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Laura Levitt

Laura Levitt is Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender at Temple University where she has chaired the religion department and directed both the Jewish studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s studies programs. She is just completing The Objects that Remain (Penn State University Press, forthcoming 2020). She is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997). Levitt is an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust (2003), and Judaism Since Gender (1997). Laura Levitt is an editor with Tracy Fessenden (Arizona State University) and David Harrington Watt (Haverford College) of NYU Press’s North American Religions Series. She is working on a series of new projects that consider the reliquary desires that inform contemporary acts of commemoration and a collection of essay whose working title is, "I and You: Jewish Feminist Writing."

Essays

Revisiting Reflections on Relics and Contagion in Two Parts

Life after violence and profound loss requires that we find ways to hold and contain that pain. Relics help us do this. As we wrap them in our words, craft beautiful containers, or place them in vitrines, we keep these memories alive. We acknowledge and respect their ongoing presence in our lives.

Humanity beyond the human: Theorizing War with Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said

I am interested in this sense of the ordinary, ongoing strike. This humble strike—not necessarily modest but rather close to the ground—could involve a politics of refusal and boycott, where those terms could be understood not only as negatives, but also as holding space for a new international community, and thus connecting explicitly something already connected or entangled in practice.