Diseased Dybbuks: Race and Disability in Contemporary Jewish Fantasy

• In Event: Narrating Disability: Education and the Power of the Jewish Literary Voice

Abstract

Contagion and the nonhuman are mutually constitutive. Anxieties about contagion are entangled with anxieties of being affected and infected by the nonhuman, a label which white patriarchy has perpetually affixed to black and disabled people. To combine how race and disability form narratives of contagion, I propose to investigate the dybbuk, a villain in Jewish folklore, due to its frequent associations with mental disability (Bar-Nadav). A mobile soul, the dybbuk traditionally takes possession of transgressive women, thereby positioning these women’s minds and bodies as the locus for discourses of race, disability, and the nonhuman. Veronica Schanoes’ short story “Rats” from BURNING GIRLS AND OTHER STORIES (2021) and Naomi Novik’s novel SPINNING SILVER (2018) afford ideal articulations of Jewish literary perceptions of disease because the amalgamation of social myths surrounding the dybbuk link race, disability, and nonhuman contagion. Both authors cultivate concerns about possession, but Schanoes employs the dybbuk to distance the protagonist Lily’s white femininity from her disabled body, whereas Novik inscribes black disability onto her dybbuk to subsequently exterminate it.
Although Jewish theorists have grappled with this question of the construct of the ‘human,’ most theorists who mine potentially Jewish posthumanist texts generally write exclusively about male authors (Pines; Spinner; Wasserman; Geller), disavow posthumanism (Pines), focusing on Biblical studies (Atlas; Benjamin), Talmudic literature (Wasserman), or modernist writers (Meir; Cooper). Those examining climate crisis frequently respond from ethics rather than literary studies (Atlas; Benjamin), thereby largely neglecting contemporary literature and Jewish women writers. The few analyzing contemporary Jewish texts rely on Eurocentric models of folklore (González Bernárdez; Lee; Schanoes). By mapping black posthumanist theorists Zakkiyah Jackson and Sami Schalk onto these contemporary Jewish texts, I explore the stakes of the nonhuman in the literary and cultural imagination through interdisciplinary dialogues across disability studies, critical race theory, and contemporary American Jewish literature. This project illuminates the intricacies, tensions, and limitations of Jewish literary depictions of the nonhuman, as well as the stakes of posthumanist theory in unsettling the European Enlightenment legacy of the white, male, Christian, able-bodied human.

Author

• Marissa Herzig, University of Toronto