Jewish Studies: Beyond the Human

Session Submission Type: Seminar

Abstract

Perhaps one of the greatest inadequacies that Western philosophy has left us is the anthropocentric ladder known as the Scala Naturae, the ingrained notion of a natural hierarchy with humanity at its helm, followed by fauna, flora and the inanimate on the lowest rung. This human-centered prism pervades the very term ecology and has influenced the way a broad range of fields and disciplines narrate themselves, including philosophy, religion, linguistics, and Jewish Studies.

In the face of the global biodiversity crisis, we confront an urgent need to reconceive humanity and its relationship with other species. A wide range of multidisciplinary initiatives in scholarship, religion, and the arts are working to articulate anew the human category, at times decentering or reterritorializing it to be enmeshed with other species—beginning to imagine a posthumous posthumanity. Posthumanist scholarship within and beyond Jewish Studies has been catalyzing crucial new questions: drawing out the potent possibilities of thinking with animals and with plants, reckoning with the bacterial and the viral, reconsidering kinship with the so-called inanimate, and more.

Our seminar aims to center these questions within Jewish studies, thinking both inside the Ark as well as outside the Ark, to paraphrase Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates. We aim to bring together scholars from diverse disciplinary approaches to grapple with subjects and methods beyond the human. How might we think with the inanimate, with plants or with other animals? In what ways might we rethink and rewild the Scala Naturae, cleansing toxic taxonomies and reimagining connections between beings and their worlds?

We aim to open a space for writing the next chapter of a storied planet across a wide range of fields within Jewish Studies. We particularly seek papers interested in texts that articulate cross-being encounters or that enrich the way we think beyond the human, as well as work that explores the nexus between Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and fields like Animal-Human-Studies, New Materialism, and Ecocriticism.

In alphabetical order, our seminar participants will discuss:

Julia Watts Belser will present on the “God of Crows: Wild Kinship, Disability, and Queer Jewish Feeling"

Mara Benjamin will share an excerpt from her current book in progress, Terrestrial: Jewish Thought and a World Disrupted.

Beth Berkowitz will share a portion of her current book manuscript, What Animals Teach Us about Families, which begins with Viennese Jewish author Felix Salten's Bambi and ends with Jack Halberstam's take on Finding Nemo in order to raise questions about how and why animal families matter and what the Bible and its Jewish readings have to say on the subject.

Aaron Gross will examine biblical animals in contemporary Jewish perspectives.

Ariel Evan Mayse will explore theories of entanglement and ethics of care suggested by a range of Jewish mystical and legal sources.

Rafe Neis will explore, drawing upon multiples types of media and representation, non-monagamous and multispecies households in Late Ancient Mesopotamia.

Jonnie Schnytzer will discuss medieval kabbalistic deconstructions of the human.

David Shyovitz will analyze medieval conceptions of animality in Ashkenazi culture.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary Approaches

Chair

• Judith Plaskow, Retired

Discussants

• Julia Watts Belser, Georgetown University

• Mara Benjamin, Mt. Holyoke College

• Beth Berkowitz, Barnard College

• Aaron Gross, University of San Diego

• Ariel Mayse, Stanford University

• Rafael Neis, University of Michigan

• Jonnie Schnytzer, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

• David Shyovitz, Northwestern University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 07