This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t yet happened—at least not fully. At bottom, the modest version of a swerve it performs is to ask: what do we mean when we say, “Jewish Studies,” when we conjoin its component terms, when a field takes up its past and projects its future, when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but project? JS offers a unique lens through which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, though it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and ... More

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t yet happened—at least not fully. At bottom, the modest version of a swerve it performs is to ask: what do we mean when we say, “Jewish Studies,” when we conjoin its component terms, when a field takes up its past and projects its future, when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but project? JS offers a unique lens through which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, though it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances in respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. JSAC reconceives Jewish Studies as an agent of that force Jacques Derrida calls “leverage” both in relation to the humanities and to its own multiple possibilities, its pluralities of position, practice, and method. As one of several images marshaled, the lever functions not just to theorize or conjure JS but to figure it, to recast the enterprise through a series of elastic and catalytic tropes. In that way, the book seeks to harness the dialogical possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which JS is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.