Looking and Listening Differently: Crimes and Misdemeanors, II Samuel 11–12 and #Metoo

Abstract:This article sets out to look back at and “rehear” a film, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, and a biblical text, the story of David and Bathsheba in II Samuel 11–12, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency and in light of the #MeToo movement. Employing the interpretive method used in my book, Movies and Midrash, as well as the feminist epistemological insights of Evelyn Fox Keller and Miranda Fricker, the article concentrates on and critiques the would-be throwaway, comic, #Metoo-relevant moments of the Woody Allen film, those not typically addressed in critical and Jewish interpretations of the film, including my own book. It then offers a contemporary, #MeToo, feminist, midrashic close reading of the David and Bathsheba story. Throughout the David and Bathsheba narrative, men and a masculine God are depicted as seeing, often broadly and from a distance, but only Bathsheba actually hears. The aim of the article is to engage in an exercise in self-observation, re-listening and constructive re-interpretation that also speaks to the kind of broader historical, epistemological and hermeneutical shifts that allow us as a culture to read differently.