Over the past few years, I’ve been working on co-editing a special issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, with my colleague and friend Laura Limonic. The issue is finally here!
Here’s a brief excerpt from our introduction, “Contemplating Death”:
“There is, of course, nothing particularly Jewish about death, that ultimate universalizing force. But today, several years following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, and in the midst of the 2020 swelling of support for Black Lives Matter, a worldwide activist movement driven by grief, alongside the devastating and still in-progress global Coronavirus pandemic, the puzzles of what Jewishness and Judaism, in their many configurations and iterations, can teach us about death, and what attending closely to death, as well as its close companions, mourning and grief, can teach us about Jewishness and Judaism, have particular urgency. As numerous historians and scholars recognize, it was in times of great upheaval, including around the Crusades and the Black Death, and its attendant massacres, that various now widely recognized Jewish customs and rituals surrounding death, mourning, and memorialization were crystallized. 2 This contemporary moment, then, seems like the right time to rethink what death—and its economic, material, social, ideological, and emotional contexts and circumstances—can mean for Jews and the world around us.
This special issue, edited by a sociologist and a literary and visual culture scholar, is not just multidisciplinary but transdisciplinary. It includes essays incorporating scholarly research and methodology culled from Latin@ studies, Rabbinics, film studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. The creative compositions include photography, comics, the short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction writing.
By bringing together explorations of Jewish death and loss, sometimes as incontrovertible fact and sometimes as metaphor, sometimes in a communal and sometimes individual sense, from the standpoint of those who have lost and from the standpoint of those afraid of losing, through traditional and secular frameworks, and articulated in a multitude of formats and modalities, we hope this volume, whether held in your hands or scrolled on a screen, will serve as an object of contemplation and curiosity, an instrument for bonding together learning, thinking through, and feeling.
To attend to what is often unspeakable, unknowable, or simply difficult to convey is an act of faith, and it is also a way of assuming responsibility. 3 We hope that, in assembling a chorus of voices, concentrating, each in their own way, on what is more easily put to the side, disguised, or avoided completely, this edited volume will suggest new ways of being faithful—not just to the living, the ailing, and the grieving, but also to the dead once among us.”
Read the full introduction here: “Introduction: Contemplating Death”
See the full issue here