ACJC Presents: Friday Forum with visiting scholar Shai Ginsburg.

Moses in Exile: Freud and the Politics of Belonging

In this talk, I return to Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to consider broad questions about writing, violence, and belonging. What does it mean to write as a member of a community—or to write against the expectations that membership imposes? Under what historical and institutional conditions can a text be written, published, and heard? And what happens when war, exile, or political violence transforms those conditions? Beginning with Freud’s hesitation to publish the final part of his book and his eventual flight from Vienna to London, I explore how Moses and Monotheism enacts the very movement of repression, displacement, and return that it describes. I then turn to the book’s reception to ask how different readers have understood its unstable relationship to Jewish identity. Does Freud uproot Moses from Jewish history, or does he imagine another form of belonging—one grounded in fracture, translation, and multiple identification?

Shai Ginsburg is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on modern Hebrew literature, Israeli cinema, Jewish intellectual history, literary theory, and game studies. He is the author of Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880–1990 and coeditor of Jews and the Ends of Theory and Bounded Mind and Soul: Russia and Israel, 1880–2010. His current work explores the emergence of Hebrew speech at the turn of the twentieth century.

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