197 research outputs found
2023 CCLA AGM Minutes
No full textMinutes of the 2023 AGM of Canadian Comparative Literature Associatio
Economic utopia of the Torah. Economic concepts of the Hebrew Bible interpreted according to the Rabbinical Literature
No full textHebrew Bible offers alternative Economic utopia for building Theocratic society. In this paper, various economic concepts and themes are presented, as found in the Hebrew Bible. These economic concepts include taxation, property rights, labor market, social policy, banking, years of Sabbath and Jubilee, and business cycles. Most economic issues of the Bible are found in the texts of Torah, also known as five Books of Moses. These texts are analyzed by using classical Rabbinical commentaries for better insight. Contrary to the modern Economic theory which is based on the assumptions of scarcity of resources and unlimited needs of consumers, Economics of the Torah is based on God’s resources which are enough for all true needs of His people.Hebrew Bible, History of Economics, History of Economic Thought, Ancient Israel, Judaism
“The Madness of the Carnival”: Representations of Latin America and the Caribbean in the U.S. Homophile Press
No full text2022 CCLA AGM Minutes
No full textMinutes of the 2022 AGM of the Canadian Comparative Literature Associatio
Same-Sex Desire and Jewish Community: Queering Biblical Texts in Canadian and American Jewish Literature
No full textA Queer Genealogy of "Havruta": Study Partnership as Intimate Relationship Between Men in Jewish Literature
No full textThis dissertation traces a literary lineage in Jewish cultural imaginations that associates havruta—an educational method of long-term study partnership that has evolved in a male homosocial context of traditional Judaism as a central pedagogical method and an important religious practice—with forms of same-sex erotic and affective connections, often analogous to marriage. This dissertation argues that the trope of queer havruta, which refers to literary images of traditional Jewish study pairs that can be read as queer through a modern lens, has established its place in the canon of queer romance and contributed to the shaping of Jewish queer culture.
Traditional Jewish sources, from the rabbinic period onward, often depict male study partnerships as sites of intimacy, personal attachment, and commitment, sometimes including erotic desire or sexual practices. The homoerotic potential of these representations is rooted in cultural assumptions distinct from modern sexual categories. The images of havruta intimacy in the Mishnah, Talmudim, and Midrash, along with their interpretive traditions, draw on biblical heroic couples and construct homoerotic intellectualism as a form of masculinity within ancient homosocial and patriarchal contexts.
Jewish writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including S. An-sky, S.Y. Agnon, I.B. Singer, Tony Kushner, Jyl Lynn Felman, Michael Lowenthal, Evan Fallenberg, and others—re-articulate this literary tradition of homoerotic scholarship and havruta intimacy in ways that both align with and challenge modern gender and sexual categories. These modern and contemporary narratives seek and resist the signification of havruta intimacy, offering new pleasures, relational models, and ways to conceptualize male-male desire through affective and eroticized readings of Jewish history and intellectual life.
Reimagining havruta through a queer literary genealogy enables the reclamation and transformation of traditional Jewish symbols, often by challenging their heteronormative, sexist, and misogynistic assumptions, while reshaping religious, gender, and sexual identities, relationships, and intimacies. It disrupts binary and totalizing definitions of normativity and queerness by representing havruta intimacy as an intersection of multiple viewpoints and sensibilities, when some forms of traditional Jewish normativity produce enabling dynamics for new queer intimacies. It allows the creation of a distinctly Jewish queer space
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