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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Fonrobert

Charlotte Fonrobert

Stanford University
Department of Religious Studies

Charlotte Fonrobert is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford, and specializes in Judaism, particularly talmudic literature and the construction of gender in this literature. Her current work focuses on the cultural strategies the talmudic rabbis employ to construct their identity as the only valid Jewish identity and on the parallel rabbinic strategies of delegitimizing Jewish cultural alternatives. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. She completed her graduate training at the Graduate Theological Union.

Project Summary

Fonrobert's project, "Rabbinic Maps of Urban Identities: The Eruv, Mixed Neighborhoods and Symbolic Boundaries," intends to analyze the symbolic valence and the cultural significance of a system of Jewish ritual practices, designated by the umbrella term eruv. These practices establish a symbolic unification of a residential community for the purposes of observing the Sabbath. The eruv will be analyzed as a non-territorial strategy of inscribing collective identity into geographical space in general and urban space in particular.

This project will form the central part of a book on rabbinic strategies of inscribing Jewish collective identity into the geo-political and cultural space controlled by others. The plan for the book is to map various spatial frameworks and their boundaries imagined by the rabbis. Fonrobert envisions finishing a rough draft of the book by the end of the 2004-05 academic year.