Jewish Studies as Lever

Abstract

After a compressed history of modern JS centering on the figure of Gershom Scholem (no mean metaphorist himself), this first of two linked chapters adds to the initial figuration of Jewish Studies (counterlife, report, adhesion, four questions, satire) a further constellation of images pertaining to location and movement/force: the boundary, ruins, the city, the lever. In parallel with the sequence of figures is a polyphony of carefully curated voices whose reverberant and interdiscursive effect offers one paradigm, in the context of JS, for a more dialogically inflected humanities. Both this chapter and the succeeding one endeavor to think the project of Jewish Studies adventurously, by considering genres over and above disciplines, emergent rather than settled questions. In thus reframing some of the field’s organizing assumptions, my particular interest is to “work the frame” itself: to mobilize borders, to set forth inside relative to outside “as a problem,” and, in echo of the ever-insistent answerabiliy Bakhtin assigns to art, to pursue the latent interrogativity of JS.