Textual Intercourse: What Sex Can Teach Us About Contemporary Problems and Rabbinic Texts

This lecture aims to address two problems: first, that modern Jewish ethics has tended to assume a simple one-to-one correspondence between the subject matter of rabbinic texts and the contemporary problems it wishes to address, and, second, that modern thinkers more generally have tended to treat sex as a sui generis phenomenon, a singular category of behavior that requires a correspondingly singular mode of analysis.

Sponsored by the Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department and cosponsored by the Program in Religious Studies.