Dr. Laura Levitt
Associate Professor of Religion
A.B., Brown University 1982
M.A., Hebrew Union College-JIR 1986
Ph.D., Emory University 1993
Women’s Studies Certificate, Emory University 1993
Current Research
Dr. Levitt just published a book that uses family photographs to address some of the legacies of ordinary loss that have shaped 20th century American Jewish history and memory. The book, American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust insists on lifting these images and stories up from under the shadow the Holocaust. Dr. Levitt is also affiliated with the faculty of the Women’s Studies and Dance Departments.
My Father’s World
by Laura Levitt, March 12th, 2008
In my father’s world, books are sacred objects. Authors are to be worshiped, especially those who write literature. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are among those ensconced in his pantheon. For my father, literature was not simply a subject he studied formally, but a larger vocation. He haunted bookstores. In Albany he sat at the feet of a man named Lockrow who owned his favorite shop, Lockrow’s Bookstore at 52½ Spring Street. More than any of my father’s other fellow book lovers and collectors, Harman Lockrow was a mentor to him. He encouraged my father to collect books. My father began this collecting as a college student in the late 1940s. By now he has an impressive collection of first editions. Mr. Lockrow taught him a great deal about the publication history of many of the books he collected. This is still the basis for much of my father’s knowledge about these things. [Read More]
Article: "Laura and Miriam: On Friendship and Writing"
Read an interview with Dr. Levitt from Temple’s library here http://blog.library.temple.edu/liblog/archives/2008/02/professor_laura.html .
Publications
Review of Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings, Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, Bridges 14.1(April 2009), 171-174. [PDF]
with Rebecca Alpert, introduction to "Jewish feminist and our fathers: Reflections across gender and generations," Bridge 14.1(April 2009), 1-10. [PDF]
"Embodied Criticism: A French Lesson," for a special issue on Life Writing, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, and Jeanne Perreault, ed., 39.1-2(January-April, 2008), 217-238. [PDF]
with Deborah Glanzberg-Krainin, "Gender Theory and Jewish Studies," Religion Compass, Blackwell Publishing, online , 2/3(2009), 241-252.[PDF]
The Objectivity of Strangers, Seeing and Being Seen on the Street: A response to Deborah Dash Moore’s "On City Streets," The 2006 Marshall Sklare Memorial Lecture, Contemporary Jewry vol. 28(2008), 114-120. [PDF]
"Engendering the Jewish Past: Towards a More Feminist Jewish Studies," for a special issue of Feminist Theology, Julie Clague ed. 16.3(2008), 365-378. [PDF]
Review of Barbara Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, Jewish Quarterly Review 98.1(Winter 2008), 127-131.
The personal is political academic
In her new book, Temple professor Laura Levitt contemplates ordinary losses in relation to larger Jewish histories. [more]
Impossible Assimilation’s, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism. Download PDF
"American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust" NYU Press, 11/01/2007
"Refracted Vision, A Critique of "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art"
Download PDF
"Changing Focus: Family Photography and American Jewish Identity" http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/cf/index.htm
"Intimate Engagements: A Holocaust Lesson," Nashim : A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Studies , Number 7 (Spring 5764/2004), 190-205.
" Revenge, 2002," Nashim : A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Studies , Number 6 (Fall 5764/2003), 35-39.
"Judaism and Gender," International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences , Dr. Neil J. Smelser, and Dr. Paul B. Baltes, Editors in Chief, Oxford : Elsevier Science Limited, 2001, 8011-8014.