Laura Levitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592120 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Levitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Levitt |
| SIGNATURE | LEVITT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Temple College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Wedding Dresses
Seeing and Doing
This two part meditation begins with a reading of Sieg Maandag's life and work, and then moves to a sustained exploration of a doubled portrait of the artist in a painting and a photograph. We explore how Skorczewski and Maandag-Ralph become witnesses to the witness as they locate Sieg Maandag's art on the "aching dark terrain of life after trauma and violence" (Levitt, 2020, 9)
A Photograph in Words
In her memoir, The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson writes about the over-thirty-year-old unsolved murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, a case brought back to life in a Michigan court room. Who gets to tell this story? How should it be told
American Performances, Economies, and Genealogies of Constraint
In this collaboratively written exercise, the authors discuss the material significance of embodied sense perceptions and affects. Despite Protestant secularity’s claims to the contrary, sensation and affect are no more confined to interiorized subjective mental states than is religion merely belief
American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust
Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book. An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewis…
After a Critique of Secularism
Turning to the immanent space of contemporary Jewish life, this essay considers what happens after the critique of secularism to explore Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Jewish life. It argues that part of what the critique of secularism opens up are new ways of exploring these Jewish practices. Without the constraints of secularization’s clear definitions of what is either secular or religious, this essay shows how we can begin to make di…
Analogies Otherwise
This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conference of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. I spoke these words not long after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. The theme of the gathering was "Revolutionary Love." I was invited to address this issue after I wrote a blog post raising questions ab…
Judaism and Gender
Judaism Since Gender
Judaism Since Gender offers a radically new concept of Jewish Studies, staking out new intellectual terrain and redefining the discipline as an intrinsically feminist practice. The question of how knowledge is gendered has been discussed by philosophers and feminists for years, yet is still new to many scholars of Judaism. Judaism Since Gender illuminates a crucial debate among intellectuals both within and outside the academy, and ultimately ove…
Jews and Feminism
By interrogating America's promise of a home for Jews as citizens of the liberal state, Jews and Feminism questions the very terms of this social "contract". Maintaining that Jews, women, and Jewish women are not necessarily secure within this construction of the state, Laura Levitt links this contractual construction of belonging and acceptance to legacies of marriage as a contractual home for Jewish women. Exploring the immigration of Jews from…
Still Looking
The photographs of Larry Sultan and Cindy Sherman, considered in the context of American Jewish identification, make a case for self-love as a part of seeing and performing Jewish
Feminist Theory and Jewish Studies
This article examines the history of the relationship between feminist theory and Jewish studies; it considers feminist theory's role as a transformational force in Jewish studies. Feminist theory is an approach to Jewish studies that problematizes subjectivity and posits that identities are multiple, shifting, and frequently constructed through social discourses and practices. Feminist theory pays special attention to the complicated intersectio…
The Jewess Pallas Athena
Reviewed by: The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity Laura Levitt Barbara Hahn . The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity. Translated by James McFarland. Princeton, N.J. and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 233. Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unusually rich and engaged account of German Jewish modernity and its cultural production, its poe…
Engendering the Jewish Past
To engender the Jewish past is to continue to question how and what we think we already know about Jewish history and Jewish memory. In order to imagine other stories, we must risk engaging in other ways of doing Jewish study. Only by repeatedly engaging in these other practices can we begin to undo the assumptions about gender we have come to assume as normal or natural. This paper explores first, what it means to engender the Jewish past and th…
The Objectivity of Strangers, Seeing and Being Seen on the Street
Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience
Reviewed by: Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves Laura Levitt Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen, eds. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves. Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies. London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003. Pp. xxii + 297. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves is an unusual colle…
Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference
To remain marked as other even in the process of becoming citizens, of becoming incorporated into the nation, still haunts contemporary Jewish experience as well as efforts to explain Jewish difference. Although it may be said that the French and American revolutions brought Jews into the dominant cultures of the West, they also set limits on this very promise of inclusion. In this essay I am interested in these limits as they have been enacted a…
Menstrual Purity
The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 312-313 Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 326. Menstrual Purity is the latest contribution to a growing body of critical scholarship on the construction of gender in rabbinic culture. More specifically , it builds on Daniel Boyarin's work on rabbini…
Menstrual Purity
Booking Passage
The Jew in the Text
Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference
To remain marked as other even in the process of becoming citizens, of becoming incorporated into the nation, still haunts contemporary Jewish experience as well as efforts to explain Jewish difference. Although it may be said that the French and American revolutions brought Jews into the dominant cultures of the West, they also set limits on this very promise of inclusion. In this essay I am interested in these limits as they have been enacted a…
Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience
Reviewed by: Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves Laura Levitt Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen, eds. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves. Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies. London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003. Pp. xxii + 297. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves is an unusual colle…
Booking Passage
The Jew in the Text
Booking Passage
Menstrual Purity
The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 312-313 Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 326. Menstrual Purity is the latest contribution to a growing body of critical scholarship on the construction of gender in rabbinic culture. More specifically , it builds on Daniel Boyarin's work on rabbini…
Menstrual Purity
Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience
Reviewed by: Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves Laura Levitt Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen, eds. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves. Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies. London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003. Pp. xxii + 297. Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-Placing Ourselves is an unusual colle…
Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference
To remain marked as other even in the process of becoming citizens, of becoming incorporated into the nation, still haunts contemporary Jewish experience as well as efforts to explain Jewish difference. Although it may be said that the French and American revolutions brought Jews into the dominant cultures of the West, they also set limits on this very promise of inclusion. In this essay I am interested in these limits as they have been enacted a…
The Jewess Pallas Athena
Reviewed by: The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity Laura Levitt Barbara Hahn . The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity. Translated by James McFarland. Princeton, N.J. and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 233. Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unusually rich and engaged account of German Jewish modernity and its cultural production, its poe…
Engendering the Jewish Past
To engender the Jewish past is to continue to question how and what we think we already know about Jewish history and Jewish memory. In order to imagine other stories, we must risk engaging in other ways of doing Jewish study. Only by repeatedly engaging in these other practices can we begin to undo the assumptions about gender we have come to assume as normal or natural. This paper explores first, what it means to engender the Jewish past and th…
The Objectivity of Strangers, Seeing and Being Seen on the Street
Feminist Theory and Jewish Studies
This article examines the history of the relationship between feminist theory and Jewish studies; it considers feminist theory's role as a transformational force in Jewish studies. Feminist theory is an approach to Jewish studies that problematizes subjectivity and posits that identities are multiple, shifting, and frequently constructed through social discourses and practices. Feminist theory pays special attention to the complicated intersectio…
Still Looking
The photographs of Larry Sultan and Cindy Sherman, considered in the context of American Jewish identification, make a case for self-love as a part of seeing and performing Jewish
Jews and Feminism
By interrogating America's promise of a home for Jews as citizens of the liberal state, Jews and Feminism questions the very terms of this social "contract". Maintaining that Jews, women, and Jewish women are not necessarily secure within this construction of the state, Laura Levitt links this contractual construction of belonging and acceptance to legacies of marriage as a contractual home for Jewish women. Exploring the immigration of Jews from…
Judaism Since Gender
Judaism Since Gender offers a radically new concept of Jewish Studies, staking out new intellectual terrain and redefining the discipline as an intrinsically feminist practice. The question of how knowledge is gendered has been discussed by philosophers and feminists for years, yet is still new to many scholars of Judaism. Judaism Since Gender illuminates a crucial debate among intellectuals both within and outside the academy, and ultimately ove…
Judaism and Gender
Analogies Otherwise
This essay is a modified version of a talk I gave in the Fall of 2017 at the Biennial Conference of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. I spoke these words not long after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. The theme of the gathering was "Revolutionary Love." I was invited to address this issue after I wrote a blog post raising questions ab…
After a Critique of Secularism
Turning to the immanent space of contemporary Jewish life, this essay considers what happens after the critique of secularism to explore Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Jewish life. It argues that part of what the critique of secularism opens up are new ways of exploring these Jewish practices. Without the constraints of secularization’s clear definitions of what is either secular or religious, this essay shows how we can begin to make di…
A Photograph in Words
In her memoir, The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson writes about the over-thirty-year-old unsolved murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, a case brought back to life in a Michigan court room. Who gets to tell this story? How should it be told
American Performances, Economies, and Genealogies of Constraint
In this collaboratively written exercise, the authors discuss the material significance of embodied sense perceptions and affects. Despite Protestant secularity’s claims to the contrary, sensation and affect are no more confined to interiorized subjective mental states than is religion merely belief
American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust
Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book. An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewis…
Seeing and Doing
This two part meditation begins with a reading of Sieg Maandag's life and work, and then moves to a sustained exploration of a doubled portrait of the artist in a painting and a photograph. We explore how Skorczewski and Maandag-Ralph become witnesses to the witness as they locate Sieg Maandag's art on the "aching dark terrain of life after trauma and violence" (Levitt, 2020, 9)
Wedding Dresses
Philosophy (14 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (13 works) · Judaism (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Theology (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Jewish Identity and Society (8 works) · Religious studies (8 works)