Michal Kravel-Tovi: Accounting of the Soul : Quantification and the crisis of Jewish life in the US
23.4.2024 von 12-14 Uhr c.t., Oettingenstr. 67, Raum L155
Over the last three decades, the American Jewish public square has been steeped in numerical concerns about demographic and cultural endangerment—a phenomenon generally dubbed as a “Jewish continuity crisis.” Based on a long-term and multi-sited anthropological study, I chronicle the social lives of this “crisis”, demonstrating how population discourses related to Jewish continuity allow American Jews to engage with their trajectory as a minority, post-Holocaust, and diasporic ethno-religious community. The presentation problematizes the very fact that a voluntary minority community sets the demographic course of its population as an abject of knowledge and intervention, and illuminates the cultural meanings of statistics as a powerful yet alienating representation and language of the social.