The papers in this session explore the lives and afterlives of Jewish spirits and ghosts, selves and past selves, ideas and ideologies. The papers represent a cross-disciplinary and multivocal approach to critical issues in Jewish Studies, including mourning, disability, communication, social and parasocial relationships, transformation, transition, and belonging. By looking at texts and traditions that range from the rabbinic to the hyper-modern this session will offer new and innovative discursive pathways into discussions of identity and personhood.
Death and mourning rituals are among the most persistent and culturally-distinctive Jewish practices today. Yet the early rabbinic concepts of death that produced many of these practices, including care for the deceased body and sitting shiva, bear little resemblance to those of the contemporary West. Today, life and death are boundaried states: death marks the end of agency, awareness, and relationality. The Talmud reflects a cosmology in which the boundaries between life and death are far more porous: The dead are dynamic beings who retain sentience, agency, and affective capacity, while mourners undergo ritual restrictions that render them temporarily “death-like,” aligning their bodily experiences with that of the deceased. Engaging rabbinic texts alongside contemporary theories of animacy, affect, and disability, this paper argues that rabbinic cosmology offers an alternative framework for understanding bodily autonomy that challenges the modern equation of mobility, independence, and productivity with the conditions for human life.
The supposed rabbinic condemnation of gossip occurs because the rabbis (both real and fictive) are themselves engaging in gossip (although it is dressed up as dispute and story telling) and because there is a strong homology between the structure of gossip and the mechanisms we use to keep the dead present in our community. In the simplest sense: gossip is a dialogue between two or more people about someone who is not there. Similarly, all discussion of the dead occurs between two people about someone (necessarily) absent.
Gossip, while hardly democratic, is a popular method for social introjection (i.e. maintaining the dead,) one that Jewish authorities have tried (and failed) to harness and control; an examination of their efforts and anxieties will help us understand the role gossip plays as a techne for determining the people who are part of our future, even after they are gone.
This paper traces some of the experiences of trans and nonbinary converts to Judaism in the contemporary United States, looking specifically at an online queer digital yeshiva, Yeshiva Yavne. I argue, on the basis of around a year and a half of digital ethnographic research and interviews, that trans converts uniquely navigate simultaneous processes of gender transition and religious conversion, disidentifying with both Jewish history and identity, still engaging with them for the sake of rendering Jewish tradition more inclusive—in terms of gender, race, and disability. This presentation argues that trans converts eschew rigid gendered/religious binaries within a variety of Jewish denominations, “queering” and “transing” Torah study in order to shape Jewish tradition in productive, justice-oriented ways, all in service of working to bring about “olam ha’ba,” or “the world-to-come.” Trans converts offer exciting challenges to contemporary American Judaisms, and their attempts to rework it deserve study.