postmedieval awarded for best new journal

“Go to Brooklyn. It has all these cool neighborhoods. There’s a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn and I know it really well because it borders one of my friends neighborhood’s, Sunset Park. And you have to walk through it to get to another part of Brooklyn. Now Hasidic Judaism is a rather interesting kind of radical sect within Judaism that looks very old because they practice these things that feel very ancient: they have very strict gender divisions; women have to keep their heads covered; men have a certain kind of haircut, and they have to wear these long coats. When you walk through the neighborhood, you feel like you’re stepping back into time. But, there’s two weird things going on. Hasidic Judaism was founded in the 19th century. It was an attempt to recapture a past that had supposedly disappeared. But it is itself a modern invention. Also, if you are a Hasidic Jew living in Brooklyn, you may have your own neighborhood, and everyone may look alike, but you’re surrounded. You’re in this modern city. Everyone else walking by is wearing their getup.

“So, the other thing that interests us is the ways in which every single person is kind of a unique container of different times and places and whatever you think modernity is depends on where you are. If you’re in Calcutta or Brooklyn or LA of Bangladesh or Kosovo or Grosny in Chechnya after the Russians bombed the entire city to rubble, how can you tell what time you’re in? I went to a conference and I showed pictures of Grozny after it was bombed and I asked the audience where is this and most of them said Dresden from World War II. How is each time different from every other time. Our journal is interested in showing how the medieval and the modern are constantly locked together in a dialogic encounter, the outcome of which is never certain.”

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