Jewish Shape-shifting and Modernity

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman provocatively described anti-Semitism as a form of “proteo-phobia,” that is, fear of the multiply-defined, metamorphic, transforming. One understands what he means: the more one tries to define “the Jew,” the more protean an entity it becomes.No wonder, perhaps: Jewish modernity, as articulated by Moses Mendelssohn, is founded on multiplicity-- the claim to be both Jew and German--and in the Eastern European context,Yehuda Leib Gordon’s “A Jew at home, a man in the streets” takes the psychological measure of this duality.While the charge of “double loyalty” is one familiar, paranoid response to this culture of doubleness, Bauman’s insight redirects us to the more polarizing phenomenon of shape-shifting, a phenomenon of “rapid, drastic, and radical” change. As a protean figure, the Jew can as easily be a paragon of modernist subjectivity as a figure of monstrosity and irrationality.Gathering together critics who work with both verbal and visual materials, and in US and European contexts, this round table explores a suite of questions concerning how Jews in modernity have thematized, critiqued, and/or embraced a protean identity:

1) How do monsters of the medieval Jewish imaginary--especially dybbuks, but also golems--contribute to the phenomenon/phenomenology of Jewish shape-shifting?

2) Do we as critics interpret shape-shifting primarily as a matter of self-invention or as an adaptation to environment?

3) How have Jews used various modalities of representation- text, film, performance—to thematize shape-shifting? How does the mode of representation become implicated in protean identity?

4) Is proteanism a mode of Jewish identity or an ironization of attempts to define Jewish identity? Does shape-shifting abet passing-? if so, as what?

5) Is shape-shifting saliently a matter of illusion, and conversely, disillusionment? More broadly, how does it relate to Jewish mysticism, magicians and mages (not the same thing) of the distant or the recent past, for example, Harry Houdini, assimilated Jew and self-transformer extraordinaire?

6) If shape-shifting is a hallmark of Jewish modernity, then what happens when we substitute a post-modernist for a modernist frame of reference?

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Moderator

• Rachel Rubinstein, Hampshire College

Discussants

• Esther Schor, Princeton University

• Adriana X. Jacobs, University of Oxford

• Cheryl Spinner, Duke University