Bodies

What has been called the “corporeal turn” in recent Jewish studies is provoking anxiety. If “Judaism’s mind has been more interesting and more influential than Judaism’s body,” a distinction worthy of study in its own right, critics are calling for “a swing back to its more traditional mooring in the text (which, in any case, has often dealt with the body).” But those who took the corporeal turn never left the text behind. Rather, they brought a concern with the body to the text and found new ways to read and think about those texts. What troubles the critics would seem to lie elsewhere. Reviewing several books published in the 1990s, Hillel Halkin characterized the trend as “feminizing Jewish Studies,” which he did not intend as a compliment (Halkin 1998; for an alternative perspective, see Bunzl 2000). The problem was not that their authors ignored the text. ¹ Rather, it was the way they read the texts; their approach was marked, in his view, by “postmodern thinking,” skepticism, a “non- to anti-Zionist” stance, an affirmation of “Diaspora Jewish identity,” and above all an open embrace of feminism and feminist theory (and, though he does not say so in so many words, a preoccupation with sexuality and homosexuality). Non-Orthodox Jewish America is, in his view, suffering from deep confusion, exacerbated (if not caused) by the “sexual revolution,” and this kind of work just makes things worse. A firestorm ensued, fueled a few months later by Gabriel Schoenfeld’s wholesale condemnation of “the voguish hybrid known as gender studies” in Holocaust scholarship (Schoenfeld 1998: 44).