The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies

Abstract

During the past decade or so, there has been a “veritable boom … of projects that investigate questions of place and space” in Jewish studies. In this arena, scholars in various fields of Jewish studies have begun to engage with developments in the humanities at large. Since the 1980s, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have become more attentive to the cultural challenges of globalization, prominent among them the effects of increased movements of migration. From these movements have arisen questions about the effect and meaning of uprooting and dislocation, the significance of belonging to a place (or to various places), the emergence of diaspora communities, and so on. The spatial dimension of human existence began to move to the forefront of scholarly considerations, and with it, new names of fields of study, such as human, critical, or cultural geography. While Jewish studies has, of course, for the longest time been aware of “diaspora” as a dimension of human existence, often perhaps with the understanding that diaspora was historically a uniquely Jewish experience, to a certain degree our field remained caught in the binarism of diaspora versus nationalism or Zionism, at least until the advance of this new impulse in the humanities, identified by some as a “spatial turn.” Against such binarisms, the volumes under discussion repeatedly appeal to “multidimensionality” in Jewish topographies and in our approaches to them.

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