(Photo)Shooting: Judaism, Violence, and Whether to Gaze at Death

The invention of new mass media visual technologies – including photography, video, and social media – has raised significant questions regarding the ethics of “viewing the dead.” Should we watch the videos of the death of George Floyd or protesters shot by ICE in Minneapolis? Should photographs of children killed in school shootings appear in newspapers? In this paper I address these urgent questions by turning to the way photography has been used to depict a narrative of Jewish death as tragic and violent. These images of death contrast with Judaism’s general reluctance to visually engage with corpses, whether in the traditions of Jewish art or in death care rituals. By developing a more positive aesthetic of Jewish death – one that depicts care, solidarity, and community - we can begin to imagine a visual culture of death as caring in the face of violence, as creating solidarity in response to oppression.