The Opportunities and Affordances of Centering the Arts in the Study of Contemporary Judaism

This roundtable will consider the opportunities and affordances of centering the arts as a vantage point for viewing and conceptualizing contemporary Jewish life. Attending to the arts offers opportunities to make a broad array of religious ideas, populations, and embodied practices visible. It centers as religious authorities people who are rarely described as among the traditional gatekeepers of theological or textual knowledge. Participants in this roundtable will draw on their ethnographic research with Jewish performers and artists, as well as with audiences in different Jewish cultural artistic settings to explore how centering artistic engagements with Jewishness can illuminate the diverse ways that both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish knowledge, live within Jewish time, and engage in Jewish praxis.