Abstract: In this article I present a case study of one of the most massively popular, hugely expensive, and globally influential works of culture ever made, the video game The Last of Us, Part 2 (2020), with particular attention to its creators’ deliberate effort to offer “Jewish representation” to its audiences. I survey contemporary discourse about “Jewish representation” and Jewishness in video games, and attend in detail to the strategies of this particular game’s creators for including Jewish characters and content. Drawing on Adam Y. Stern’s recent “theological-political genealogy” of “survival,” I demonstrate that when a corporation spends hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a cultural product for a global audience, even what that product’s creators earnestly intend as “Jewish representation” can, instead, reflect Christian hegemony.

Abstract: On June 11, 1771, a group of thieves broke into a private house in Chelsea, a village outside London. The event ended with the killing of one of the servants in addition to the theft itself. Soon enough it became known that the perpetrators were Jewish and the case became a cause célèbre. The perpetrators were apprehended five months later, put on trial, and sentenced to death. The case attracted wide public attention and resonated into the nineteenth century. What made it a catalyst of such broad public agitation? I argue that it became a compelling case because it effectively featured the contradictions that were embedded in the contemporary imagery of the Jew—specifically of the masculine Jew—oscillating between an assimilated gentleman and a perilous criminal who poses a constant threat to the English woman. At the same time, and relatedly, it touched on the borders of Englishness. The question of whether Jews could be part of English civil society became a contested issue in the second half of the eighteenth century, a debate that reflected the uncertainty of the definitions of both Jewishness and English identity. As we shall see, gender and masculinity were hotspots of vulnerability for both concerns, and they figured prominently in depictions of the Chelsea case.

Abstract: Kest made early marriage possible for the Ashkenazi Jewish elite and had a significant impact on the role of women where it was practiced. It was standard in Ashkenazi Jewish society for centuries. This was not an accident. It was part of the “toolbox” of a community that developed creative responses to challenges in its environment. This is despite the fact that it was the total opposite to many of the characteristics of ancient Judaism. Nonetheless, it was regarded as one more element of Jewish tradition. Ultimately, it was abandoned, but the tradition of kest, at least in the use of the term, lives on.

Abstract: The vernacularization of Hebrew speech was an integral component of the Zionist conception of national revival. In this article I explore some of the ways in which the discourse of regeneration and the figure of the “muscle Jew” shaped ideas about the sonic component of Hebrew speech, through the case of study of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. I show that Jabotinsky took speech, and Hebrew speech in particular, to be a potent site of regeneration, viewed as the cultivation of corporeal sensitivity to form. I trace his invention of a sonic counterpart to the muscle Jew, and demonstrate how, employing a conception of speech sounds as manifesting qualities of speakers, he constructed an ideological program for regenerative Hebrew speech that challenged the grammatical prescriptions of mainstream revivalists and included observations of and prescriptions about patterns of Hebrew speech down to the level of phonemes and phonological processes.

Abstract: In this article I argue that the transformation of the ḥeder (the traditional Jewish study room) in modern Hebrew literature from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century reflects a profound shift in Jewish identity, encapsulating the tensions between tradition and modernity. I explore how the ḥeder , once a site of rigorous religious education, evolves into a potent symbol of individual creativity and self-expression in the works of Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, Dvora Baron, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. By situating this literary transformation within the broader currents of secularization and European modernism, I illuminate how these authors grapple with the dual forces of cultural continuity and change. I conclude with a discussion of Youval Shimoni’s 1999 novel Ḥeder , which suggests that while the ḥeder ’s function has changed, the room continues to serve as a space for introspection and artistic creation in a world that is increasingly uncertain.

Abstract: In this article I identify a trend in the mainstream of Israeli literature of the second decade of the twenty-first century, namely, nostalgia for a lost anticipation for the future signaled in the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestinians in the early 1990s. I focus on five novels published in the years 2014–15, by some of the most central and successful novelists in Israel, that express the way the Israeli cultural elite is haunted by the specter of the lost future implied in the vision of the Oslo Accords. The novels are: A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (2014); All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan (2014); Judas by Amos Oz (2014); The Extra by A. B. Yehoshua (2014); and The Third by Yishai Sarid (2015). These novels try to relive a lost anticipation for the future by looking back to the past.

Abstract: The 1920s and 30s witnessed an explosion of interest in Spinoza among Zionist intellectuals. The reflexive equation of nation and state has led scholars to conclude that Zionists were drawn to Spinoza because he justified state sovereignty. This assumption is mistaken. Eastern European Zionists rejected Spinoza’s sovereignty-centered political thought—precisely because it denies political standing to non-sovereign bodies such as the kahal. Drawing on diasporic history, Spinoza’s Zionist critics elaborated a distinctive political vision that prized national autonomy but did not equate self-rule with sovereign power. I foreground Zionist repudiation of Spinozist sovereignty to challenge reigning assumptions about the ideological sources of non-sovereign politics. Theorists influenced by German Jewish thought have predicated the cultivation of non-sovereign political imagination on a disavowal of nationalism. This opposition—between diaspora and nation, between nationalism and non-sovereignty—is false. In eastern Europe, nationalist figurations of galut (exile) have long inspired non-sovereign, non-Spinozist political imaginaries.

Abstract: From its 1940 establishment to the Great Deportation of 1942, accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto testify to the misery of beggars within its walls, who drew attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoirs and testimonies, reveal beggars’ struggles—as well as non-beggars’ often hostile reactions to their songs and other sounds. Drawing on scholarship in sensory history and cultural histories of the Holocaust, this article reveals that these reactions perpetuated established critiques of shund (artistic “trash”) and tapped into longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as modern, civilized, and European. However, certain beggars’ songs overcame listeners’ hostility by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars and their music were intrinsic to the Warsaw Ghetto’s soundscape, and the debates they engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even amid its destruction .

Abstract: La epoka was a Ladino newspaper published in Salonica. Its editor Sam Lévy published three interviews with Theodor Herzl between 1901 and 1904. His announcement and subsequent publication of the third interview drew angry responses from the Sublime Porte, which ordered the governor of Salonica to close it down. The governor resisted the orders and La epoka remained open, even publishing a eulogistic obituary of Herzl. In this article, I examine these interviews and obituary, showing that Lévy combined his sharp criticisms of Zionism with an adulation of the Zionist leader. I also explore Ottoman archival documents about the Ladino press and argue that Hamidian censorship could be flexible according to political circumstances, overlooking Lévy’s first two interviews that were made during the Ottoman government’s negotiations with Herzl, yet reacting sharply to the third interview conducted afterward and containing direct references to the Sixth Zionist Congress.

Abstract: This forum brings together eight scholars of various disciplines who take stock of queer perspectives on Jewish Studies, introduce new lines of research, and show the many ways in which queering Jewish Studies energizes the field. The authors also discuss the particular promise of Jewish trans studies as well as the nexus of queers and Jews in the age of rising populism. Overall, the forum serves as a primer for those interested in how to teach or do queer Jewish Studies.