Laura Levitt | Temple University (original) (raw)
Papers by Laura Levitt
Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unu... more Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unusually rich and engaged account of German Jewish modernity and its cultural production, its poetry and its intellectual life broadly conceived. And her account is gendered. It makes explicit the central role of German Jewish intellectual women in the production of German modernity. Hahn does this by focusing on the work and words, both public and private, that animated these women's cultural production. Hahn uses the figure of ''the Jewess Pallas Athena'' who comes to us via the poet Paul Celan as a way into and through this rich tradition. As Hahn explains, ''She [the Jewess Pallas Athena] accompanies German-Jewish history, from its start in the middle of the eighteenth century to the time after 1945 when Jewish women driven out of Germany dared to look back. Look back on a country in which they had been raised, whose language and culture they had shared. A country from which they had flown and to which they could never come home again'' (pp. 12-13). In other words Hahn begins with the earliest salonières and concludes her study at the end of the 1960s with the death of one of the last of the writing women in this tradition, the poet Margarete Susman. And, in the end, Hahn brings us back to where she began, connecting Susman intimately with the work of Paul Celan. As Hahn so powerfully demonstrates, the relationship between Celan and Susman itself painfully enacts the last breath of this cultural legacy. By looking carefully at some of the poems Celan wrote explicitly for Susman and the correspondences between them, Hahn shows how, together, Celan and Susman were able to mark the end of this legacy of German Jewish letters. It is fitting that the poetic muse at the heart of this book is Paul Celan. Celan's poetry marks the utter loss of this once vibrant culture even as his figure of the Jewess Pallas Athena is nevertheless still able to usher us into the lost world he mourns. As a literary scholar, Hahn enables her readers to enter into not only Celan's poetry but this broader literary and
Placing Ourselves is an unusual collection that brings together a wide range of scholars from Isr... more Placing Ourselves is an unusual collection that brings together a wide range of scholars from Israel, Europe, and the United States with a focus on historical memory from a variety of perspectives-sociological, historical, literary, artistic, and architectural. Like many anthologies especially on gender, this volume also grows out of a conference, in this case, an interdisciplinary gathering at Bar-Ilan University in January 2001. As the editors tell us in their introduction, it was the conference and its focus on the interplay between gender, place, and memory that inspired this publication. ''Different memories of different places and different gendered experiences provide the backdrop to understand the variation of Jewish life and identity. These places and experiences shade Jewish memories in a myriad of shades, forming the rainbow of colors of which modern Jewish life is composed'' (p. xix). This alluring statement frames our understanding of the conference and its mandate, although it is unfortunate that the editors never make clear the specific relationship between these goals and the volume before us. Regretfully, they never flesh out how differences of place, memory, and gender come together and are in conversation within modern Jewish life. In other words, we never learn about the conversations, the discussion within and between sessions and papers that took place at Bar-Ilan and might have helped readers who were not there understand how these fascinating essays are in conversation with each other. Instead, the editors have chosen more or less to allow the essays and the three sections of the volume to speak for themselves. Given this, they begin their introduction by describing the complexities of modern identity in general and modern Jewish identity formation in particular. As they explain, for Jews not only are there issues of ''who we are, where we come from and how we remember our past'' but also questions about ''choice'' (p. xix). As they explain, ''In certain cases, being Jewish is still a pivotal part of a person's self-definition. For others, it is but one of a
The Massachusetts Review, 2021
CrossCurrents, 1998
L'A. s'appuie sur l'oeuvre de E. Borowitz pour apprecier le lien entre judaisme rabbi... more L'A. s'appuie sur l'oeuvre de E. Borowitz pour apprecier le lien entre judaisme rabbinique et liberalisme. Pour lui, Borowitz lui offre un modele conciliant ces deux domaines. Son oeuvre lui donne un poids theologique et insuffle de l'autorite a son propre liberalisme mais un probleme surgit : celui de confondre le judaisme rabbinique avec le liberalisme. Finalement la vision du liberalisme prime et n'apporte pas de liberation, de justice et de protection. L'A. prend l'exemple du mariage en expliquant qu'on ne distingue plus le mariage juif du mariage liberal, ce dernier pouvant meme creer et perpetuer une forme de subordination, notamment en ce qui concerne le contrat sexuel implicite dans le mariage. Pour les femmes juives americaines d'aujourd'hui, l'heritage du liberalisme est difficile a assumer.
