Event details

The Program in Judaic Studies proudly welcomes this year's Mytelka Scholar, Beth Berkowitz, and begins her visit to Princeton with this lecture on Monday, February 10.

Description
Family separation due to war, migration, and incarceration is a major public concern, but what about the animal families routinely separated by human agriculture and development? What is the impact on them, on us, and on the planet? Moving beyond debates about the ethics of animal consumption to focus instead on animal intimate lives, What Animals Teach Us about Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature takes on the anthropocene and big animal agriculture to consider the fragmented animal families left behind in their wake. This book reads the four “animal family” laws of the Bible alongside their rabbinic interpreters from ancient times to today, narrating how biblical writers and readers conceived of and constituted the ties that bind humans to animals and that bind animals to each other. Through the lens of biblical and rabbinic literature, this book reveals the combination of concern, cruelty, and curiosity that we humans bring to animal lives. What Animals Teach Us About Families does not restore family values so much as reimagine family to include new forms of life and alternative modes of kinship.

Open to the public. Refreshments will be available.


More about Beth Berkowitz

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). She has published articles in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Jewish Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Ancient Judaism, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, AJS Review, and Biblical Interpretation. Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include critical animal studies, Jewish difference, and Bible reception history. Her book What Animals Teach Us about Families: Four Biblical Laws and Their Rabbinic Readings, forthcoming with University of California Press, is a study of the four laws in the Hebrew Bible that feature the parent-child relationship in animals.