GALE LECTURES 2021-2022

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

SCJS Faculty Members Hina Azam and Hervé Picherit on How Their Work Expands the Boundaries of Jewish Studies

Dr. Hina Azam, an associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Graduate Advisor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recently became an affiliate faculty member at the SCJS. Here she discusses how she became connected to the Center and why this is meaningful.

What are your scholarly interests?

I have always loved reading, writing, and teaching, and the life of the mind generally, and so academia was a natural decision for me. I completed my BA at Loyola University in Chicago with a double major in Philosophy and Journalism, after which I did my graduate studies at Duke University’s Department of Religion, where I focused on Islamic Studies within a broader comparative theoretical framework. I was drawn to UT Austin because of its stellar Middle Eastern Studies department, its public-facing mission, its size, and its location in the wonderful city of Austin. moment, when our society is being stretched thin by culture wars: one is allyship and the other is our common humanity. The current polarization in our society shows that staying in our own silos not only deprives our scholarship and teaching of richness, but it also contributes to potentially dangerous misunderstandings between peoples. Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies, whether historically, culturally, or religiously focused, are both enhanced when in conversation with each other.

What are you most looking forward to in the year ahead?

My main scholarly interest up till now has been in women and gender in Islamic jurisprudence. My first book was on sexual violation in Islamic law, and my other publications thus far have also been related to women and gender in Islam. More recently, I have been interested in Qur’anic ethics and stories and in the teaching of Islam at the college level. I have also become interested more recently in American Muslim fiction, as part of my general interest in how stories— whether in scripture or prose— explore moral content and convey moral principles.

How did you decide to become an academic, and what was your path to UT? What brought you to your work with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies?

I was initially brought in when my colleague Dr. Karen Grumberg wanted to create a speaker series on Jews living in Muslim lands. I was immediately interested in helping with this important project. Then, the new director of the Center, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, invited me to speak on a panel on antisemitism and the American far right. When I was thereafter invited to join the SCJS more formally, I agreed.

I hope that my participation, as a Muslim academic in the SCJS will signal and support two principles that I believe are particularly important in this historical I am very much looking forward to being back on campus, in person. The isolation of the pandemic has adversely affected so much of the university’s work. Not only has the formal classroom been impacted, but the constant informal interaction between faculty, students, and staff has been curtailed. The university is not just an institution, it is a community, and it thrives and relies on the continual flow of ideas and activities. I look forward to a resumption of that flow, even as I hope that we have learned new ways of doing things. I am also looking forward to some writing projects that have been on hold for various reasons and to continuing work with our series on Jews in the World of Islam. SCJC faculty affiliate Dr. Hervé Picherit is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian and an affiliate faculty member at the Center for European Studies. Here he discusses his current research and teaching goals and how the 2016 election reshaped his approach to his work.

What are your scholarly interests?

Since graduate school, I’ve been fascinated with the novel, which lead me to write my dissertation and first book about the French novelists Marcel Proust and LouisFerdinand Céline. I considered their diametrically opposed reactions to World War I. I also enjoy working on film and the avant-garde. I suppose what unifies my work is a fascination with the ways in which authors use literary or cinematic form to create new conceptual spaces for artistic play. One of the most personally valuable discoveries I made early on was realizing that literature and art are sophisticated forms of the same kind of make-believe that we engage in as children.

How did you decide to become an academic, and what was your path to UT?

I ended up following that path because, like so many others in my field, I love reading. I decided I would make it a central part of my existence until someone told me to stop (so far so good). Going through graduate school and then in my first academic job at the University of Wyoming, I discovered the great privilege and responsibility of teaching students. Eventually, I was lucky enough to find my home department of French and Italian at UT where I’ve had the great fortune of working with amazing students and faculty.

What do you most enjoy teaching here?

Every semester, I am surprised and humbled by our students. UT students are a decidedly impressive group. I count among the great fortunes of my professional life that I get to know their stories and that I get to contribute to their ambitious visions of the future. It’s also an immense privilege to share with this group texts and films that I feel are important or that might help them as they prepare to go off into the world.

What brought you to your work with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies?

The day after the 2016 presidential election I had to continue teaching my graduate course on French avant-garde literature. I remember being hard-pressed justifying to my students our work on something that suddenly felt frivolous in light of the authoritarianism and intolerance that dominated our horizon. In the years that followed, I came to feel the urgency of doing research and teaching classes that addressed the contemporary dangers we face but that still used the tools of my training. And since my field is Twentieth-Century French literature, my study of these issues in the past lead me to France’s tenuous relationship with Judaism in a century marked most notably by the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy’s collaboration with the Germans during the French Occupation. These issues had already influenced my first book, where I considered Proust’s complex relationship with his own Judaism and Céline’s virulent antisemitism. But my approach to these questions become more focused for me in the graduate class I taught on the Literature of Collaboration and Resistance. The conversations I had with my students in this class indicated that we had found a way to combine our unique set of skills with a subject that spoke to the present moment.

What are you most looking forward to in the year ahead?

In the spring, I will be reprising my “Literature of Collaboration and Resistance” graduate course. I look forward to the tenor of the conversation with students in light of January 6, 2021.

On a lighter note, I look forward to teaching a new Plan II undergraduate course, “College Goes to the Movies,” which examines the myth of the American university experience as portrayed in popular film. I’ve always loved watching college movies, and I look forward to getting serious about something so seemingly frivolous.