PRECIS:This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conf... more PRECIS:This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conference of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. I spoke these words not long after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. The theme of the gathering was "Revolutionary Love." I was invited to address this issue after I wrote a blog post raising questions about revolutionary love and the categories of race, religion, and ethnicity. Specifically, I wrote about these matters for scholars of religion engaged with the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Returning to these remarks in the Winter of 2020, the urgency of my concerns could not be any more relevant. What follows is, more or less, what I wrote then. My hope is that these reflections will resonate with some of the powerful words of a younger generation of scholars' works on issues of religion, ethnicity, and race—versi...
Kali Handelman interviews Laura Levitt about her new book, The Objects That Remain (Penn State Un... more Kali Handelman interviews Laura Levitt about her new book, The Objects That Remain (Penn State University Press, 2020).
Journal of Religion and Film, 2016
This essay addresses what Jewish Studies and Religion scholars have to contribute to cultural dis... more This essay addresses what Jewish Studies and Religion scholars have to contribute to cultural discourse about film. Through a careful reading of feminist critic Tania Modleski's essay, this article demonstrates some of the blindspots in film studies when it comes to depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. By addressing the ambivalent status of Jewishness in Modleski's work, the essay offers another way of reading Jewishness in not only the Jazz Singer and Crossing Delancy, but in critical discourse more generally. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol1/iss2/5 Almost the same but not white: the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction. It is a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible with that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rule...
Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, 2009
He was a baker and a survivor, and he understood the power both of withholding bread and of shari... more He was a baker and a survivor, and he understood the power both of withholding bread and of sharing it. Fading fast, her father rallies enough to say, “Bebbski, you still want the challah recipe? Write it down ... I can’t bake one, but I can bake ten dozen. Take a sack of flour, two dozen eggs, about this much yeast ...” With this parting gift from her father, Deb goes to Berlin to perform her show. She adds the story about her father baking bread with the German prisoners to the scenario. Still the show feels incomplete. On a break, she enters a German bakery, smells the aroma of freshly baked bread, hears her father’s voice, and has a flash of inspiration: she will bake a loaf of bread during the show. “How many cups are there in a sack of flour?” she asks the German baker. This initiates a process in which she adjusts her father’s recipe to make it her own, laboriously making the translation from ten dozen to one. On stage, Deb achieves the perfect loaf, which finishes baking jus...
Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPA... more Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPACESOF REMEMBRANCE1. Archiving an Architecture of the Heart 2. Haunted by Memory: American Jewish Transformations 3. A House for an Uninhabitable Memory (The Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University) II. ISRAEL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY4. The Return of the Repressed 5. Racism and Ethics: Constructing Alternative History 6. "Don't Touch My Holocaust"-Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Holocaust Taboo III. TRANSGRESSING TABOOS7. Holocaust Toys: Pedagogy of Remembrance through Play8. The Nazi Occupation of the "White Cube": Piotr Uklan'ski's The Nazis and Rudolf Herz's Zugzwang 9. On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise IV. CURATING MEMORY10. Holocaust Icons: The Media of Memory11. Sense and/or Sensation: The Role of the Body in Holocaust Pedagogy Artists' Works A selection of works by artist...
for Susan Shapiro What happens as scholars of various disciplines increasingly write in the first... more for Susan Shapiro What happens as scholars of various disciplines increasingly write in the first person? (1) What does it mean for us to place ourselves, our embodied and historicized selves, in our work? I am interested in what transpires when we do this not just in our introductions, prefaces, or acknowledgements, but throughout an entire text. Given this turn to the first person point of view, what are we to make of the narrating of self, the self narratives that are present in our work and in the works of others? What comes to pass as these narratives become sedimented, when we can see the layers of self narratives presented over time? How do we write and rewrite our stories knowing that at least some of our readers already know some of these earlier tellings? With these questions in mind, I want to think about how we read the traces of the lives of other writers in an author's work and what the traces tell us, and to consider how we account for changes in our own positions...
... For crucial comments and suggestions I want to thank Sara Horowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Larry Sil... more ... For crucial comments and suggestions I want to thank Sara Horowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Larry Silberstein, Rob Baird, James Young, Marion Ronan, Evelyn Beck, Rebecca Chopp, Michelle Fried-man, Angelika Bammer, Ellen Umansky, David Blumenthal, and Lynne Davidman. ...
Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unu... more Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unusually rich and engaged account of German Jewish modernity and its cultural production, its poetry and its intellectual life broadly conceived. And her account is gendered. It makes explicit the central role of German Jewish intellectual women in the production of German modernity. Hahn does this by focusing on the work and words, both public and private, that animated these women's cultural production. Hahn uses the figure of ''the Jewess Pallas Athena'' who comes to us via the poet Paul Celan as a way into and through this rich tradition. As Hahn explains, ''She [the Jewess Pallas Athena] accompanies German-Jewish history, from its start in the middle of the eighteenth century to the time after 1945 when Jewish women driven out of Germany dared to look back. Look back on a country in which they had been raised, whose language and culture they had shared. A country from which they had flown and to which they could never come home again'' (pp. 12-13). In other words Hahn begins with the earliest salonières and concludes her study at the end of the 1960s with the death of one of the last of the writing women in this tradition, the poet Margarete Susman. And, in the end, Hahn brings us back to where she began, connecting Susman intimately with the work of Paul Celan. As Hahn so powerfully demonstrates, the relationship between Celan and Susman itself painfully enacts the last breath of this cultural legacy. By looking carefully at some of the poems Celan wrote explicitly for Susman and the correspondences between them, Hahn shows how, together, Celan and Susman were able to mark the end of this legacy of German Jewish letters. It is fitting that the poetic muse at the heart of this book is Paul Celan. Celan's poetry marks the utter loss of this once vibrant culture even as his figure of the Jewess Pallas Athena is nevertheless still able to usher us into the lost world he mourns. As a literary scholar, Hahn enables her readers to enter into not only Celan's poetry but this broader literary and
Placing Ourselves is an unusual collection that brings together a wide range of scholars from Isr... more Placing Ourselves is an unusual collection that brings together a wide range of scholars from Israel, Europe, and the United States with a focus on historical memory from a variety of perspectives-sociological, historical, literary, artistic, and architectural. Like many anthologies especially on gender, this volume also grows out of a conference, in this case, an interdisciplinary gathering at Bar-Ilan University in January 2001. As the editors tell us in their introduction, it was the conference and its focus on the interplay between gender, place, and memory that inspired this publication. ''Different memories of different places and different gendered experiences provide the backdrop to understand the variation of Jewish life and identity. These places and experiences shade Jewish memories in a myriad of shades, forming the rainbow of colors of which modern Jewish life is composed'' (p. xix). This alluring statement frames our understanding of the conference and its mandate, although it is unfortunate that the editors never make clear the specific relationship between these goals and the volume before us. Regretfully, they never flesh out how differences of place, memory, and gender come together and are in conversation within modern Jewish life. In other words, we never learn about the conversations, the discussion within and between sessions and papers that took place at Bar-Ilan and might have helped readers who were not there understand how these fascinating essays are in conversation with each other. Instead, the editors have chosen more or less to allow the essays and the three sections of the volume to speak for themselves. Given this, they begin their introduction by describing the complexities of modern identity in general and modern Jewish identity formation in particular. As they explain, for Jews not only are there issues of ''who we are, where we come from and how we remember our past'' but also questions about ''choice'' (p. xix). As they explain, ''In certain cases, being Jewish is still a pivotal part of a person's self-definition. For others, it is but one of a
The Massachusetts Review, 2021
CrossCurrents, 1998
L'A. s'appuie sur l'oeuvre de E. Borowitz pour apprecier le lien entre judaisme rabbi... more L'A. s'appuie sur l'oeuvre de E. Borowitz pour apprecier le lien entre judaisme rabbinique et liberalisme. Pour lui, Borowitz lui offre un modele conciliant ces deux domaines. Son oeuvre lui donne un poids theologique et insuffle de l'autorite a son propre liberalisme mais un probleme surgit : celui de confondre le judaisme rabbinique avec le liberalisme. Finalement la vision du liberalisme prime et n'apporte pas de liberation, de justice et de protection. L'A. prend l'exemple du mariage en expliquant qu'on ne distingue plus le mariage juif du mariage liberal, ce dernier pouvant meme creer et perpetuer une forme de subordination, notamment en ce qui concerne le contrat sexuel implicite dans le mariage. Pour les femmes juives americaines d'aujourd'hui, l'heritage du liberalisme est difficile a assumer.
