Mara Benjamin is the Irene Kaplan Leiwant Associate Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009) and The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Indiana, 2018). Her website is https://www.marabenjamin.com/
What is your work about? What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
This book uses the physical and psychological work of caring for children as a lens through which to read and reread important topics in Jewish theological and philosophical reflection. I argue that the subject position one inhabits when attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent needs of young children, a position of obligation, is valued in Jewish theological anthropology, but devalued in modern liberal thought. I stage an intervention in both of these traditions by examining the care that we all received in some form from the point of view of the adult caregivers who provide that care and who therefore negotiate “being obligated” every day.
I use keywords, such as Power and Teaching, to anchor each chapter. These keywords lie at the intersection between a phenomenological approach to caring for young children, on the one hand, and issues in a body of work that I want to rethink, on the other. For instance, the chapter on power reflects on the daily negotiation of a relationship defined, in part, by complex power differentials. I then propose how we ought to think about this aspect of human social life, and demonstrate that feminist theological ethics has not fully grappled with asymmetrical power. The keyword structure allows me to move across fields and types of literature.
It sounds like you’re taking material from a number of different philosophies and fields (phenomenology, the study of power, feminism, theology, etc.). How does the book interweave these different philosophies? Is there one that your thesis tends to support more than others, or are you trying to develop a new philosophy distinct from these other ones?
For me, doing justice to maternal subjectivity meant apprehending it as a site where the social, the political, the psychological, the ethical, and the existential all intersect. Grappling with all of these dimensions of the experience necessarily meant seeking out and working with resources that each offered unique tools for thinking about motherhood. For instance, I felt writing about maternal subjectivity necessarily involved theological reflection on love, but most of the theological writing I found assumed a Christian rather than a Jewish theological lexicon. Literature that arose out of ethics of care was equally critical to my thinking, but most of the feminist philosophers and political theorists I encountered took a reductive approach to religion. Modern Jewish thinkers’ work on the ethical meaning of intersubjectivity was formative for me, but I discovered it could not adequately conceive of the Other as an infant or the self as a caregiver. So I cobbled a number of pieces together from different places.
Reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Mother Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience early on in the project inspired me by showing how fruitful a multidimensional perspective could be. It also showed me the power of integrating first person narrative into analytic contexts, and I use first-person narrative occasionally throughout the book. Part of what I enjoyed so much about this project was having the (posttenure) freedom to break out of the usual constraints on how we conceive of intellectual problems. It is also what I hope to demonstrate as the breadth of intellectual resources that does and can power Jewish constructive theology.
The status of modern Jewish thought won’t be familiar to everyone. What topics does it take up, and where would you like to see it change?
I completed my graduate work in a subfield referred to as modern Jewish thought. “Thought,” in this context, functions as a catch-all for Jewish intellectual production in modernizing societies, but especially in western and central Europe. It is a young subfield with a small canon, and virtually everyone trained within a decade or two of my generation, whether they come from departments of philosophy, history, or religious studies, can recite the liturgy: Benedict Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas. There are other figures who crop up – some from the nineteenth century, some who might be considered “post-Holocaust” theologians, others who are preoccupied with Zionism and nationalism, and so on. But in the roughly fifty years or so that modern Jewish thought has been recognized as an area in Jewish studies, what was once called the jüdische Frage – the “Jewish question” or “Jewish problem” – still hangs over the field: to what extent can or should Judaism accommodate the demands of “modernity” (emancipation, acculturation, Enlightenment), and how do the answers reveal the conditions of modernity in a new light.
Recent scholarly developments have started to change the landscape of modern Jewish studies, and I am hopeful that those of us who study intellectual production can take a broader view. For example, we need to stretch the geographical boundaries of modern Jewish thought and decenter Germany. A lot of great work is happening now in Eastern European Jewish intellectual history, for instance, and among people who study Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews (from the southern Mediterranean, the Maghreb, and the Middle East). Modern Jewish thought can also become more interesting if we look to others genres – literature, memoir, the arts – and not just philosophy and theology.
Why did you feel the need to write this work? What effect do you hope your work will have?
After publishing my first book, I grew dissatisfied with the ways modern Jewish thought (and thus the field itself) has remained fairly stagnant in last half-century. This project in particular aimed, in part, to expand modern Jewish thought beyond its typical constraints with regard to women, gender, and feminism. I wanted to stretch the boundaries of the field and to make it more elastic.
I hope that this constructive project will open up a new and more reflexive way of reading the thinkers and the questions that have dominated modern Jewish thought. Beyond the intervention in my subfield, I also want to demonstrate that lived experience can and should be integrated in a more full-bodied way into intellectual reflection, whether we call that philosophy, theology, or ethics.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
I wanted this book to change the conversation in my field, but also I wanted to reach non-academic readers. For this book, I didn’t want to produce a standard academic monograph. As an academic who internalized the standards for scholarly writing in the humanities, I struggled to break out of a traditional model. But then I got an important piece of advice from a friend: “Write the book you want to read.” So I did.
From the beginning, this book was experimental for me. Now that it is starting to make its way into the world, I’m excited to see how and where the project lands for different readers. It was important to me that the book would reach beyond academic audiences, to readers who are thoughtful and intellectually curious – and who appreciate a well-written book. A lot of the time, academic writing serves as a neutral medium in which information or concepts are communicated; often, it is actively unpleasant to read. Because I hoped this book would have a wider readership, I wanted to write a book with lovely and not merely serviceable prose. So far, both academic and non-academic readers have told me I accomplished that goal.
It’s a bit early for reviews, but I have started getting notes from colleagues and friends who have read the book. People in my most immediate subfield have appreciated its political and philosophical contributions. Colleagues who study Jewish literature from late antiquity have responded with excitement to seeing, for instance, Talmudic texts brought together with feminist studies of global chains of caregiving.
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