FACULTY NEWS

Itzik Gottesman participated in an event sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center: “Keeping It in the Family: Yiddish Writers and Their Legacies.” The panel consisted of children and descendants of Yiddish writers discussing their family history. At the Association for Jewish Studies convention, Gottesman spoke about the blog he directs, Yiddish Song of the Week, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. As part of the festival “Yiddish New York,” he gave four lectures on Jewish folklore and spoke at the Riverdale Temple in NYC on “The Jewish Belief in

the Evil Eye.” Gottesman is one of the founding members of a new website that was launched this past year Inside the Yiddish Folksong to which he contributed the essay “The Life of the Yiddish Folksinger.”

Karen Grumberg guest-edited a special issue of Poe Studies on “Poe in the Middle East,” where she published an article on Poe in the Hebrew imagination. She also published an article on Amos Oz and the short story form in the Journal of Israeli History and an entry on “Space in Modern Hebrew Literature” in Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies. This Spring, she was promoted to Full Professor (starting in Fall 2021).

Jonathan Kaplan published the following essays in edited volumes in 2020–21: “Martyrdom, Mysticism, and Disputation: Rabbi Akiva and the ‘Beginning’ of Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs” and “Pastiche, Hyperbole, and the Composition of Jonah’s Prayer.” He presented papers over Zoom at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the Association for Jewish Studies as well as gave lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Universität Osnabrück, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was awarded a William M. Calder III Fellowship by the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Jason Lustig publishes his book, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture, in December 2021 with Oxford University Press. He is also excited to share two forthcoming articles, including “From Monumental Histories to a Multiplicity of Histories: The Persistence and Meaning of Master Narratives of Jewish History,” which will appear in AJS Review. He also continues publishing and producing the Jewish History Matters podcast (www.jewishhistory.fm), which recently surpassed 125,000 total downloads.

Julia Mickenberg is working on a project she’s tentatively titled The Way We Were: Eve Merriam and the Hidden History of American Feminism, a biographically based intellectual history that uses the Jewish, feminist, communist writer and activist Eve Merriam (19161992)—who happened to be an inspiration for Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were but is more significant as a poet, playwright, essayist, and author for children—as a lens for exploring the lives and work of other left-feminist women writers of her generation.

Esther Raizen is back in the Hebrew language classroom after a decade of administrative work, and she had a most rewarding year. She published a review essay on Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making and is completing the essay “Terrible Noise: Jean-Claude Pecker on Loss, Remembrance, and Silence,” which discusses two poetry collections by French astrophysicist Jean-Claude Pecker (1923-2020), in which he grapples with the loss of his parents in the Holocaust and articulates the impact of this loss on his life and work.

Jonathan Schofer contributed “Wisdom in Jewish Theology” to The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and Wisdom Literature and wrote reviews of Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions for The Journal of Jewish Ethics and of the T&T Clark Handbook of Children in the Bible and the Biblical World.

Suzy Seriff saw her ongoing work toward inclusive and hands-on learning honored with a studentinitiated international virtual exhibition on “Folk Arts in the Time of Covid,” and two awards, the Signature Course Inclusive Classroom Award, and the Tower Award for “Outstanding Community Based Learning Instructor.” Her course “Austin Jews in the Civil Rights Era” and its digital storytelling archive is to expand in fall of 2021, through a partnership with Dr. Laurie Green (History) on a larger project on women’s activism in Austin and UT during the Civil Rights Era.

Geoff Smith spent the year working with his colleague, Brent Landau, on researching and writing The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity. In 1958, while conducting an inventory of the holdings of the library of Mar Saba, an ancient monastery in the Judean desert, Morton Smith—a well-known scholar of Jewish Studies and Early Christianity—found a text that purported to be a secret version of the Gospel of Mark in which Mark offers esoteric teachings to more advanced students. Some scholars have come to believe that Morton Smith discovered an authentic version of the Gospel of Mark and that the Secret Gospel provides new, reliable information about Jesus’ life and ministry; others suspect that Smith forged the manuscript himself, perhaps as a joke. In this book Drs. Landau and Smith argue that the truth lies somewhere in between.

Amy Weinreb used her Global Virtual Exchange implementation grant from Texas Global to teach an enhanced version of “Multicultural Israel,” which includes Hebrew University student guests. She also invited local community liaisons to her new course, “Contemporary Jerusalem,” to support students’ independent inquiry projects. Weinreb received Global Career Launch funding and the Israel Studies Summer Research Stipend

Posters for 2020-2021 SCJS events organized by affiliated faculty members and leadership. for her book project: “The Essential Israel Studies Teaching Guide: Global, Virtual, and Ethnographic Approaches.” This guide will offer an overview of the field, teaching strategies, and pedagogical innovations for approaching Israel Studies through a rigorously academic lens.

Bruce Wells published “Death in the Garden of Eden” in the Journal of Biblical Literature. He also received a Big XII Faculty Fellowship for research at Baylor University and presented (over Zoom) two invited lectures on the parallels between the figures of Adam and Eve and Babylonian temple servants at Baylor University and the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. He also advised Audrey Baillette’s undergraduate honors thesis, “Prophetic Interpretation to Political Aspiration: American Evangelical Christian Support of Israel.”

Philip Yoo published “Dinah Among Jacob's Seventy: On Genesis 46:827” in Biblica and continues to work on the next book on the multiple presentations of the wilderness period as they are preserved in the Pentateuch. He is leaving UT to take up the position of Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia this Fall. He will miss the intellectual community at the SCJS.