Untethered from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability, a nonfoundational Jewish studies seeks a Jewishness that is provisional, critical, and constructive. In this talk, Berman explores how the law, especially its practices of comparison and analogy, may offer a guide to such a nonfoundational approach. At the same time, she asks whether current-day claims about Jews and their safety are, in their own way, similarly nonfoundational, verified not by empiricism but rather by critical and constructive uses of Jewishness.
Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul & Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and the director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution (Princeton, 2020), as well as Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago, 2015) and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (California, 2009). Her forthcoming book project examines the legal categories of citizenship and American Jewry.
Co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program
LOCATION: Wolf Center, 623 Williams Hill