About this site
Jewish English Major is an independent publication launched in September 2024/Elul 5784 by Adam Zemel (adamszemel.com). Subscribe for email updates from the newsletter. There are also paid content tiers, which you can read about below.
What is Jewish English Major?
Reading means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and for me the Jewish part of it feels distinct–like I am accessing Judaism when I read, even if there’s nothing overtly Jewish about what I am reading. My father is a rabbi. I spent eighteen summers at a Jewish summer camp and a semester of high school in Israel; I am not lacking in overtly Jewish influences on my identity, my Judaism. But somehow, reading feels to me like it also belongs on the list.
This newsletter is named Jewish English Major because I am pursuing this project in the spirit of my time in the English department of my undergrad, and the low res MFA where I learned to write fiction. So my methods will more closely resemble the day-to-day work of an English major, playing a game of meaning-making by taking language seriously.
A lot of literary studies already parallels Jewish study. At the heart of each is close reading–understanding how the text functions on its own terms, considering how the language accomplishes its effect. There’s also intertextuality–what do texts say alongside each other? How can we create meaning from the space between them? These questions live comfortably in a beit midrash where students study Talmud in pairs, and a university classroom where a professor of 19th century British literature facilitates conversation about the novels of George Eliot and Jane Austen.
Many English departments include concentrations in film studies, folklore, comparative literature. They have faculty who employ a variety of critical approaches that can help orient us to a text, providing aesthetic, cultural, historical, political contexts. The English department where I finished my undergrad also housed the Cultural Studies PhDs, who apply the idea of a text to all sorts of fun things: IHOP menus, public transit systems, wellness MLMs. So the “English Major” moniker is a way of granting myself permission to pursue a pretty broad range of interests.
And English departments include the dreamers like me who concentrate in creative writing, an academic pursuit which, in addition to learning how to write—or more accurately to my experience, learning how to teach oneself to write—teach a whole other way of staying very close to the text, to regard language as something to be wrestled and wrangled and massaged.
Growing up as a liberal Jew, I sometimes worry that many Jews on my end of the observance spectrum shy away from meaningfully exploring ideas of faith and religion outside the realm of social justice. And while there is a foundational Jewish mandate, as old as the Torah, to help the stranger, care for the community as a community, and make the world whole, social justice is not enough.
Pirkei Avot teaches that the world stands on three things–study, prayer, acts of humanity. The social Justice framework speaks, powerfully at times, to the economic and political aspects of our lives, provides Jewish language and a Jewish sense of moral purpose to our participation in a market, in a political structure. But I want a Judaism that functions to remind me I am not part of a market, I am part of a story. A Judaism that celebrates the meaning and wonder of narrative and imagination, partaking of a bountiful vastness beyond the transactional dimensions of life. Religion can be a place we can go that affirms a broader, messier, more difficult, more beautiful truth. A place of intuition and discernment and love. A place to tend the garden of our deeper selves.
I suspect that many Jews like me shy away from Jewish conceptions of faith and belief because we assume that there isn’t a way to Jewishly plug in to them without adopting the practices and prayer life of Orthodox Judaism and its associated rigidities. I reject that. I believe literature and the humanities, in addition to their own self-evident merits, can be a vessel for this sort of Jewish searching, a way of exploring Judaism in idioms that are more familiar to contemporary life. There is opportunity in consciously and intentionally importing concepts and materials from the humanities–philosophy, language, history, art–into Jewish study, which for the purposes of this newsletter means both “searching for the immaterial and insistent portion of existence”, and “the act of making sense of living Jewishly in and moving Jewishly through the world”.
And the opportunity is mutual; liberal Judaism also has something to offer the humanities–a place to thrive. In America today, AI proliferates, devaluing art and diluting meaningful insight. Universities STEMify and transform into white collar trade schools. The academic labor market is subsumed into the gig economy. These problems are particularly astute at public universities, which were once the backbone of a sort of unassumingly progressive civic intellectual infrastructure that provided social ballast from the sweeping capitalist ideologies of the market. Just look at what's happening to the University of West Virginia. Add to that the book banning movement, the financialization of the entertainment industries, and the commodification of human attention. Institutional and normative support for art and labor that investigates the human experience has never been lower in my lifetime.
The Jewish English Major dreams of a 21st century Judaism that loves and stands up for the humanities and the Enlightenment, and, in doing so, doubles down on that part of Judaism that embraces nuance and complexity while refusing to negate the existence of moral absolutes.
Let’s talk about the paywall. There's nothing behind it. I am setting up a $5 subscription for this newsletter if you want to compensate me for my effort here, but I do not anticipate publishing for paying subscribers very often, if at all. I reserve the right to reconsider this approach.