Young scholars are re-exploring through contemporary thought, practice and tradition, politics,literature, film, and culture. Beth Elohim invites some of these scholars to discuss their cutting-edge work, in dialogue with Rabbi Daniel Bronstein, as part of our Bagel Brunch series.

The Decline and Revival of the Jewish Body Through the Lens of Jewish Literature

Beverly Bailis
Examining the metaphor of the body via Hebrew and Yiddish iterary texts, Ms. Bailis centers on the Tehiyyah, or “revival” literary period, an era of profound crisis and transformation panning roughly the last two decades of the 19th century up ntil the 1920’s. This epoch heralded the end of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and its rationalistic worldview, as well as the beginnings of modern Jewish nationalism, the intensification of pogroms, and the first three waves of immigration to Palestine. At the very same time, Jewish writers generated new literary strategies to meet the demands for Jewish self-identification and new ways of looking at human beings, at gender, and the body–both the collective Jewish body as well as the individual body.

$5 class fee