Jewish Studies and Material Culture

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Roundtable Proposal, AJS December 2014

Over the past decades, Jewish Studies has taken the material turn. In making this turn, Jewish Studies has followed the lead of many fields in the humanities at large, but for Jewish Studies this turn holds special import if only because of the field’s historical (over)reliance on textual and literary documentation. To be sure, historians of Jewish art and students of visual culture have always used and studied this material, but the new wider interest in materiality raises for them—and for the entire field-- the question of how to integrate their work into the more text-oriented scholarship. Different disciplines ask different questions, so the methodological and substantive questions require as much interrogation as the material itself. How can this “clash of disciplines” be used productively? In this panel sponsored by the American Academy for Jewish Research, we would like to bring together scholars specializing in different areas and periods of Jewish Studies to consider such questions as the following:
1)How has material culture shaped and changed your field, both substantively and methodologically? This question will obviously have different meanings and answers for text-oriented scholars (who have not previously studied this material), on the one hand, and scholars of material culture (e.g. art historians, who always have) on the other, but the question is how the new interest in joining these fields—with their different perspective and objects of study—has changed the over-all discipline of Jewish Studies?
2)What are the ways in which material culture and textual study complement and conflict in your area? And how can instances of conflict be used productively?
3)Does one read material culture as a text? Or are texts themselves part of material culture?
4)What impact does the does the incorporation of material culture have in the classroom and through trips to public displaces of visual culture (museums; libraries; archives)?
And how can these public venues play a more valuable role in the academic and scholarly dimensions of Jewish Studies?
1)What are the social practices (collecting/archiving/inventorying; preserving; exhibiting; narrating; mass-producing/marketing; repurposing; de-/re-materializing; fetishizing) around Jewish material culture, either contemporary with the material in question or ex post facto, and how are they implicated in your study of the material itself?

The following scholars have agreed to participate on the panel: Seth Schwartz (Columbia), on ancient Judaism; Vivian Mann (JTS), on medieval and early modern artifacts; David Stern (Penn) on the Jewish book in the manuscript and early print periods; Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers), on the modern and contemporary periods.
The panel will be chaired by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (NYU).

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Moderator

• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University

Discussants

• David Stern, University of Pennsylvania

• Seth Schwartz, Columbia University

• Vivian Beth Mann, The Jewish Theological Seminary

• Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University