PRECIS:This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conf... more PRECIS:This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conference of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. I spoke these words not long after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. The theme of the gathering was "Revolutionary Love." I was invited to address this issue after I wrote a blog post raising questions about revolutionary love and the categories of race, religion, and ethnicity. Specifically, I wrote about these matters for scholars of religion engaged with the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Returning to these remarks in the Winter of 2020, the urgency of my concerns could not be any more relevant. What follows is, more or less, what I wrote then. My hope is that these reflections will resonate with some of the powerful words of a younger generation of scholars' works on issues of religion, ethnicity, and race—versi...
Kali Handelman interviews Laura Levitt about her new book, The Objects That Remain (Penn State Un... more Kali Handelman interviews Laura Levitt about her new book, The Objects That Remain (Penn State University Press, 2020).
Journal of Religion and Film, 2016
This essay addresses what Jewish Studies and Religion scholars have to contribute to cultural dis... more This essay addresses what Jewish Studies and Religion scholars have to contribute to cultural discourse about film. Through a careful reading of feminist critic Tania Modleski's essay, this article demonstrates some of the blindspots in film studies when it comes to depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. By addressing the ambivalent status of Jewishness in Modleski's work, the essay offers another way of reading Jewishness in not only the Jazz Singer and Crossing Delancy, but in critical discourse more generally. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol1/iss2/5 Almost the same but not white: the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction. It is a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of what is known and permissible with that which though known must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rule...
Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, 2009
He was a baker and a survivor, and he understood the power both of withholding bread and of shari... more He was a baker and a survivor, and he understood the power both of withholding bread and of sharing it. Fading fast, her father rallies enough to say, “Bebbski, you still want the challah recipe? Write it down ... I can’t bake one, but I can bake ten dozen. Take a sack of flour, two dozen eggs, about this much yeast ...” With this parting gift from her father, Deb goes to Berlin to perform her show. She adds the story about her father baking bread with the German prisoners to the scenario. Still the show feels incomplete. On a break, she enters a German bakery, smells the aroma of freshly baked bread, hears her father’s voice, and has a flash of inspiration: she will bake a loaf of bread during the show. “How many cups are there in a sack of flour?” she asks the German baker. This initiates a process in which she adjusts her father’s recipe to make it her own, laboriously making the translation from ten dozen to one. On stage, Deb achieves the perfect loaf, which finishes baking jus...
Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPA... more Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPACESOF REMEMBRANCE1. Archiving an Architecture of the Heart 2. Haunted by Memory: American Jewish Transformations 3. A House for an Uninhabitable Memory (The Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University) II. ISRAEL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY4. The Return of the Repressed 5. Racism and Ethics: Constructing Alternative History 6. "Don't Touch My Holocaust"-Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Holocaust Taboo III. TRANSGRESSING TABOOS7. Holocaust Toys: Pedagogy of Remembrance through Play8. The Nazi Occupation of the "White Cube": Piotr Uklan'ski's The Nazis and Rudolf Herz's Zugzwang 9. On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise IV. CURATING MEMORY10. Holocaust Icons: The Media of Memory11. Sense and/or Sensation: The Role of the Body in Holocaust Pedagogy Artists' Works A selection of works by artist...
for Susan Shapiro What happens as scholars of various disciplines increasingly write in the first... more for Susan Shapiro What happens as scholars of various disciplines increasingly write in the first person? (1) What does it mean for us to place ourselves, our embodied and historicized selves, in our work? I am interested in what transpires when we do this not just in our introductions, prefaces, or acknowledgements, but throughout an entire text. Given this turn to the first person point of view, what are we to make of the narrating of self, the self narratives that are present in our work and in the works of others? What comes to pass as these narratives become sedimented, when we can see the layers of self narratives presented over time? How do we write and rewrite our stories knowing that at least some of our readers already know some of these earlier tellings? With these questions in mind, I want to think about how we read the traces of the lives of other writers in an author's work and what the traces tell us, and to consider how we account for changes in our own positions...
... For crucial comments and suggestions I want to thank Sara Horowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Larry Sil... more ... For crucial comments and suggestions I want to thank Sara Horowitz, Daniel Boyarin, Larry Silberstein, Rob Baird, James Young, Marion Ronan, Evelyn Beck, Rebecca Chopp, Michelle Fried-man, Angelika Bammer, Ellen Umansky, David Blumenthal, and Lynne Davidman. ...