Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus
Professor of Religion
Office: Knapton 102
Office Hours: MWF 10:30-12:30; MW 2:00-3:00, and by appointment
Phone: 286-3694
Fax: 286-3640
Email: jkraus@wheatoncollege.edu
Degrees
Ph.D., M.A., Vanderbilt University
M.H.L., Rabbinical Ordination Reconstructionist Rabbinical
B.A., Harvard College
Main Interests
Bible, Comparison of Religions, Judaism, Kabbalah and ethics, Ritual, Food and Religion (especially meal rituals), Symposium Literature, Christian-Jewish relations.
Research Interests
Much of my research is focused on meals and religion. I have a book in press, Memorable Meals: Symposia in Luke's Gospel, The Rabbinic Seder, and the Greco-Roman Literary Tradition, in which I compare early Christian table fellowship with the Jewish Passover seder.
(http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/Academic/academicdept/Religion/MemorableMeals/mm_tc.htm) I've presented papers on Jewish meals for the Association for Jewish Studies and at the Brown U. Colloquium on Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean region. I participated in a national conference on Food and Judaism, the 15th Annual Klutznick-Harris Symposium in Omaha, NE, the international Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and I am on the Steering Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature research Group "Meals in the Greco-Roman World." (http://www.philipharland.com/meals/GrecoRomanMealsSeminar.htm)
I'm currently working on a research project "Reading at the Dinner Table: the Use of Books at Jewish Meals." It is for a book on the study of Torah at Jewish meals, Eating Torah, a study of rabbinical and medieval Jewish "rituals of dinner." I am investigating how people used the manuscripts and earliest printed editions of the Shulhan Shel Arba, a treatise on eating by the 13th century Spanish kabbalist and Biblical exegete Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher. He says his readers should have his book by their side, reading it while they are at the dinner table. I am comparing analogous material evidence of contemporaneous Sephardic Haggadot, and Christian and Muslim texts about reading and eating. Do their physical form, size, food stains, and illuminations support statements like Bahya's? What can be inferred about the communities who used books at the dinner table and the purposes for which they did so?
These are not just antiquarian questions, but in fact are one set of possible answers and strategies for a basic feature of the human condition, what in his new book Michael Pollan calls The Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin, 2006). Given the wide range of foods we are physiologically capable of eating, we constantly have to decide what is good to eat. Thus, human beings compose and use narratives that make food, in the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, "not only good to eat, but also good to think." How similar and how different in purpose are the Jewish medieval texts from contemporary narratives about food that we find not at the table, but in grocery stores, the stories we tell or which are implied in the labels "organic," "halal," "vegan," "kosher," or "low carb"? Aren't we telling stories about our food because, as Pollan says, "it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we long depended on...to 'engag[e] in authentic experiences' and imaginatively enact...a 'return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact'"?(p.137) When R. Bahya has his readers frame the activities of the meal within the sacred drama of Adam and Eve's fall, the revelation at Sinai, and the messianic banquet on the flesh of Leviathan, or when the Passover Haggadah's stories and pictures evoke memories and visions of the utopian redemption from Egypt as we eat the bitter herbs and sweet haroset, or when Christian and Jewish sages counsel us to "eat the book", to ruminate, chew on the words of God to restore our exalted status that we lost when the first man and woman sinned and ate what they mistakenly thought was good to eat - aren't they intending something quite similar? In their own way, they are prescribing a remedy - certain kinds of reading, sometimes on an empty or full stomach, but definitely at the table - for the omnivore's dilemma.
I also recently participated in an NEH Summer Seminar on Religious Diversity and the Common Good, led by Boston College Professor Alan Wolfe, to gain a deeper understanding of the current American cultural situation in which I'm doing my research and teaching.
Teaching Interests
I teach courses on the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (in translation), on Judaism, Islam, responses to the Holocaust, comparison of religions, religion in modern literature, and "The Rituals of Dinner." (See http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/Quarterly/Q2008Winter//Food.html) I am the director of the Judaic Studies minor and I offer a Seminar on Jewish Thought as needed. I offer enhanced sections of some of my courses to study texts in Hebrew or Greek. (Contact me if you are interested.) I am interested in experiential and service learning and received a Shouse Fellowship for making an oral history project (interviewing members of the local Muslim community) part of my course Islam: Faith and Practice. I'm very interested in having students make the connections between the critical comparative study of religion and their experience in "the real world." A good example of the kind of discussions we have in class can be viewed on the "Scripture in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" blog for my Religion 204 course of the same name: http://wheatonma-rel204-spring2008.blogspot.com/
Other Interests
Faculty Advisor to the Wheaton College Hillel, Chair of First Year Seminar Steering Committee. I have also conducted an informal weekly Torah study session "Lunch and Lernen with the Rabbi," sponsored by Hillel, for students and others interested and I am a contributor to the blog The Jew and the Carrot: Jews, Food, and Contemporary Issues (http://jcarrot.org). I lecture on Islam for the "Understanding the Modern Middle East" program of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. I led a book discussion of The Da Vinci Code for the Richards Memorial Library of N. Attleboro, MA, and for Women's History month at Wheaton, with Visiting Assistant Professor Jane Gerhard, a panel discussion on "Da Vinci's Code and Gibson's Passions: Christianity and the Female Body in Recent Popular Culture." I was the part-time interim rabbi for a local Reconstructionist synagogue in Marshfield, MA, Congregation Shirat Hayam from 2004-2005.
