On Monday, March 15, the Institute along with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies hosted the third 2020-21 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture with Pratima Gopalakrishnan.
The concept of “maintenance” — food, clothing, or other in-kind provision to family members labeled dependents — has a long history from antiquity to modernity, in both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts. This talk explores the rich history of this term, as well as its more remote use in classical rabbinic texts. For the rabbis, maintenance was not just a legal obligation, but a malleable concept for defining and thinking through relationships within the household. The talk considers maintenance not only as a legal term but as an entry point into constructions of gender and labor in the ancient Jewish household.
Pratima Gopalakrishnan is a scholar of late antique Jewish religion and history, who uses theoretical approaches drawn from feminist and queer theory, and slavery and labor studies. She works primarily with late antique rabbinic Jewish texts, as well as the textual and material artifacts of late antique and early medieval legal cultures and considers how ostensibly economic ancient discussions — of the household, the agricultural field, but also the laboring body itself —were always imbricated with the projects of defining religious, ethnic, and sexual difference. Pratima received her Ph.D. from the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation titled “Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household.” She is currently the Perilman Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.
The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.
Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.