Gerhard Casper Lecture

Traditional Jewish Literature and Trans Politics

Ancient Jewish texts contain a variety of sex and gender categories that profoundly shaped Jewish ideas about law and gender. Eunuchs and androgynes, for example, allow for the possibilities of existence beyond a simple binary. In this talk, Max K. Strassfeld argues that these historical Judaic texts can prompt a radical reassessment of contemporary narratives about the relationship among religion, gender, and law. Such venerable rabbinic sources, they suggest, can help counter the so-called traditional claims of Judeo-Christian ideas of binary gender.