How are ERUVIN good to think? Interdisciplinary approaches to the ERUV

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

The ritual institution referred to in shorthand as the eruv has attracted the interest of many scholars, lawyers, and artists over the last two decades. This roundtable offers a discussion of the multidisciplinary perspectives that together can shed new light on the eruv, as well as on the question of how the eruv can be used to understand interactions between Jews and the societies in which they live. The questions to be addressed by the participants include: As you have thought about eruvin, which disciplinary approach/es beyond your own has/have been most useful to you? Where would you most like to see new work (artistic, curatorial, scholarly) around the eruv? What collaborations would you encourage? All of the participants in the roundtable, while based in a discipline, have approached their work on the eruv from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Leora Auslander (University of Chicago) a historian of modern European history is finishing a book that argues that the eruv encapsulates urban Jews’ understandings of home, time, and territory more powerfully than do the familiar concepts of assimilation, acculturation, symbiosis or subculture. Gil Klein (Loyola Marymount), an architectural historian, works on the relationships between the speculative dimension of the Sabbath boundary and the lived aspects of the late antique city (which entails architectural as well as ritual settings). Barbara Mann (Jewish Theological Seminary), a Jewish studies and literary scholar, focuses on the tension between eruv as both “place" and “thing" and considers how this movement may illuminate Jewish studies' relation to both “the spatial turn” and “thing theory.” Adam Mintz (CCNY/NYU) a rabbi, who curated the 2014 exhibition on eruvin at the Yeshiva University Museum, will speak on integrating historical and halakhic approaches to the eruv with artistic depictions. Finally, Margaret Olin (Yale University) is an art historian whose work focuses on the eruv as a visual phenomenon of community identification. Her most recent work has been on eruvin in the context of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Our roundtable will be moderated by a scholar whose work is centered in the late antique world: Charlotte Fonrobert (Stanford University), a rabbinics scholar who has published extensively on the eruv and is finishing her book on Talmudic discourse of eruvin.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Moderator

• Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Stanford University

Discussants

• Gil P Klein, Loyola Marymount University

• Barbara E. Mann, The Jewish Theological Seminary

• Margaret Olin, Yale University

• Leora Auslander, University of Chicago

• Adam Mintz, New York University