Student Projects
In 2002-2003, Jacklyn Schmitt '03, my Wheaton Research Partner helped me put together a working bibliography on Meals in Jewish Studies at
http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/jkraus/articles/Jewishmealsbib.htm.
I worked on a project on meals in the Greco-Roman world with two students in 2004-5 in another Wheaton Research Partnership (WRP).
Selected Publications, Creative Work or Performances
Publications:
"Torah on the Table: A Sensual Morality," Food and Morality: Proceedings of the 2007 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, ed. by Susan Friedland; Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2008
http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/academic/academicdept/Religion/jbkarticles/TorahontheTableSensualMorality.pdf
"'Real Eating:' A Medieval Spanish Jewish View of Gastronomic Authenticity," Authenticity in the Kitchen: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery 2005, ed. by Richard Hoskings; Totnes (UK): Prospect, 2006.
http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/jkraus/articles/BrumbergKrausJ.pdf
"What is Religious About Ethics?" The Reconstructionist 69:2 (2005) 49-57.
"Does God Care What We Eat? Jewish Theologies of Food and Reverence for Life," in Food and Judaism: Studies in Jewish Civilization 15, ed. by Leonard Greenspoon et al.; Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2004.
"Meals as Midrash: A Survey of Ancient Meals in Jewish Studies Scholarship" in Food and Judaism, 2004.
"The Ritualization of Scripture in Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher's Eating Manual Shulhan Shel Arba'," Proceedings of the 13th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 2001.
http://www.lekket.com/Site_ViewDocument.asp?id=913&idPage=1 or http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/academic/academicdept/Religion/jbkarticles/ritualizationofscripture.pdf
"'Not by Bread Alone...': Food and Drink in the Rabbinic Seder and in the Last Supper," Semeia 86: Food and Drink in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, ed. by Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten (2000) 154-179.
"Jesus as Other People's Scripture," The Historical Jesus Through Jewish and Catholic Eyes (ed. by Bryan F. Le Beau, Leonard Greenspoon, and Dennis Hamm; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000.
"A Jewish Ideological Perspective on the Study of Christian Scripture," Jewish Social Studies N.S. 4:1 (1997) 121-152.
"Meat-eating and Jewish Identity: Ritualization of the Priestly 'Torah of Beast and Fowl' [Lev. 11:46] in Rabbinic Judaism and in Medieval Kabbalah," Association for Jewish Studies Review, 24/2 (1999) 227-262.
"Contemporary Jewish Theologies: An Essay Review," The Reconstructionist 59/1 (1994) 86-93.
"Were the Pharisees a Conversionist Sect? Table Fellowship as a Strategy of Conversion," "The Making of Proselytes": Jewish Missionary Activity in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (ed. A.-J. Levine and R. Pervo; forthcoming), 161-192.
http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/jkraus/articles/Pharisees.htm
Papers:
"Performing Myth, Performing Midrash at Rabbinic Meals," paper for the Seminar on Meals in the Greco-Roman, SBL Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November, 2008.
http://www.philipharland.com/meals/2008%20Brumberg-Kraus%20Final-Performing%20Myth_jbk.pdf
"Kabbalah, Food, and Sustainability," Twentieth Annual Klutznick-Harris Symposium "The Mountains Shall Drip Wine::" Jews and the Environment" Omaha, NE, October 28-29, 2007
"'Torah on the Table:' A Sensual Morality," Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery," Oxford, UK, September 8-9, 2007
http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/jkraus/articles/toranontable_jbk.pdf
"Contrasting Banquets: A Literary Commonplace in Philo's On the Contemplative Life and Other Greco-Roman Symposia," Consultation on Meals in the Greco-Roman World, AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, November, 2004
http://www.philipharland.com/meals/2004%20Brumberg-Kraus%20Abstract.pdf
"The 'Normal Mysticism' of Jewish Meal Rituals," Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, MA, December, 2003
"The Tension between Vegetarianism and Meat-Eating in Judaism," Animals and Religion Consultation, AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA, November, 2003
"Meals and Jewish Studies," Consultation on Meals in the Greco-Roman World, AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, Toronto, November, 2002
http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/jkraus/articles/MealsasMidrash.htm