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 2026, we are particularly interested in the following topics:
- Technologies, objects, and cultures of Jewish memory and transmission in dialogue with the presidential theme of “Future/s”
- Critical Jewish studies: past, present, and future
- Thematic and/ or transhistorical approaches to Jews and “conspiracies”
- Populist movements, authoritarianism, and Jewish populisms
- 2026 will be the 75th anniversary of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath. We welcome papers or panels engaging with the text in conversation with climate crisis; interreligious eco-theologies; disability justice, rest, and the refusal of work; future/s of the Sabbath and the “sabbatical animal”; and pedagogy.
- For a possible session Co-Sponsored with Religion in Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean, we also seek respondents to two recently published books: Marc Herman, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World (Penn, 2025); Noam Sienna, Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana, 2025). Potential respondents can address cultural exchange, book history, or other issues raised by either or both books.
The goal of this Unit is to develop and expand the relationship between Jewish studies 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 religious studies by exploring the historical, social, aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural aspects of Judaism in its various contexts.