April 4, 12 PM: Larisa Reznik, "Our Rosenzweig, Ourselves: Or, What Does Gender Critique Want?"

The UC Davis Jewish Studies Program is pleased to announce the second event in the New Directions in Jewish Studies 2023 Lecture Series: "Our Rosenzweig, Ourselves: Or, What Does Gender Critique Want?" with Larisa Reznik and Mara Benjamin, responding, Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 12 PM PDT via Zoom. Please find a poster, abstract, and registration link below.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: This lecture looks at the history of scholarly attempts to talk about the gender politics of Rosenzweig's classic text, The Star of Redemption. In particular, Rosenzweig's account of revelation and the community constituted around it has been read as everything from patriarchal, dominative, and homosocial; to casually sexist; to queer; to evincing something like a feminist ethics of care; to something that can be explained (away) by Rosenzweig's social, historical, or exegetical context. It's not especially surprising that people disagree on how and why to read a text. But I suggest that the particular contours of this disagreement are indicative of a larger issue in the fields of feminist studies and modern Jewish thought. I use the story-telling maneuvers of these attempts, and the difficulties embodied in their contradictions, to speak about the gender politics of The Star and diagnose a broader challenge in these fields; namely, that the goals of feminist critique are many and often incommensurable. For example, the desire for greater inclusion of women may sit uneasily with the goal of abolishing gender or the demand to do away with gender binaries. In short, we don't know if we want more gender, less gender, different genders, or something else altogether. In analyzing the stories scholars tell (or refuse to tell) about the gender politics of this classic Jewish text, I suggest that this productive disagreement needn't paralyze Jewish feminist thought and ought not be used as an excuse for scholars who claim not to work on gender to avoid addressing the gender politics of philosophical texts. Instead, I use the case study of Rosenzweig and his readers to reflect on questions of method in Jewish thought.

Bio: Larisa Reznik is Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at The University of Chicago.  Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Pomona College. Her research and teaching focus on modern Jewish thought, political and social theory, religion, ethics, and politics, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Modern Jewish Thought and the Politics of Political Theology.

Register here.