A Jewish Anthropology of the Present: Four Questions

A Jewish Anthropology of the Present is an extended essay in two voices that broaches questions about Jewishness, time, history, and state power from nontraditional angles. It takes the form of an exchange of statements that will convey to readers the sense of “listening in” on the half a century-long conversation between an anthropologist and a theoretical physicist, one living in New York City and one in Jerusalem, both deeply committed to ethical Jewishness and the work of inheriting ancestry. 

Issues are articulated such as: what might be distinctive about a Jewish anthropology that is not merely an ethnographic record of Jewish communities? How can we address the tension between Judaism as a wisdom tradition and Jewishness as what Jews do? How do we define the scope of ongoing crisis temporally? What is the value of continuing to do Jewish things? How does neoliberalism affect Jewishness?