[POSTPONED] Trans Talmud: Religion and the Public Conversation

Please note this event has been postponed. Please visit the CSR website for more information.

Max Strassfeld is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, published in 2022 with the University of California Press, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.
CCSR Graduate Research Fellow Eliav Grossman will be in conversation with Dr. Strassfeld.

This event is part of the Religion and the Public Conversation series. The 2023-2024 theme for the series is “Bodies and Embodiment.”