A Scholarly Feast-Enjoy!
PERSPECTIVE A Scholarly Feast—Enjoy! I am about to reveal one of the best kept secrets of the Jewish world. It's not simply what goes on at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish...
...But of course it is not the hotel that I'm touting, but the two days of meetings, which consist of wall-to-wall lectures on the widest variety of subjects of Jewish concern...
...Finally, attendance should be encouraged by planning a few—but not too many—sessions especially for people who are not professional scholars.—H.S...
...By this time, it was time for lunch...
...Cohen, on the other hand, stressed the need to consider what acts result from chimeric hostility...
...it is not simply the chimeric hostility of the Nazis that horrified the world, but the death chambers themselves that defined the nature of the horror...
...Other examples: "Franz Boas and the Anthropological Study of Jews in America, 1903-1942" by New York University's Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and "Lexical Cohesion in Biblical Poetry" by the University of Maryland's Adele Berlin...
...Feldman cited the riots in Alexandria, Egypt, at the turn of the era (38 C.E...
...Of course," I replied, "I'm a Jewish feminist and editor of moment magazine...
...2) xenophobic hostility, based on an exaggerated fear of a perceived threat from Jews or Judaism...
...according to this slander, the Jews caused the Black Death by poisoning the wells...
...Bring out more of the senior scholars...
...To understand Jewish hope, he said, we must first understand the history of Jewish despair: ' 'Only when we become painfully aware of the historical depths of Jewish hopelessness will we begin to realize that Jewish hope is not a historical given, but a historical problem...
...Each session consists of three or four papers with time for questions and responses...
...The three respondents were soon joined from the floor by Yeshiva University's Louis Feldman (Cohen's teacher and mentor), who argued that Langmuir's definition is too narrow...
...The planners should also take the initiative in organizing a few sessions on larger, more general scholarly issues...
...If there were few agreed conclusions, we learned much about the subject and the complexities of getting an intellectual hold on it...
...can attend...
...You can even jump from session to session, as I do...
...It's not simply what goes on at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, but that anyone—like you...
...I note a glaring omission from the program, which should surely be corrected next year: There was not a single paper on biblical archaeology...
...an example of the second type is the claim that Jews control the world banking system or that they control the press...
...as anti-Semitic in origin...
...In her presidential talk, McGill University's Ruth Wisse reported that the association now has over 1,100 members, of whom more than 400 attended the annual meeting...
...Send S20 ($25 if you're a full-time professional) to the AJS at Widener Library M, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, and you're in...
...The Young Turks who started the new organization—Nahum Sarna, Jacob Neusner, Baruch Levine—are now themselves senior scholars...
...The format varies...
...The chair asked me if I knew what session this was...
...Nevertheless, "to realize that we are not the first to whom despair was alien" may be "a small and modest step toward hope itself...
...The chair said attendance was confined to women and that I must leave...
...To make sure you're on the mailing list, join the Association for Jewish Studies...
...Then someone suggested I should be excluded not because I was a man but because I was a journalist...
...At last year's meeting, which I attended, there were as many as six simultaneous sessions from which to choose on such disparate subjects as "Commemorative Rituals After the Holocaust," "Medieval Intellectual History," "Kabbalah and Symbolism," "Biblical Poetry," "Anti-Semitism," ' 'Sholem Aleichem in America," ' 'Modern Ideologies and Orthodox Rabbis," "Women's Judaic Studies" and "Ideology and Response to Tragedy in Modern Hebrew Literature...
...For Langmuir, only the last type of hostility is true anti-Semitism...
...History was imbued with supreme meaning," but its meaning was to be found beneath its "manifest surface...
...It will be the 20th anniversary of the AJS...
...The next annual meeting will be a special one...
...When the session reconvened, I discreetly stayed away...
...Yet Yerushalmi was "under no illusion that a history of hope will give us any solutions to our problems...
...The AJS originated in reaction to the exclusivity (membership by invitation only) of the American Academy for Jewish Research, then controlled by such major lights as Saul Lieberman, Harry Wolfson and Solomon Zeitlin...
