Modern Jewish Thought/Philosophy and the Politics of Religious Studies

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The question of normativity has become a site of contention in the discipline of religious studies. Scholars frequently accuse one another of being too devotional or not devotional enough, failing to offer disinterested scholarship or applying standards foreign to, and at odds with, the traditions they study. While modern Jewish thought has hitherto largely ignored this debate, the papers on this panel use the contested issue of normativity to problematize and rethink the project of modern Jewish thought.

The first paper, “Has Jewish thought ever been ‘modern’? Periodization and Queer Temporality” seeks to clarify not only how the discipline of religious studies constrains the study of Jewish thought but also what Jewish thought has to offer religious studies. ‘Modern Jewish thought’—understood in its inextricable and critical relationship with Christianity’s configuration of ‘religion’—provides vibrant and diverse data for challenging the ‘modern’assumptions of the discipline of religious studies, particularly its divisions between critical and confessional, historicist and antihistoricist, rational and affective, and modern and pre-modern.

The second paper, “Justifying Normativity in Modern Jewish Thought,” asks not whether Jewish can be normative but whether any normative stance is legitimate. Following Levinas’ efforts to ground normativity in language, this paper argues that theology must be understood fundamentally as a discourse of imagination, of the ‘as if.’ Recognition of this ensures a break with Halakhic positivism, and renders the law into a revisable instrument that fulfills Jews’ desire to flourish, and modern Jewish thought becomes excitingly legible again as a tradition of arguments about flourishing-making acts and beliefs.

Finally, “The Orientalist Foundations of Modern Jewish Thought,” explores the antagonistic relationship between modern Jewish thought and early 20th century German RELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT. This paper argues that the canon of modern Jewish thought should be grasped as part of a larger discourse that seeks to define the identity of the Occident, a discourse that is inextricable from the demarcation of the Occident’s Others. Attending to the fraught relationship between modern Jewish thought and Orientalism, enables Jewish thought to engage the challenge of contemporary pluralism in a richer manner that avoids Eurocentrism.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Thought and Theology

Chair

• Shaul Magid, Indiana University, Bloomington

Individual Presentations

• Has Jewish thought ever been “modern”? Periodization and Queer Temporality - Larisa Reznik, University of Chicago

• Justifying Normativity in Modern Jewish Thought - Martin Kavka, Florida State University

• The Orientalist Foundations of Modern Jewish Thought - Robert A. Erlewine, Illinois Wesleyan University