Response to Jacob Neusner

Religious Education, Winter 2000 by Braiterman, Zachary

Abstract

Jacob Neusner's critique of my original essay, "Teaching Jewish Studies in a Radically Gentile Space: Some Personal Reflections," fails to recognize it as a piece of self-referential reflection that does not represent how the course was actually taught. That said, Neusner and I pursue conflicting interpretations of Judaism, with Neusner preferring to emphasize the pure over my emphasis on the impure.

Professor Neusner must surely have confused my essay for something else. The marked animus that propels his critique of my essay rests on three alleged points. I have been accused of (1) teaching a class in ethnic studies that (2) shows absolutely no interest in tradition and historical context, and that (3) trafficks in random emotions and feelings. I do not think that this critique demonstrates the close reading demanded in the scholarly world. Indeed, his heated response assumes the character of a broadside that revolves around a twofold confusion about genre and style. First, regarding the essay in question: I did not offer a strictly academic piece, but merely my own personal reflections on teaching American Judaism in Santa Clara University's department of religious studies. Hence its inclusion in Religious Education with the subtitle, "Some Personal Reflections," in the "Insights from Practice" section. Neusner rightly notes that I don't "refer to data of social science and demography." The piece was supposed to be impressionistic. That Professor Neusner sought to treat it like a bona fide theoretical statement shows an unseemly haste to dramatize his own displeasure and critical myopia. "Odd facts and trade opinions" characterized some of the contents found in my piece for Religious Education, not the contents of my class. This points to a second confusion about style. I adopted a self-referential ("solipsistic") voice in this particular essay. The point was to share personal impressions with colleagues in a more or less informal setting. That style reflects the tone I took in this particular essay, not the tone I took in class with students. The anecdotes reflect only that-incidental anecdotes, not substantive course contents.

Neusner found ethnocentrism, the "viewpoint of a ghetto." Certainly I never believed that the "common [academic] arena" of Judaism that he and I share might yield consensus. At bottom, we pursue conflicting interpretations regarding Judaism. With Leon Roth, Neusner assumes that Judaism constitutes the idea and way of life that shapes Jewish community. While I do not ignore the form-giving power of ideas, I am as or more inclined to give equal weight to how the members of disparate communities shape those ideas and that way of life. I am honored by Professor Neusner's calling this a secular presentation of Jewish studies, although I do not think he gives particular honor to Spinoza by associating him with my own impressionistic reflections. We have here a very subtle difference of opinion about which reasonable people respectfully differ. This does not include a distinguished scholar groundlessly asserting that in the view of this younger colleague "everything counts and nothing matters" or that "all Jews, and few texts of Judaism[,] ... serve as data." For my part, I would like to thank Professor Neusner for the following description of my own essay. In fact, I do "[draw] upon this and that, mixing the sublime with the mundane, the representative with the idiosyncratic, the ancient and enduring with the fabricated and the notional." Even more to the point: that is precisely how I understand Jewish religious culture (including the Bible, Rabbinic Judaism, American Judaism) and teaching it in Christian and post-Christian academic settings.

Zachary Braiterman is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Article submitted: October 1999

Article accepted: October 1999

Zachary Braiterman

Syracuse University