Annette C AronowiczThe Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis Emerita Prof. of Jud. Studies & of RST
Teaching
My first full time teaching job (1982–85) was at Stanford University, in its Great Works Program. The passion for reading texts closely, and for thinking about interpretation involves has followed me into all the other courses I have taught. When I came to Franklin and Marshall College, in 1985, I became responsible for the introduction to Religious Studies, in which, through its many permutations, I focused on classical texts from a variety of traditions, against the background of the various theories about religion that might be helpful in the art of interpretation. I also devised a variety of upper division seminars, Religion and Politics, Modern Religion Thinkers, Modern Jewish Thought, as well as courses intended for first- and second year- students: Literature of Exile, What is Education? Catastrophe in the Modern Imagination, Religion and Literature, Modern Jewish Literature. Always, my aim was to make students careful readers, that is, as aware as possible of the assumptions they were bringing to the table. I retired in 2018.
Scholarship
I graduated from UCLA in 1982, with a PhD in History. At the time, the History Department included a Chair in the History of Religions, held by my adviser, Dr. Kees Bolle. My interests were in the various assumptions ruling the study of religion since the nineteenth century, as well as in modern Christian and Jewish thought. My dissertation, Freedom from Ideology: Secrecy in Modern Expression (Garland, 1987), explored four great European authors in the first half of the twentieth century, who tried to free themselves from the political camps of their times, appealing to a reality that those camps ignored. It was an attempt to speak about transcendence without reverting to a directly Christian or Jewish vocabulary, although two of the authors were Christian and two Jewish. This early exploration set my research agenda for the rest of my academic life. I have been interested in the intersection of religion and politics, in the way great literature gives us access to a transcendence we would otherwise miss, and in the way the "secular" and the "religious" always cross paths and cannot be studied merely in opposition. A selection of my publications follows:
Books
Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas, translated and with an introduction by Annette Aronowicz (Indiana University Press, (1990, 2019)
Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Péguy's Portrait of Bernard-Lazare (Stanford, 1998)
Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish Childhood (Academic Studies Press, 2021)
The Thought at the Back of the Mind: Five Explorations of the Human in the Age of the Natural Sciences, (Wipf and Stock, 2024)
The Thought at the Back of the Mind
The Thought at the Back of the Mind is a plea for the centrality of the humanities as a vehicle of knowledge about ourselves
and about the reality around us. It illustrates the interpretative arts through Aronowicz's
close reading of Charles Peguy, Don DeLillo, Bernard d'Espagnat, Wysława Szymborska,
and Marilynne Robinson. Each author exhibits a complex relationship to the narratives
emanating from the sciences—wonder, terror, appreciation, resistance. All, in different
ways, point to a dimension of the human that cannot be captured through "the scientific
method." For the most part, they make their points not through abstract argument but
through an exploration of daily life. Each writer gives pride of place to metaphor,
humor, and/or intuition as indispensable conduits to the reality within and without
us. The Thought at the Back of the Mind explores the religious dimension embedded in the narratives emanating from the natural
sciences as well as in the quest to formulate what eludes them. These two contrary
dimensions of our relation to the sciences, in their various configurations, reveal
us to ourselves in our historical moment.
Selected Articles
"The Secret of the Man of Forty," History and Theory 32:2 (1993) 101-118. Reprinted in Bruce K Ward, trans. Notes on Bergson and Descartes: Philosophy, Christianity, and Modernity in Contestation (Eugene: Oregon: Cascade Books, 2019), 235-258.
“Jewish Education in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Abiding Challenges, (London: Freund Publishing House, 1999), 65-100. Reprinted in Modes of Educational Translation, eds., Jonathan Cohen & Eli Holtzer, (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2008), 97-129.
“Haim Sloves, the Jewish People, and a Jewish Communist’s Allegiances,” Jewish Social Studies, 9:1 (2002), 95-142.
“Homens Mapole: Hope in the Immediate Post War World,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 98:3 (2008), 355-388.
“The First Play About the Shoah on the Israeli Stage: Reflections on Ideology and Art,” in Hebrew translation ("Hamahazeh ha rishon al haShoah be teatron ha Israeli: Harhurim al ideologia ve omanut,” Bamot u Masah 9 (Dec. 2012), 22-39.
“No Longer Other? Jews in Czeslaw Milosz’s Landscape,” in Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pedich and Jacek Patyka, Jews and non-Jews: Memories and Interactions from the Perspective of Cultural Studies (Frankfort: Peter Lang, 2015),103-113.
"A Poet in the Land of the Sciences. Thinking About Human Nature with Wyslawa Szymborska," Bibliotekarz Podlaski 3/2023: 343-363.