Taking Stock

Description

Taking Stock is a collection of lively, original essays that explore the cultures of enumeration that permeate contemporary and modern Jewish life. Speaking to the profound cultural investment in quantified forms of knowledge and representation—whether discussing the Holocaust or counting the numbers of Israeli and American Jews—these essays reveal a social life of Jewish numbers. As they trace the uses of numerical frameworks, they portray how Jews define, negotiate, and enact matters of Jewish collectivity. The contributors offer productive perspectives into ubiquitous yet often overlooked aspects of the modern Jewish experience.

Introduction: Counting in Jewish Michal Kravel-Tovi
Part I. Counting the Dead: Iconic Numbers and Collective Memory
1. Six Million: The Numerical Icon of the Holocaust Oren Baruch Stier
2. Breathing Life into Iconic Numbers: Yad Vashem's "Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project" and the Constitution of a Posthumous Census of Six Million Holocaust Dead Carol A. Kidron
3. Putting Numbers into Space: Place Names, Collective Remembrance, and Forgetting in Israeli Culture Yael Zerubavel
Part II. Counting the Living: Putting "the Jewish" in Social Science
4. "Jewish Crime" by the Numbers, or Putting the "Social" in Jewish Social Science Mitchell B. Hart
5. Counting People: The Co-Production of Ethnicity and Jewish Majority in Israel-Palestine Anat Leibler
6. Wet Numbers: The Language of Continuity Crisis and the Work of Care among the Organized American Jewish Community Michal Kravel-Tovi
Part III. Counting Objects: Material Subjects and the Social Lives of Enumerated Things
7. "Let's Start with the Big Ones:" Numbers, Thin Description and the 'Magic' of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center Josh Friedman
8. 130 Kilograms of Matza, 3,000 Hard-boiled Eggs, 100 Kilograms of Haroset and 2,000 Balls of Gefilte Fish: Hyperbolic Reckoning on Passover Vanessa L. Ochs
Postscript: Balancing Accounts: Commemoration and Commensuration Theodore M. Porter

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• Statistics
• Judaism
• Religion
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253020574
• Langue: English

