Erez DeGolan

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies

Contact
Email:
ed114@wellesley.edu
Department
Jewish Studies

A scholar of Ancient Judaism and Religion

I specialize in classical rabbinic literature in Hebrew and Aramaic from between the first and seventh centuries (CE). My research combines textual, historical, and critical methods in studies of ancient and late-ancient rabbinic culture. My work has appeared or will appear in the Ancient Jew Review, the Journal of Textual Reasoning, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

At Wellesley, I am working on a book project, titled Rejoicing Rabbis: Emotions and Power in Roman Palestine, which explores the nexus between joy and political culture in rabbinic texts from Roman Palestine. I am also developing a new research project on the theme of ritual attentiveness in premodern Jewish prayer.

My courses offer students a panoramic view of Judaism and invite them to contemplate dynamics of continuity and change in religious traditions.

I served on the Program Committee of the Association Association for Jewish Studies, was the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Religion and Violence, and co-organized the 2020 Ancient Judaism Regional Seminar, which was awarded the Cross-Institutional Cooperative Grant by the American Academy for Jewish Research. I was a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow.

I overstate my guitar skills and downplay my juggling talent.

Current and upcoming courses

People of the Body: A Sensory History of Judaism

JWST212

Traditionally, the study of Judaism has neglected the senses, the body, and emotions as worthy objects of inquiry. This course aims to fill this gap in our conception of Judaism by surveying key Jewish traditions from antiquity to the present through the lenses of sensory studies, new materialism, and affect theory. We will explore, for instance, the centrality of pleasant and foul odors to premodern Israelite religiosity, notions of attention as a bodily experience in medieval Jewish mysticism, and modern debates about love and shame as determining factors in Jewish law. To appreciate the sensory, somatic, and affective realms of Jewish history, we will engage analytical tools that focus on texts’ representation of textures of lived experiences and apply these methods to sources such as the biblical Song of Songs, the talmudic tractate Berakhot (“prayers and blessings”), hassidic tales of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and Noah Kahan’s Twitter feed. (JWST 212 and REL 212 are cross-listed courses.)