Arts and Humanities Commons^™

All Joking Aside: The Role Of Religion In American Jewish Satire, Jennifer Ann Caplan

Dissertations - ALL

Jewish humor is a well-known, if ill-defined genre. The prevalence and success of Jewish comedians has been a point of pride for American Jews throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What I undertake in this dissertation is to isolate one particular form of humor-namely satire-and use it as a way to analyze the changing relationship of American Jews to traditional religious forms. I look at the trends over three generations, the third generation (who came of age in the 40s and 50s), the Baby Boom generation (who came of age in the 60s and 70s) and the contemporary generation (who …

Carnal Excess: Flesh At The Limits Of Imagination, Virginia Burrus

Religion - All Scholarship

This essay explores representations of fleshly excess in Christian and Jewish texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries, from the cosmically-scaled figures of Adam and the resurrected Christ in Genesis Rabbah and Augustine's City of God, on the one hand, to the hagiographical portraits of fat rabbis and monks in the tractate Baba Metsia of the Babylonian Talmud and the Lausiac History of Palladius, on the other. The Platonic figure of the khora is initially invoked to frame two main arguments: first, that these late ancient texts discover transcendence within, rather than outside of, the boundlessness of materiality; …

Ritual Legitimacy And Scriptural Authority, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

In this essay, James W. Watts explains the interdependence of texts and rituals with regard to ancient religions. Specifically, he outlines patterns of practice and developments in the ritual use of texts and the texual authorization of rituals in antiquity.

Watts also makes the case that beyond the interplay of texual authority and ritual legitimacy that most ancient cultures engaged in, Judaism was unique in elevating the Torah along with its other laws and stories to special "scriptural" status.

The Legal Characterization Of Moses In The Rhetoric Of The Pentateuch, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

The force of law depends on the authority of its promulgator. Self-characterizations by lawgivers play a vital role in persuading hearers and readers to accept law and in motivating them to obey it. Pentateuchal laws therefore join narratives in characterizing law-speakers as part of a rhetoric of persuasion. They present, however, two speakers of law, one divine (YHWH) and the other human (Moses). I will show that this dual voicing of pentateuchal law has two effects: it restricts Deuteronomy's prophetic characterization of Moses to the narrower definition of prophecy presented in the previous books, while it uses Moses' scribal role …

Psalmody In Prophecy: Habakkuk 3 In Context, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

The psalm in Habakkuk 3 resembles songs in Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32 and 33, Judges 5 and 2 Samuel 22 in its archaic linguistic formations and vocabulary stock, victory hymn form, and appearance outside of the Psalter. Unlike these hymns set within prose narratives, however, Habakkuk 3 appears within a book of prophetic poetry structured in a liturgical and dramatic fashion. Habakkuk, therefore, offers an ideal case for the comparative study of prophetic and narrative composition through the use of the same literary device. The results of such a comparison reveal a sophisticated text which mixes inherited generic conventions to …

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud's Mosses: Judaism Terminable And Interminable., Ken Frieden

Religion - All Scholarship

Review of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's work Freud's Mosses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable.

"This Song" Conspicuous Poetry In Hebrew Prose, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

The Hebrew Bible contains many passages in which prose narrative surrounds conspicuous poetry. The various theoretical and practical difficulties in distinguishing Hebrew prose from verse in other texts do not negate this observation. Explicit genre labels often appear in both the prose frameworks and the beginnings of poems, telling readers that the genre and mode have changed. The interpretive problem then becomes, not whether this is verse, but why poetry appears precisely here. What does poetic expression accomplish that Hebrew prose narrative cannot or will not do?

Comparative study of conspicuous inset poetry suggests that Hebrew narratives use it to …

Freud's Dream Of Interpretation, Ken Frieden

Books

Frieden explores methods of dream interpretation in the Bible, the Talmud, and in the writings of Sugmund Freud, and brings to light Freud's Troubled relationship to his Judaic forerunners. This book reveals unfamiliar associations in intellectual history and challenges received ideas in biblical, Talmudic, and Freudian scholarship.