Unsettling Jewish Knowledge

Text, Contingency, Desire

Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781512824308
• eBook ISBN: 9781512824315
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Spanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection's eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment—and the darker implications of these questions. The book's essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations. Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s “Holocaust Fiction”
• Chapter 2. Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day”: Body, Text, Interpretation
• Chapter 3. Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past
• Chapter 4. Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination
• Chapter 5. Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose
• Chapter 6. Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation
• Chapter 7. Beyond Faith and Reason: R. Avraham Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish) on Certainty and Doubt, Love of the Law, and Constructing the Halakhic Self
• Chapter 8. Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus)
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments