Knowledge is Power: On Writing and Responding Together

Abstract

Knowledge is Power:On Writing and Responding Together Lila Corwin Berman (bio), Kate Rosenblatt (bio), and Ronit Y. Stahl (bio) Reading these eight full and generous responses to our article reminded us of the benefits of collaborative scholarship. Were we to rewrite our article now, after having digested our colleagues' responses, we would undoubtedly clarify, rework, and change certain sections. And, happily, the scholarly pursuit continues beyond the publication of an article, so we trust we will have the opportunity to continue to refine and reconsider our argument in light of these illuminating responses to it. I. FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE We start by invoking the benefits of collaborative scholarship not only to offer necessary gratitude to our colleagues but also to reflect on our own process of knowledge production. We produced this article—and now this response—by committing ourselves to collaboration. And we will be the first to admit that this kind of rigorous collaboration has not been the common coin in any of our prior scholarly experiences, so we had to learn how to do it on the fly. Indeed, our collaborative method is constitutive of the intellectual claims we are making and, thus, warrants discussion as we reflect on this set of responses. When all of this started in the summer of 2018, we found each other on a common thread on Facebook. We knew each other already—Rosenblatt and Stahl attended graduate school at the University of Michigan together, and Berman had met both when she was a fellow at Michigan's Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. As our friends and colleagues started to parse Hannah Dreyfus's reporting about Steven Cohen, the three of us began to puzzle out (first as comments to threads and then over Messenger) what we perceived as a difference between the individual dimensions of Cohen's then-alleged sexual predation and the structural framework in which his scholarship, power, and authority rested. At the time, one of us was a full professor (Berman), one a postdoctoral research fellow (Stahl), and one a contingent faculty member (Rosenblatt). We were aware of our own power differentials, and as we thought about writing something for a broad audience, we appreciated the way that collaboration could amplify our voices and shield us from certain risks of speaking alone. [End Page 243] Over the course of a morning, we moved from Facebook to a Google document and started to write together. We took the skeletal framework we had crafted over Chat and expanded it, writing over one another, stopping to ask questions about what a word or phrase meant, correcting or rephrasing one another's prose. It was dizzying and exhilarating. In motion, we were building trust in one another's thought process and crafting a collective form of knowledge. When the editors of American Jewish History asked if we would expand our Forward article, we each hesitated. By then, between us, there were new jobs to start, books to finish, and family obligations to fulfill. But we also knew that what we had written for the Forward only skimmed the surface of applying historical understanding to the structures of power that delimited Jewish continuity discourse. We decided to meet in person to draft a new article in the summer of 2019. First around a seminar table at the University of Pennsylvania's Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and then around Berman's dining room table, we sat together, computers open to a shared Google document. We talked and typed, debated points, went down research rabbit holes and came back out with references, some used and others left on the cutting room floor. It felt freeing at times—when one of us could not think of the right word or turn of phrase, another one would supply it. But it was also constraining to have to listen to voices outside of one's own head and to get such immediate feedback. In the process, we learned that we had some very different perspectives, depending on our own experiences with Jewish communal pressures and our own encounters with scholarly conversations and research. We saw, as Harriet Hartman writes here, how "our personal...