Dr. Sam Shonkoff, Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union

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Drawing on extensive research in the NLI’s Buber Archives, and as a scholar of both Hasidism and German-Jewish thought, Sam Shonkoff’s current book project is the first major hermeneutical study of Martin Buber’s Hasidic tales vis-à-vis the original sources. The book focuses on themes of embodiment and embodied theology in Buber’s representations of Hasidism. And yet, as emphasized especially in feminist and womanist scholarship, the language of “embodiment” can threaten to distract from actual bodies, which are always socially situated bodies—praised and persecuted, fetishized and marginalized, racialized and gendered. In the case of Buber’s embodied theology, then, we must ask: Whose bodies are present in his Hasidic tales, and whose are absent?

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This lecture will look specifically at questions of race. Hasidic and German circles alike promulgated distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish bodies—how did Buber navigate that terrain in his German renditions of Hasidic texts? How did racial anti-Semitism, denigrations of Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), and volkish ideologies in Germany shape Buber’s interpretations of Hasidic sources? On one hand, intertextual investigations reveal ways in which Buber deracinated Hasidism, uprooting the movement from its geographic and religiocultural particularities in order to inspire diverse audiences. On the other hand, though, while that deracination surely exhibited universalizing tendencies, it also served to racialize the Hasidic body. In effect, Buber’s tales intimated that even assimilated, “Western” Jews might identify with a primal Jewishness that lay beneath Hasidic garments, as it were. With close attention to the confluence of Hasidic sources and Buber’s representations thereof, this lecture will illuminate dynamics between deracination and racialization in Buber’s Neo-Hasidism.

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Dr. Sam Shonkoff, Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union

‍

Drawing on extensive research in the NLI’s Buber Archives, and as a scholar of both Hasidism and German-Jewish thought, Sam Shonkoff’s current book project is the first major hermeneutical study of Martin Buber’s Hasidic tales vis-à-vis the original sources. The book focuses on themes of embodiment and embodied theology in Buber’s representations of Hasidism. And yet, as emphasized especially in feminist and womanist scholarship, the language of “embodiment” can threaten to distract from actual bodies, which are always socially situated bodies—praised and persecuted, fetishized and marginalized, racialized and gendered. In the case of Buber’s embodied theology, then, we must ask: Whose bodies are present in his Hasidic tales, and whose are absent?

‍

This lecture will look specifically at questions of race. Hasidic and German circles alike promulgated distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish bodies—how did Buber navigate that terrain in his German renditions of Hasidic texts? How did racial anti-Semitism, denigrations of Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), and volkish ideologies in Germany shape Buber’s interpretations of Hasidic sources? On one hand, intertextual investigations reveal ways in which Buber deracinated Hasidism, uprooting the movement from its geographic and religiocultural particularities in order to inspire diverse audiences. On the other hand, though, while that deracination surely exhibited universalizing tendencies, it also served to racialize the Hasidic body. In effect, Buber’s tales intimated that even assimilated, “Western” Jews might identify with a primal Jewishness that lay beneath Hasidic garments, as it were. With close attention to the confluence of Hasidic sources and Buber’s representations thereof, this lecture will illuminate dynamics between deracination and racialization in Buber’s Neo-Hasidism.

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