Event Archive 2016 - Present

Dr. Michael Berkowitz, Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College, London, will present at the Jewish Studies Workshop. Light refreshments will be served. Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies. For information, contact the workshop coordinators Anna Band (aband@uchicago.edu) or David Cohen (davidc1@uchicago.edu).

The Religion and Literature Club presents Vivian Liska on 'German Jewish Thought and its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy.” Prof. Liska will be discussing her recent book, focussing on the chapter regarding Franz Kafka. Abstract: References to the law pervade Kafka’s writings, but their meaning remains elusive. It is precisely because it is uncertain whether the law in Kafka’s work is to be understood in juridical, religious, literary, or more generally ontological terms that it has elicited numerous and often contradictory interpretations that shed light on the relationship between these different realms. The lecture will explore how this indeterminacy and its effects have inspired important debates between modernist thinkers from Scholem and Benjamin to Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. The talk will focus on the relationship between law and narrative and its correlation with Jewish approaches to the interaction between Halacha and Aggadah. Vivian Liska is Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is also, since 2013, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her research focuses on modernist literature, German-Jewish literature and thought, and literary theory. She is the editor of the De Gruyter book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts,” of the Yearbook of the Association of European-Jewish Literature, of the comparative literature journal arcadia and of numerous books, among them the two volume ICLA publication 'Modernism and What does the Veil Know?' In 2011 she was awarded the Cross of Honor of the Republic of Austria for Science and the Arts. Vivian Liska is the author of several monographs, among them Die Nacht der Hymnen (on Paul Celan), ‘Die Moderne – ein Weib’ (on Turn of the Century German women novelists), Das schelmische Erhabene (on Else Lasker-Schüler), Giorgio Agambens Leerer Messianismus (translated into Hebrew as אגמבן 'ורג'יוג  של הריקה המשיחיות); When Kafka Says We (translated into German as Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne and soon in Hebrew translation with Hakobbutz Hameuchad.) Her most recent book: 'German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy' (2017).

'Beyond the Book: Rethinking Religion In and Around the Bible,' is an interregional set of colloquia on the (non-)centrality of the Bible in pre-modern Judaism including The University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. Isabel Cranz, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, will present a paper entitled, “Atonement and Purification: Priestly and Assyro-Babylonian Perspectives on Sin and its Consequences” that will address Priestly expiatory rituals in Biblical historiography vs. expiation and purification in the ancient incantation-work Šurpu by Assyro-Babylonian scholars. Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Assistant Professor, Department of Theology, Fordham University, will present a paper entitled, “Gender and Ancient Jewish Reading Practices” that will discuss the place of the Bible in reconstituting the roles of women and men in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity. Both papers will be followed by student responses. For further information contact Sun Bok Bae (sunbok@uchicago.edu) or Marshall Cunningham (mcunningham1@uchicago.edu).

Bettino Bergo, Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal, on 'And God Created Woman' Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas wrote his « And God Created Woman » (Tractate Berakhot, 61a) between 1972 and 1973 in the shadow of “mai soixante-huit”. It follows, even stands in the shadow of his “Judaism and Revolution” (a reading of Baba Metsia 83), which appeared in 1969. The two Talmudic readings arguably share a guiding thread, although their discussions are quite different: in 1969 it is social and metaphysical alienation; in 1972, it concerns an enigmatic domain of justice situated between the universal and the particular. Thus Levinas’ clin d’oeil to Godard’s film with Bardot focuses on “a difference that does not compromise equity,” before it so much as touches on sexual difference. Perhaps predictably, we find running through the debate about God’s ‘second’ creature (viz., is the rib from which Eve is created a face, or rather a tail?), the question of alterity itself. But is this not one of those abstractions—flowing out of phenomenological formalism—that belies its lived origin in our experiences of or with actual people? Alterity and its “modalizations” would be the question that opens to that of justice in this reading, as in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being. To understand this approach I compare his Talmudic reading with Daniel Sibony’s discussion of the discovery, après coup, of Eve, Isha, by Adam, Ish.