CHARLOTTE FONROBERT

‘Rabbis’ Hermaphrodite’ April 6 topic

By Jewish Review

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“The Rabbis’ Hermaphrodite: Gender Ambiguity and Legal Identity in Judaism” will be the topic when the Institute for Judaic Studies’ Writers and Scholars lecture series resumes April 6.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, an associate professor in the religious  studies  department of Stanford University, will speak at 4:30 p.m., Sunday, April 6, at Reed College Psychology Room 105.

Jewish law as conceived by the sages of the Talmud assumes that its subjects are either men or women. Indeed, in traditional Jewish law someone’s gender identity is crucial, since the individual commandments apply to either men or women.

Curiously, the sages of the Talmud are very interested in those people who do not clearly fit into either of these two categories, namely what they call the “androginos” or hermaphrodite, a dually sexed person, and the “tumtum,” the non-sexed person.

In this talk, Fonrobert will reflect on the importance of the rabbinic discussion about gender ambiguous people to Jewish thinking about gender and to contemporary reflections on gender identity.

Fonrobert specializes in talmudic literature and culture. Her research interests include gender  in  Jewish culture, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in  Late  Antiquity, the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy, and rabbinic  conceptions  of Judaism with respect to Greco-Roman culture. She completed her  graduate  training at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Fonrobert is the author of “Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian  Reconstructions of Biblical Gender” (2000), which won the Salo Baron  Prize for a  best first book in Jewish Studies of the year.

This lecture is presented by The Institute for Judaic Studies in co-sponsorship with Reed College and Lewis & Clark College.Tickets are $15 each, free for students with ID.

For more information about the Fonrobert lecture and the entire 2007-2008 Lecture Series, call 503-244-4473.