Elevator Garage, Chicago, 1936
John Gutmann

The Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies

Since 1976 Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan has thrived as an interdisciplinary endeavor drawing on the rich resources of a diverse faculty, educating undergraduate and graduate students, and engaging the community. The inauguration of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judiac Studies in 2007 establishes the University of Michigan as a premier site for Jewish Studies in the United States.

inthenews…

• Read: Review of Eileen Pollack's new novel, Breaking & Entering, in The New York Times
• Read: "Playing the Blame Game: American Jews Look Back at the Holocaust" by Deborah Lipstadt.
• Watch: The Politics of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment Among the Jews of Russia
• Read the January 2012 issue of Frankely Speaking.
• Watch: Jeffrey Abt and Deborah Dash Moore on "Community, Idenity, and the Jewish Museum in Postwar New York"
• Download: Frankel Institute Colloquia from iTunes U

spotlight

Michal Kravel-Tovi to Deliver Mandell L. Berman Lecture February 15: "An Accounting of the Soul: The American Jewish Community, Social Science, and the Language of Crisis"

Over the last two decades, Jewish communal leaders—social scientists, public intellectuals, and both professional and lay leaders—have saturated the American Jewish public sphere with statistical data. Filling that sphere with rates, weights and figures, and adorning it with charts, tables and graphs, these leaders have constituted American Jewry as a numerically-imagined community. Drawing on both ethnographic and socio-historical research, this talk explores the discursive practices that constitute the flourishing field of American-Jewish statistics. Specifically, I analyze that field by unpacking the term heshbon nefesh: "an accounting of soul." I argue that the American-Jewish "statistical system" has thrived by occupying a discursive space of tension—one in which the dauntingly dry language of numerically-based social science and the poignant language of emotions converge to synergically generate a powerful, crisis-laden discourse about Jewish "social facts" and their collective weight. In calling this discourse "wet numbers," I shed light on the exercise of Jewish biopolitics in the voluntary-based, diasporic context of American-Jewry.

Michal Kravel-Tovi is the Mandell L. Berman Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary American Jewish Life. Prior to that position, she was a fellow at the Frankel Institute. A cultural anthropologist who received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Michal’s work covers a range of topics and fields of study that center on the interconnection of collective crisis, knowledge and subjectivity in a range of contemporary Jewish contexts. These academic interests link her work on Chabad messianism, state-run conversion in Israel, and American Jewish biopolitics. Michal’s work on Chabad was awarded ’Best M.A Thesis‘ by The Israeli Anthropological Association, and has since been published in American Ethnologist and Religion. For her doctoral work on conversion, she was granted a number of fellowships, including a Mark Uveeler Special Doctoral Fellowship from The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and a doctoral fellowship from Scholion at the Hebrew University. Articles drawn on her PhD dissertation are forthcoming in Ethnic and Racial Studies and American Ethnologist. In October of 2012, Michal will join the faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

The Mandell L. Berman Lecture in Contemporary American Jewish Life will be held on Weds., February 15, 4 pm, at 202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022, Ann Arbor, MI.