Selected Writing
WHEN A HUMAN is available open access and in hard copy. This book is about the weird ways in which the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud(s) understood the weird universe in which they lived. On my read, theirs was a world in which the mystery of life coming into being (what we today call "reproduction") was unpredictable, unstable, and outside of straight, cis, sex, pregnancy and so-called "Traditional" "family values." The supremacy of the human (despite its vaunted "image of god" tag) and the stability of species boundaries (despite the rabbinic project of categorizing everything) was unstable. So this is a book that uses ancient Jewish ways of thinking to disrupt contemporary ideas about sex, gender, biology, cisness, and how “religion” is deployed to support them.
Also, as a practicing artist and comics- and zine-maker, I incorporate a bunch of paintings and comics in the book as part of my "argument."
The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Winner of the Salo Baron Prize 2013 and honorable mention for Schnitzer Award 2013. Available in both hardback and softcover. Reviews in AJS Review, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art & Visual Culture, Marginalia: LA Review of Books, Talmud Blog, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, American Historical Review, Ars Judaica, Ancient Jew Review
with Gilah Kletenik, “Decolonizing Jewish Studies Part 2: a Response to the Backlash,” Religion Dispatches (2021)
with Gilah Kletenik, “What’s the Matter with Jewish Studies? Sexism, Harassment, and NeoLiberalism, for Starters,” Religion Dispatches (2021)
"'All That Is in the Settlement': Humans, Likeness, and Species in the Rabbinic Bestiary," Journal of Jewish Ethics, 5,1 (2019) - email me for a copy
“The Seduction of Law: Rethinking Legal Studies in Jewish Studies,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 109,1 (2019) - email me for a copy
"Flesh," Frankel Institute Annual: Jews & the Material in Antiquity (2018)
“When Species Meet in the Mishna,” Ancient Jew Review, Forum on Animals/Species (2018)
“Interspecies and Cross-Species Generation: Limits and Potentialities in Tannaitic Reproductive Science,” in Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen, ed. Michael Satlow (2018)
"Directing the Heart: Early Rabbinic Language and the Anatomy of Ritual Space,” in Placing Ancient Texts: the Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space, eds. Mika Ahuvia and Alex Kocar (2018)
"The Reproduction of Species: Humans, Animals, and Species Nonconformity in Early Rabbinic Science,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 24:4 (2017)
“Embracing Icons: the Face of Jacob on the Throne of God,” IMAGES: a Journal of Jewish Art & Visual Culture, 1 (2007)
Where possible I link to PDFs of articles and chapters. If there is no link to a piece, it means that I cannot link to it for reasons of copyright, in which case please contact me at postrafelite@gmail.com