...Yet none of them gave papers at last year's meeting...
...the degradation of Jewry, a body of honor...
...I was the only man in the room...
...Hope was to be found in what Yerushalmi called, for want of a better term, a midrash of history, a particular view of history he traced to biblical religion...
...Anyone can join...
...For these ridiculously low membership fees, you'll also receive the AJS Review, a scholarly annual, and the semi-annual AJS Newsletter...
...As a scholarly-meeting junkie (I've attended meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the International Society for Biblical Literature, the World Congress of Jewish Studies, the International Biblical Archaeology Congress and even the Studiorum Novi Testamentum Societas), I may be permitted a few suggestions: There were too many papers by graduate students and junior scholars...
...But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than another woman said that if I were ordered to leave, she too would leave...
...An example of the first type is the hostility of certain early Christians to certain Jews of the time...
...But you will learn about the world of Jewish scholarship—in the best, disinterested sense...
...Each year in early December, the AJS holds this meeting at the grande dame of Boston hotels, the Copley Plaza, where you can enjoy fin de Steele elegance for S50 a night at the convention rate...
...You'll also be eligible to register for the 20th anniversary scholarly bash next December...
...Several of the more unusual and esoteric papers turned out to be surprisingly interesting—for example, "The Influence of Women on the Design, of the American Synagogue," by Northwestern University's Rochelle Berger Elstein (how synagogue plans changed in response to women's organizations, women's activities and their increased leisure time so as to incorporate designs for meeting rooms and arts-oriented clubs...
...When I entered, toward the end of their session, everyone laughed...
...After canvassing the history of Jewish despair, Yerushalmi concluded that, subjectively, for the generations that experienced them, the traumas of the past were comparable to what this generation experienced in the Shoah...
...Not programmatic or political, mind you—you won't learn how to run an art auction to raise money for the synagogue, or how to interest teenagers in services, or even about the intricacies of the recent Jewish Agency elections...
...One of the most moving talks was given by Columbia University's Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who spoke on the history of Jewish hope, a history that has not yet been written...
...Cohen argued that the term anti-Semitism is so vague and ill-defined that it is worthless and should not be used...
...I caused quite a reaction when I walked into a meeting of the Women's Caucus...
...There's plenty of time to meet the scholars (including during two kosher dinners at the hotel), to chat and even occasionally to gossip...
...and (3) chimeric hostility, which has no basis whatever in fact...
...Nevertheless, I share their concern that women be recruited and paid equally with men, that their problems with Jewish ritual and theology be given a fair hearing, and that they be free from harassment, sexual or otherwise (even from professed Jewish feminists...
...This position seemed to garner some support until someone else noted that moment's managing editor, Charlotte Anker, had been in the room since the beginning of the session and had clearly identified herself as coming from moment when each of the attendees identified herself, yet the question of allowing journalists in was raised only when a man entered...
...The other two types of hostility are common to different peoples and are not peculiar to hostility against Jews...
...This type of hostility began only in the 12th century and culminated in the Holocaust...
...mundane victories, a sign of error rather than truth...
...At the session on anti-Semitism, Professor Gavin Lang-muir (who is not Jewish) presented a major paper analyzing hostility toward Jews, which he divided into three categories: (1) realistic hostility, based on antagonistic positions taken by Jews...
...From such a perspective, the triumphs of empires could be viewed as transient episodes...
...I hope to hear them all at the 20th anniversary bash...
...its suffering, a mark of its Chosenness...
...Langmuir's presentation led to a heated, but civil, debate by three designated respondents—New York University's Robert Chazan, Hebrew Union College's Michael Meyer and the Jewish Theological Seminary's Shaye Cohen...
...Murmurs of support for this position were heard around the room...
...an example of the third type is the charge that Jews deliberately caused the Black Death, the 14th-century plague that killed a third of the population of central Europe...
...The dates are December 18-20, 1988...
...For students, it's only S12.50...
Vol. 13 • March 1988 • No. 1
