Monthly Archives: February 2013

Religion, State, and Jewish National Israeli Culture (Ruth Calderon at the Knesset)

Posted on February 15, 2013 by zjb

Appearing today online at Open Zion are my churlish remarks concerning the recent and much discussed inaugural speech at the Knesset of Ruth Calderon, a new parliamentarian with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party. Here’s some of what I said: Like … Continue reading →

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Polish Synagogue Restoration Project (Simulation-Memory)

Posted on February 14, 2013 by zjb

Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has been working for sometime with the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, Poland. One of the projects there is the restoration of wooden synagogue at Gwozdziec, which was destroyed by the Nazis (?). … Continue reading →

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Der Golem (Techno-Judaism) (A Narrow Circuit)

Posted on February 13, 2013 by zjb

In Paul Wegener’s classic film The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920?), so many intermingling oppositions relating to the relation between religion and technologies are packed into the tight confines of the neo-gothic set design of the old Jewish … Continue reading →

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Daniel Boyarin @ UPenn (“A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora”)

Posted on February 12, 2013 by zjb

I found this announcement online, and thought others might be interested: February 18, 19, and 21, 2013, 5:00pm, Terrace Room (ground floor), Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, University of Pennsylvania In place of the lachrymose notion of diaspora … Continue reading →

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Prayer = Occular Technology (Star of Redemption)

Posted on February 12, 2013 by zjb

Technology scrambles what we think we mean when we think about religion. No, prayer has nothing to do with time, sound, language, signification, semantic symbolization, or propositional content. Looked at this way, prayer has to do with the occular perception, … Continue reading →

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On Judith Butler & BDS (After Brooklyn College)

Posted on February 11, 2013 by zjb

After all the brooha at Brooklyn about BoycottDivestmentSanctions, The Nation published Judith Butler’s address. It’s a cool, reasoned contribution, presenting BDS in a better possible light than the one which “the movement” sometimes casts itself –the boycott of individual persons, the … Continue reading →

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Occidental Revolutions & Auto-Orientalism (Lev Nussimbaum was Essad Bey)

Posted on February 10, 2013 by zjb

Just finished reading Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist. Reiss follows the trail of Kurban Said, who was a penname of Essad Bey, the mysterious and popular Weimar-era writer, who turns out to have been a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum. “Essad Bey” … Continue reading →

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Beitar Jerusalem Burns (Soccer Racism and Political Cannibalism)

Posted on February 9, 2013 by zjb

Historically, the soccer team Beitar Jerusalem is and remains one of the most glaring sites of anti-Arab racism in Israel. Going back to the 1930s (?), all the major sports teams in Israel were once attached to political parties, Beitar … Continue reading →

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Cold Sloshy Day

Posted on February 8, 2013 by zjb
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Tikvah Fund (Israel) (Right Wing $$ & Jewish Thought)

Posted on February 8, 2013 by zjb

החוג למחשבת ישראל, בחסות תומכי נתניהו More bad news about our friends at the neoconservative Tikvah Fund running roughshod over Jewish Studies, this time in  Israel as reported in Haaretz. The bottom line. The Hebrew University is broke and can’t … Continue reading →

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