Extrait

TAKING STOCK
THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
TAKING STOCK
Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life
Edited by Michal Kravel-Tovi and Deborah Dash Moore
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02047-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-02054-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-02057-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For Yoel, Eviatar, and Shaul Tovi-the three who count most in my life
For my fourth grandchild, Oren Jacob Moore, who brings with his arrival the joys of taking stock
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Counting in Jewish / Michal Kravel-Tovi
Part I. Counting the Dead: Iconic Numbers and Collective Memory
1 Six Million: The Numerical Icon of the Holocaust / Oren Baruch Stier
2 Breathing Life into Iconic Numbers: Yad Vashem s Shoah Victims Names Recovery Project and the Constitution of a Posthumous Census of Six Million Holocaust Dead / Carol A. Kidron
3 Putting Numbers into Space: Place Names, Collective Remembrance, and Forgetting in Israeli Culture / Yael Zerubavel
Part II. Counting the Living: Putting the Jewish in Social Science
4 Jewish Crime by the Numbers, or Putting the Social in Jewish Social Science / Mitchell B. Hart
5 Counting People: The Co-production of Ethnicity and Jewish Majority in Israel-Palestine / Anat Leibler
6 Wet Numbers: The Language of Continuity Crisis and the Work of Care among the Organized American Jewish Community / Michal Kravel-Tovi
Part III. Counting Objects: Material Subjects and the Social Lives of Enumerated Things
7 Let s Start with the Big Ones : Numbers, Thin Description, and the Magic of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center / Joshua B. Friedman
8 130 Kilograms of Matza, 3,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs, 100 Kilograms of Haroset and 2,000 Balls of Gefilte Fish : Hyperbolic Reckoning on Passover / Vanessa L. Ochs
Postscript: Balancing Accounts: Commemoration and Commensuration / Theodore M. Porter
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME has been long in the making, and it is a great pleasure for us to have a chance to thank several people who have contributed to it in various ways. It began as an idea for a workshop on the social life of Jewish numbers developed by Michal Kravel-Tovi as her public contribution as Mandell L. Berman Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary American Jewish Life. As Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan, Deborah Dash Moore brainstormed together with Michal to give shape and substance to the proposed workshop, held on March 18-20, 2012. Both of us recognized that numbers have long occupied Jewish imagination and practice, mediating and shaping the ways in which Jews have constructed and narrated themselves and their worlds. It seemed worthwhile to examine in greater depth how Jews have produced numerical accounts of themselves and then employed these accounts to negotiate their relationships with both God and meaningful social others. To this end, we convened an international workshop and invited diverse scholars to both write formal papers and present comments. Over several days, the Frankel Center seminar table reverberated with lively discussions and sharp analyses, along with respectful disagreements and personal stories. Invigorated, we agreed that the papers deserved to reach a wider audience. However, we recognized that we would have to narrow the focus for publication, so we decided to emphasize such key issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, actualization of the Zionist dream, meanings ascribed to numbers in the Holocaust, and the embrace of numbers by American Jews to interpret political and religious notions of continuity.
The workshop and this volume benefited from the contribution of all of the scholars who participated. In addition to those in Taking Stock , workshop participants and their topics included: Robert Kawashima (University of Florida), Calculating Sacred Time: On the Archeology of the Ancient Jewish Calendar ; Gwynn Kessler (Swarthmore College), Rabbinic Numerology: Making Lists, Counting Numbers, and Creating Worlds ; Ian Lustick (University of Pennsylvania), Numbers and the Production of Quantification: Israeli Investigations ; Noam Pianko (University of Washington), Is Counting Counterproductive? Toward a Jewish Collectivity Beyond Numbers ; and Seth Schwartz (Columbia University), Why Do Historical Demography of Ancient Jews? ; Ruth Behar, Karla Goldman, Rachel Neis, Sammy Smooha, and Genevi ve Zubrzycki, all affiliated with the University of Michigan at the time of the workshop, contributed formal as well as informal comments in their capacity as respondents. We are grateful to all of these scholars as well as to the support of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and especially Cheri Thompson, its business manager, for hosting the workshop.
At Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen proved to be a superb editor. We benefited from her editorial suggestions as well as from the extraordinarily careful reading done by both external reviewers. Their thoughtful criticisms immeasurably improved the volume. We particularly want to thank Lila Corwin Berman for her generous and provocative comments. We appreciate Marsha Rozenblit s enthusiastic endorsement of the volume as a worthy contribution to the Modern Jewish Experience Series. We are grateful for the careful attention to copyediting and production details of Frances Andersen at Newgen North America. We also want to thank Thalia Thereza Assan at Tel Aviv University for her extraordinary work on the index of this volume.
Deborah has enjoyed working with Michal on this path-breaking volume. Her high standards, clarity of vision, and willingness to share occasionally difficult tasks have been exemplary.
Michal is grateful to the financial support of Mandell L. Berman as well as to the academic and emotional generosity of Deborah Dash Moore. Deborah has unique ways to engage with others ideas both openly and critically. Throughout the joint work on this volume, Deborah has provided ongoing support and mentorship and has modeled such a strong sense of professionalism and intellectual wisdom. It has been a true privilege to co-edit this book with her.
TAKING STOCK
Introduction
Counting in Jewish
Michal Kravel-Tovi
D ELIVERED THROUGH rapid, hip-hop beats and intense lyrics, Hadag Nachash s The Numbers Song provides a critical, numerical account of what matters to young Israeli Jews. It begins by counting states ( one or two ) in the land that stretches between the sea and the Jordan River and ends with the sacred icon of six million. In between, it offers a more intimate account of the numerical texture of personal experience ( three years and four months is the time I gave to the IDF ; 1 nine times I have been too close to a terror attack ), while detailing the harsh arithmetic that underwrites everyday life in Israel ( a quarter of a million are unemployed ; the government cut off 12 percent of child benefits ). Fast-paced and abrasive in content, the song echoes in form the pervasive flow of statistical data in Jewish public spheres, while simultaneously mocking, through its poetics, the overwhelming presence of numbers in Jewish life. However, as critical a reflection on numbers as this song provides, its lyrics also disclose their inescapable grip: Me too, the chorus admits, like all Jews, is obsessed with numbers 24/7, twelve months a year.
Hadag Nachash is not alone in its use of numbers as a structuring device for popular narration of Jewish-Israeli culture. In the late Yossi Banai s famous song, Sfirat Melai (generally translated as either stocktaking or counting stock ), the famous Israeli singer-actor relied on numbers to tell an insightful story about Jewish life in Israel. Playfully toying with the numerical associations of the Passover song Who Knows One?, Banai introduces some twists into a familiar numerical tradition. Instead of counting Jewish motifs and teachings alone, as is done in the Haggadah (e.g., the number of the tablets of the covenant or the number of the tribes of Israel), Banai s song weaves together older Jewish numbers with more contemporary ones. Look, he teasingly lays out, at just how many numbers Israel has managed to accumulate in its national and political stockpiles: One state, two seas, one lake and malaria as well . . . one nation, full of uniqueness, one headache and three pills, six days and seven nights . . . a huge immigration following two thousand years of diaspora . . . one moment of security and then thirty days of illness, one day of victory, one day of downfall, half-a-dozen veteran major-generals, two ministers without a portfolio . . . five wars . . . three tired soldiers at the post, seven