Event

Prof. Wasserman will lead us through readings of three narratives from the Babylonian Talmud's Tractate Avoda Zara, the section of the rabbinic corpus that treats interactions between Jews and non-Jews. Moving from poststructuralism into more recent new materialist theory, we will examine how these stories complicate the supposed distinction between bodies and spirits, language and material reality. Our goal will be to explore how the study of the Talmud can be enriched by an engagement with recent posthumanistic scholarship and to broach what it might contribute in turn. 

D6 Speaker
Mira Wasserman is Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, "The Humanity of the Talmud: Reading for Ethics in Tractate Avoda Zara." Her doctorate in Jewish Studies is from the University of California at Berkeley. Before pursuing doctoral studies, Mira served as a congregational rabbi. Her rabbinic ordination is from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and she is an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Barnard College.