Compelling Reading: Access, Discipline, and Marginality in Reading Rabbinic Texts

Session Submission Type: Flipped Panels

Abstract

This session brings together seven scholars to address questions of authority and disciplinary constraints in our research and teaching practices. Three pairs of participants will submit essays that include an analysis and a response. Each pair will comment on a different base text and then one scholar from the field of Modern Jewish Thought will respond “live” to the written essays and the responses.

This is a flipped panel which flips the traditional notion of havruta and the typical AJS panel. We will not read our papers during this session. Rather we will discuss the ideas that our preliminary conversations engendered and think together about the nature of the authority of the texts and how that authority is constructed and received. We will also consider how authority and the disciplinary constraints of our field undercut certain readings and certain readers.

Sub Unit

• Rabbinic Literature and Culture

Chair

• Marjorie Lehman, The Jewish Theological Seminary

Individual Presentations

• Excommunication, Power, and Shame in bMQ 17a - Sarra Lev, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; Mira Beth Wasserman, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

• Rabbinic Reproduction: An Anthro-Textual Perspective - M Adryael Tong, Fordham University

• Interrogating Witness Interrogation: Susanna, Mishna Sanhedrin 5:2 and Mishna Ketubot 1 - Chaya Halberstam, King's University College, University of Western Ontario

Respondent

• Mara Benjamin, Mt. Holyoke College