Community and Society Archive
Welcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today. What are the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century? Every other week you will find a new article here.
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Dispatches from a Jewish Studies Conference
By Libby Garland
Each year, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania gathers fellows from a range of institutions in the
United States and abroad to research and exchange ideas around a particular theme; the
year culminates in a conference at which fellows present their work. This year’s theme was “Modern Jewry and the Arts,”
a rubric on the contemporary and wide-ranging end of the Jewish Studies spectrum that the
Center explores.
I attended
the Center’s annual
conference this May. Many of the papers were interesting in their own right, exploring
such themes as the intersections between the political and the aesthetic, or the ways
conflicts between nationalist and diasporic identities colored Jewish art.
But what
struck me as most interesting was the extent to which the event reflected—both
analytically and interpersonally—some of the major tensions in Jewish Studies and,
indeed, in contemporary Jewish life. During the final session, these tensions surfaced in
an emotional, heated debate. Meant to be a
wrap-up, “whither Jewish Studies…” kind of session, it became instead a
forum in which conference participants ended up in disagreement over what, in fact, the
proper scope of Jewish Studies should be, and who was truly entitled to engage in Jewish
Studies.
At stake
were the premises of the conference, and of the center itself. Was there any utility at
all in bringing together art historians or scholars of popular culture (people working on
topics such as the American exhibition history of Ben Shahn, Yiddish vaudeville, Jews in
the jazz recording business, or nostalgic recollections of New York Jews’ 1950s
television careers) not necessarily versed in “traditional” Jewish texts, with
those steeped in Jewish Studies as it has been, with its Wissenschaft roots, its
focus on linguistic, intellectual and textual tradition, and its more particularist
understanding of Jewish history? Were these fields at all “additive,” i.e. could
they be put together to achieve some more complete understanding of what
“Jewish” has been, is, and might be? Were these groups of scholars part of the
same intellectual enterprise, and were people from each camp qualified to comment on the
work of the other?
In short,
“what and who counts as Jewish?” was, as so often in Jewish events (academic or
otherwise), a major sore point. Despite
wishing that we could all just get over it already and move on to other things, I found
the ways this tension spun out at the Center’s conference rather interesting
testimony to the inseparability of identities and intellectual work, even in professional
forums where we’re not meant to be “doing that.” That is, the question of “what counts as
Jewish” (or “Jewish Studies-worthy”), in terms of both the objects and subjects of study, was
paramount.
But as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett noted in the concluding session, reflecting both
on the conference and on the Center’s year-long exploration of “Modern Jewry and
the Arts,” the inverse problem was also in play: Why ask the “Jewish
question” at all? Asking the question in
the context of Jewish Studies, for which “Jewish” is constitutive of the field
itself, is one thing. It is another to ask the question in the context of fields that have
been shaped by different questions and methodologies, such as art history. In what way is
any given phenomenon (e.g. Jews in the recording business) “Jewish?” When is
“Jewish” a biographical irrelevancy, and when is it constitutive? In other
words, what does “Jewish” help explain, whether about Jews or about anything
else—art, technology, culture, the market, nationalism, race, politics? What are the
analytic consequences of defining a phenomenon or research problem in “Jewish”
terms? What gets added, and what gets obscured?
Similarly,
Yale art historian Walter Cahn noted, in the course of his paper on painter Max
Liebermann’s renditions of Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter, that Jewish Studies is
often a process of “looking for the Jewish elements” in history or culture even
when, or sometimes because, the objects of our studies may have been trying precisely to
avoid such categorization. This, too, is
worth attending to. When is inclusion in
“Jewish” a retrospective or unlooked-for act, and what does that say about the
changing sensibilities, ideologies, priorities, and power of the (Jewish) spectators and
theorizers?
Indeed,
many of the panelists focused exactly upon the boundary between explicit and implicit,
open and hidden Jewishness, as well as upon the problem of understanding shifting
boundaries between Jewishness and “everything else”—other identities, other
practices, other communities. Jeff Shandler,
for instance, spoke about Jewishness in 1950s television as something that at the time
functioned as a kind of “encrypted presence,” as Jewish writers and producers
created Italian or Irish characters that—like Seinfeld’s
George and Elaine—played out New York Jewish stories for a national audience. Despite Jews’ retrospective desire to
understand this era of television as a particularly Jewish cultural moment, he argued,
Jews at the time were governed by what Henry Popkin, writing for Commentary in the 1950s, dubbed a
“sha-sha” mentality—meaning that keeping Jewishness quiet was the goal
(even while the expression of that practice was described in a Jewish phrase). Other conference speakers, too, were searching for
ways to describe—and claim as Jewish—similar patterns: the silencing, absence,
or blurring of artists’ Jewishness; the inevitable gaps and repressions in
transmission of family stories.
Many of the
panelists were tracing, in fact, a phenomenon they were also enacting: the cultural,
philosophical, and political repositioning that accompany generational change, and the
tensions such shifts produce. Norman Kleeblatt began his presentation on the Jewish Museum’s upcoming show
Mirroring Evil – a
sure-to-be-controversial exhibit of contemporary art that incorporates Nazi imagery --
with a story he invoked as a parallel to the Museum’s dilemma, which also serves as
an allegory for the Penn conference itself that we were attending. His story was about a recent conference at
Harvard dealing with the contentious theme of black stereotypes in new African
American art. The event ended up revealing painful fault lines between an older African
American generation that stood for an art of “positive images,” achievement and
battling stereotypes, and a younger generation ready to question everything, including the
boundaries of African American identity itself, and ready to portray a much messier,
postmodern, morally confused aesthetic and political universe. This is not to say that the two conferences were
exactly parallel. Rather, it is to observe that generational differences among scholars
and artists are reflected as differences in how each cohort understands the communities
they “represent” (both as members and as portrayers) and that this can make for
deep divides that are at once personal and intellectual.
Moreover,
such divides are not strictly theoretical. At
stake in the definition of Jewish Studies are the material and political issues conference
participants face in their home institutions and in their professional community at large:
hiring and tenure decisions, allocation of funds, fellowships and awards, publications,
and so on. Consider, for instance, a question that gets posed to candidates for certain
fellowships or jobs in Jewish Studies: “Which Jewish languages do you know?” This has meant, first and foremost, Hebrew and
Aramaic, and to a lesser extent Yiddish and Ladino. Consider, however, the implications of
accepting English, German, Spanish, Arabic, or Hungarian as equally legitimate answers to
this question. The fault line between
scholars who regard the latter as acceptable and those who do not indicates the nature of
the ongoing “redistricting” battles that will either make for upheavals in the
field in years to come, or else leave “Jewish Studies” as a secluded discipline
that focuses on a small range of scholarship while the broader study of Jewish culture and
history happens elsewhere.
As the field—or rather the collection of
scholarly enterprises for which “Jewish Studies” serves as an
umbrella—shifts, and it is shifting, it is important to recognize that there are real
power issues involved. Thus my wish that we
might “all just get along,” and be generous in our inclusiveness, is somewhat
naïve. Still, my sense is that a transition
to a broader, more interdisciplinary Jewish Studies, with all the tensions this
configuration implies, is in process.
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