The Human/Animal Binary from the Talmud to the Shoah and Beyond: Jewish Studies and the New Posthumanities

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Jacques Derrida was inspired to write his now-classic (ten-hour!) lecture “The Animal That Therefore I Am” when, one day, standing naked before his cat, he wondered: Should I feel embarrassed? Reflection on the relationship between human beings and other species goes back to Plato and Aristotle, but the Darwinian revolution in the nineteenth century and the rise of eco-consciousness in the twentieth have generated entirely new ways of thinking about human difference, leading some scholars of the humanities today to advocate for a new “posthumanities.” This panel seeks to develop a posthumanities approach within Jewish Studies.

This panel’s four presenters come from a variety of institutions, ranks, and subfields, but their interests all cluster around a set of themes related to animals, suffering, and human subjectivity. Two scholars will present on Talmudic law and story, while the other two will present on Shoah and post-Shoah Jewish writings. This panel thus operates across a variety of historical periods and literary genres, offering a highly interdisciplinary model for the new Jewish posthumanities.

Julia Watts Belser uses animal studies and gender studies to analyze Bavli Baba Metsia 83b-86a. While the story there of Rabbi Yehudah and the calf is often read as lauding rabbinic ethical concerns for animal suffering, Belser argues that the larger sugya theorizes the shadow side of human culture, using notions of animality to articulate the contours of the bestial. Drawing on Colleen Glenney Boggs in Animalia Americana, Beth Berkowitz addresses what is at stake for the Babylonian Talmud when it asks whether an animal who has sex with a gentile is still executed for the “crime.” Against a backdrop of writings that represent violence against Jews in the Shoah as a form of animalization, Jay Geller’s paper explores how the logic of sacrifice, by which the legitimation of noncriminalized killing of animals sustains human exceptionalism, the human-animal “Great Divide,” and the marking of human others as animals, was operative during the Shoah. Andrea Cooper’s paper examines the horizon of animality, sacrifice, and embodiment in post-Shoah ethics and identity in writers such as Levinas and Primo Levi.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Chair

• Aaron Saul Gross, University of San Diego

Individual Presentations

• Suffering Rabbis and Other Animals: Gender, the Bestial, and Rabbinic Self-Critique in Bavli Aggadah - Julia Watts Belser, Georgetown University

• Shame, Subjectivity, and the Human-Animal Divide: The Question of Gentile Bestiality in Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 55a-b - Beth A. Berkowitz, Barnard College

• "It’s Clear as the Light of Day": The Shoah in the Light of the Human-Animal Great Divide - Jay Geller, Vanderbilt University

• Silence, Sacrifice and the Animal/Human in Post-Shoah Ethics - Andrea Dara Cooper, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill