Jewish Studies Unit
The Jewish Studies Unit provides a designated home for work on Jews, Judaism, and Jewish studies, broadly conceived. This Unit also supports Jewish studies scholarship being represented in a wide range of units across the AAR. We welcome proposals for individual papers, papers sessions, and roundtables that address topics of concern to the broader community of religious studies scholars, from late antiquity to the present, in multiple global settings, and employing various methodologies. Pre-arranged session or panel proposals should represent a diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, and academic rank.
We are open to any proposals related to Jewish studies, although for 2025, we are particularly interested in the following topics:
- Teaching Judaism/Jewish studies in contemporary contexts
- Judaism, nationalism, and Jewish nationalism
- Transhistorical approaches to Jewish rituals and practices
- Judaism and the more-than-human world, including ecology, animal others, and/or the posthuman
- Jewish-Catholic relations, marking 60 years since Nostra Aetate
The goal of this Unit is to develop and expand the relationship between the study of Judaism and the broader study of religion. We work to meet this goal in three primary ways: • Methodologically • Topically • By cosponsorship with other Program Units. We engage in active conversation with methodologies in the study of religion by exploring the historical, social, aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural aspects of Judaism in its various contexts.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Dara Cooper | adcooper@email.unc.edu | - | View |
| Jennifer Caplan | caplanjr@ucmail.uc.edu | - | View |