AnniversaryThe 50th Anniversary Issue: Issue: FALL 2018 New Vistas in Jewish Studies FORUM: Five Decades of New Vistas The 50th Anniversary Issue: New Vistas in Jewish Studies FALL 2018 16 Blurring Boundaries 30 Beyond Buzzwords 42 Pathways In Read AJS Perspectives online at associationforjewishstudies.org 2 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | FALL 2018 From the Editor(s) 6 From the President 8 From the Executive Director 10 Blurring Torah Study, Jewishly 17 Boundaries Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg Can Paul Come to the AJS? 20 Jill Hicks-Keeton A Palimpsest: On Judeo-Islamic 22 and Israel-Palestine Studies Mostafa Hussein A Jewish Studies in Harness 25 Saul Noam Zaritt From French Guiana to Hasidic Montreal 28 Jessica Roda Beyond New Vistas in Rabbinics 31 Buzzwords Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Jewish Studies from Edge to Center 34 Chris Silver Found in Translation 36 Hamza M. Zafer My Heart Is in the East … 38 Where Is Jewish Studies? Lior Sternfeld Fifty: A View from the Middle 40 James Adam Redfield Pathways In the Weeds 42 In Adrienne Krone Drawing My Jewish Studies Journey 44 Sarah Lightman A Sense of Community 47 Mijal Bitton Knock, Knock! It’s Diversity at the 49 Jewish Studies Door! Michael A. Figueroa From Old Yiddish to Modern Mentorship 52 Annegret Oehme Forum: Five Decades of New Vistas 54 AJS Perspectives: Editors President Christine Hayes (ז"ל) The Magazine Jonathan M. Hess University of Carolina at Chapel Hill Yale University of the Association Laura S. Lieber Vice President / Membership for Jewish Studies Duke University and Outreach Please direct correspondence to: Jeffrey Veidlinger Editorial Board Association for Jewish Studies University of Michigan Carol Bakhos 15 West 16th Street University of California, Los Angeles New York, NY 10011 Vice President / Program Samantha Baskind T: 917.606.8249 Noam Pianko Cleveland State University F: 917.606.8222 University of Washington [email protected] Zachary Braiterman Syracuse University Vice President / Publications associationforjewishstudies.org Robin Judd Michael Brenner The Ohio State University AJS Perspectives is published American University bi-annually by the Association Alanna Cooper for Jewish Studies. Secretary / Treasurer Case Western Reserve University Kenneth Koltun-Fromm The Association for Jewish Studies Lesleigh Cushing Haverford College is an affiliate of the Center for Colgate University Jewish History. Past President Nathaniel Deutsch Pamela S. Nadell © Copyright 2018 Association for University of California, Santa Cruz Jewish Studies ISSN 1529-6423 American University Ken Koltun-Fromm AJS Perspectives reserves the right Haverford College AJS Staff to reject advertisements or other Adam Mendelsohn Warren Hoffman items not consonant with the goals University of Cape Town Executive Director and purposes of the organization. Copy may be condensed or Ophir Münz-Manor Michelle Katz rejected because of length or style. Open University of Israel Membership and Conference Content Manager AJS Perspectives disclaims respon- Eva Mroczek sibility for statements made by University of California at Davis Karin Kugel advertisers and contributors. AJS Perspectives Managing Editor; Devin Naar Website Manager University of Washington Amy Ronek Riv-Ellen Prell Marketing, Communications, University of Minnesota and Public Engagement Manager Cover: Joshua Schreier Front: “Yusuf running away from Heather Turk Vassar College Zulaykha” from Yusuf and Zulaykha, Director of Events and Operations by Abd al-Rahman Jani, Persia, 1853. Jacqueline Vayntrub JTSL MS 1534, f.89. Courtesy of The Amy Weiss Brandeis University Library of The Jewish Theological Grants and Professional Seminary. Yael Zerubavel Development Manager Back: “Yusuf and Zulaykha holding Rutgers University hands” from Yusuf and Zulaykha, by Abd al-Rahman Jani, Persia, 1853. JTSL Managing Editor MS 1534, f.84. Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary. Karin Kugel Inside Cover Background: From Graphic Designers the Duke of Sussex’s Portuguese Carrie Chatterson Studio Pentateuch. Lisbon, Portugal, 1480-1490 CE. Add MS 15283, f. 42r. © The British Amanda Morante Wolin Library Board. 4 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | FALL 2018 Contributors Laura S. Lieber Christine Hayes Warren Hoffman Rebecca Scharbach Jill Hicks-Keeton Wollenberg Mostafa Hussein Saul Noam Zaritt Jessica Roda Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Chris Silver Hamza M. Zafer Lior Sternfeld James Adam Redfield Adrienne Krone Sarah Lightman (Photo credit: Madeleine Zimmermann) Mijal Bitton Michael A. Figueroa Annegret Oehme Michael A. Meyer Eric Meyers Marsha Rozenblit Ellen M. Umansky Judith R. Baskin Yael Zerubavel Aryeh Cohen Susan L. Einbinder Adena Tanenbaum Flora Cassen Beth S. Wenger AJS PERSPECTIVES | FALL 2018 | 5 From the Editor(s) Dear Colleagues, This issue occupies a liminal space: like the Roman are in Jewish Studies, not all have chosen god Janus, it turns its gaze simultaneously to the traditional academic careers. In their personal and past and the future. It looks back at the history professional diversity, they also speak to the of our association, surveying its five decades of development of our field since 1968. Contributors robust experimentation and energetic growth; were asked to reflect on their pathway into Jewish and it anticipates some of what may lie ahead in Studies, to consider the current state of the field, the decades to come. In conceiving of this issue, and to lay out an agenda for where they hoped it and I strove to embrace the might move. The voices, stories, topics, and (ז“ל) Jonathan Hess AJS’s rich half century of history without succumb- sources given space here display the amazing ing to nostalgia. Our ambition was to capture in mosaic of emergent Jewish Studies, even as they print the intellectual vibrancy that propelled, and also make clear that Jewish Studies still has a lot of will continue to propel, the Association for Jewish work to do. Within the span of Jewish history, fifty Studies from its founding moments to today. years is a blink; and if “fifty is the new twenty,” surely our field still young and vigorous, occasion- By design, this issue is emphatically not a ally awkward and gangly, sometimes robustly retrospective. Jonathan and I entitled this issue self-confident and sometimes deeply self-interro- “New Vistas in Jewish Studies” precisely because gating. Such scholarly self-consciousness is no we shared an excitement about where Jewish doubt for the best. Studies is going. We recognized that Jewish Studies does not exist apart from those writers and While the Forum section, entitled “Fifty Years of thinkers who constitute the field, and so the longer New Vistas,” tacks more explicitly to the past, we essays in this issue highlight the diversity of also wanted to capture the forward momentum of scholars and scholarship energizing Jewish Studies the field, albeit from a historical angle. As with the at the present moment. The authors are academics essays, these pieces are self-reflective, but they and public intellectuals, all of whom are relative offer the voices of scholars who were, at different newcomers to the field. Many of these voices AJS anniversaries, themselves the future of Jewish understand themselves to be, in some fashion, at Studies. We asked scholars who were themselves the margins of Jewish Studies—or, as Jonathan and at the very beginnings of their careers—graduate I thought of them, at leading edges. Each author students or new faculty—when they were just received her or his PhD within the last decade getting to know the AJS and the field of Jewish (since the AJS’s fortieth anniversary), but while all Studies. We supplied them with conference programs from years past as aides-mémoire, and 6 | AJS PERSPECTIVES | FALL 2018 Laura S. Lieber asked them to imagine themselves back at that a call for a new team of coeditors. This method of moment. What, we asked, was exciting or energiz- choosing coeditors was itself new, and reflects the ing then—intellectually or professionally? How have increasing openness of our organization. We these avenues of inquiry or activism unfolded over received a gratifying number of strong applica- time since? In short, what were the “new vistas” in tions, and are pleased to announce that the new their formative decades, and what can we appreci- editors will be Chaya Halberstam (King’s University ate about those moments now, from where we College at Western University) and Mira Sucharov presently are? (Carleton University), our first Canada-based editorial team. This issue of AJS Perspectives is rich with more personal memories, as well. It is the last issue I take comfort in my confidence that Jonathan reflecting the mind, spirit, and insightfulness of my would be delighted with this issue—with its kaleido- coeditor before his untimely death in April 2018. scope of voices, visions, and (yes) perspectives— Jonathan’s fingerprints linger on these pages, as and that he would be thrilled by our successors. I does his intellectual imprint: in his mentorship, as know that Jonathan shared my pride in this noted in essays by colleagues and students with publication, and in the ways that the AJS is continu- whom he worked; in the breadth and scope of the ing to push all of us to work and think and interact. scholars represented in its pages, whose voices he As the AJS turns fifty, I realize how young that is— championed; and in the way the entire issue was just a little older than me, and a little younger than conceived and framed. Our coeditorship was a Jonathan. I will always remain grateful for my three delightful partnership, complementary and and a half years as coeditor of this publication, and reciprocal at every level. In the weeks after his I know the magazine—like the organization of which death, I had to accept that while I could see the it is a part—will go from strength to strength. issues on which he and I had worked together With all anticipation for the future, and in gratitude through to completion—with his cheerful, subver- for the gifts of the past, sive voice in my ear and, in the form of “track changes,” sometimes before my eyes—I could not Laura S.