Appetite for Udders: The Return of the Repressed Mother in Babylonian Talmud Hullin 109a-110b

The North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar welcomes Beth Berkowitz to discuss her paper, "Appetite for Udders: The Return of the Repressed Mother in Babylonian Talmud Hullin 109a-110b."

Beth Berkowitz is a scholar of Jewish and Religious Studies with a specialization in classical rabbinic literature. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is co-editor with Elizabeth Shanks Alexander of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current writing is on the experience of pleasure in animals as the Babylonian Talmud conceives it, and her next book project will be a "biblical bestiary" that profiles the reception history of various animal characters in the Hebrew Bible.

She has published articles in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Jewish Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, the Journal for Ancient Judaism, AJS Review, and Biblical Interpretation. She was a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 2004-2012 and has held post-doctoral fellowships in Yale University's Program in Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and New York University Law School's Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization.

She has been a member of the steering committee for the History of Judaism section of the American Academy of Religion and the co-chair of the Rabbinics division and the Theorizing Jewish Difference division of the Association for Jewish Studies, as well as a member of the AJS board. She is a member of the board of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, of the AJS Paula Hyman Mentorship Program affiliated with the AJS, and of the journal Prooftexts.

The NCJSS is a collaborative partnership of Duke, NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest, with participants coming from universities and colleges across North Carolina.

In-person attendance is limited to vaccinated university faculty and students of sponsoring institutions. Community members are welcome to attend via Zoom.