideas of interruption and repair. A central feature of such ideas elaborated in this context involves a tension between a temporality of rupture, interruption and immediacy on the one hand, and, on the other, an emphasis on waiting, deferring and postponing. In my talk I will propose to consider this tension in the writings of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem against the background of a notorious “solution” to the same crisis of culture: Carl Schmitt’s political theology, more particularly its notion of sovereignty, its decisionism and its friend/enemy distinction.

Jewish Visibility and Post-War Jewish Formations in Europe
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The session will examine the various ways in which Jews have visibilized themselves in Europe since 1945 as a lens for understanding the fundamental and conflicting formations of European Jewish life.