The Body as Text: The Jewish Body in Cultural, Medical, and Spiritual Contexts

3 units

What is a Jew? Though Jews have long been termed “the people of the book,” that is, a religious and cultural group defined by its textual traditions and spiritual practices, Jews are, above all, people. And people have bodies. As a means of bringing together the textual and the bodily, this course will take an embodied approach to Jewish history. Stretching from antiquity to the present, we will consider the relationship between the text and the body, between the Jewish community and the embodied individual, and the ways in which Jewish bodies have been classed, gendered, racialized, and marked as other in a variety of settings and by a variety of actors. Studying the body invites us to consider the intersections between biology, history, heritage, faith, and identity. Throughout the semester, we will look at texts from a wide variety of disciplines, including history, literary studies, religious studies, social criticism, disability studies, gender and sexual studies, as well as films, images, and other representations that will help us understand the Jewish experience as a bodily phenomenon. Understanding the Jewish body will also serve as a tool for understanding other bodies—variously classed, raced, and gendered—and seeing all bodies as human and connected. As a writing intensive course, this process will work two ways. Together, we will encounter readings that consider the relationship between body and text, but we will also endeavor on the act of creating our own texts that consider the relationship between body and word.