Hizky Shoham, The Emotional Turn in Jewish Studies

Описание: Joseph and Gertie Schwartz Memorial Lecture

Hizky Shoham (Bar-Ilan University)

The Emotional Turn in Jewish Studies

Do Jews have a distinct emotional life? This talk will examine the current influence of theories, questions, and concepts associated with “the emotional turn” in Jewish Studies. It will highlight the opportunities and new research avenues that arise from this trend while critically analyzing potential pitfalls, particularly the danger of retreating into Jewish exceptionalism.

Hizky Shoham is the head of the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; and a co-director of the Bar-Ilan’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He also serves as a research fellow in the Kogod Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem. His work encompasses the anthropological history and cultural sociology of Zionism, the Yishuv, Israel, and the Jewish world, as well as cultural theory. His publications include Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Israel Celebrates: Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Brill, 2017), and numerous articles. The recent book Why Bar and Bat Mitzvah? Gender, Spectacle, and Temporality in Modern Jewish Cultures won the Goldberg Prize in 2022 and was published in Hebrew by the Open University of Israel Press. Its English translation is forthcoming from De Gruyter in the fall of 2024.