The return of the in-person conference: the Association for Jewish Studies during the pandemic - The Jewish Chronicle

"It’s a bit like a girls’ weekend, except instead of your girlfriends, you’re with a bunch of incredibly intelligent scholars, and instead of hitting Sephora for the latest beauty products and going to swanky rooftop cocktail bars, you’re listening to talks about, oh, Sabbatianism or the history of Bais Yaakov education…you know?"

As I explained to my sister-in-law my heartfelt enthusiasm for the scholarly conference I was attending — the Association for Jewish Studies, held 18-21 December in Chicago—my analogy sounded foolish even to my own ears. And yet — not.

AJS is the kind of annual event Jewish Studies scholars of every stripe look forward to with all the excitement of a minibreak. In addition to the talks, there are, typically, meals and film screenings, a cashmere party to raise scholarship money, some bar hopping (‘networking’) and highly competitive trivia. Moreover, this year’s event came with double the anticipation of good times; after all, last year’s AJS, like so many other conferences, had to run online.

Back when we registered in April, the world was looking decent, or about as decent as things have been in this long slog of pandemia. AJS promised strict safety measures including proof of vaccination and mask wearing. The Women’s Caucus 7:30am meeting would be a breakfast with no food. The cashmere party would be a cashmere pop-up event. We would sacrifice part of the fun, yes, but we would still be able to attend.

As December neared, however, the continued dangers of the virus, along with the constantly changing travel testing and restrictions for different countries, began making participants uneasy. For my roundtable on ‘Jewish-Muslim Gender Trouble: The Potential and Pitfalls of Interfaith Encounters,’ I had been proud of the national diversity of our participants: we were coming from the US, the UK, Israel, and France. By November, this very diversity proved a liability; while the American-based scholars didn’t have to worry about securing a Covid test within 24 hours or having the borders suddenly closed to them, my international colleagues panicked.

We lost one panellist coming from Israel and another from France. We found two more who could speak on the topic. Then Omicron hit, and even the American-based academics began to wonder if coming to a conference with hundreds of people held in an enclosed hotel in a cold city was wise. Israel introduced a quarantine, so another of my roundtable’s Israel-based panellists had to cancel her trip; a fourth panellist, coming from Cambridge, tested positive for Covid before her flight. I invited a scholar in the Netherlands to join us one morning a week before the conference; by the afternoon of that same day, she pulled out, too, afraid of being separated from her children long-term. Our little roundtable in flux was a microcosm of the conference at large. By the time the event began, scores of panels had been cancelled, and the number of conference attendees, usually about 1200 strong, had halved.

Gin and Jews (Leslie Ginsparg Klein and Karen Skinazi) with their trivia prize

And yet — and yet! Even as we missed our colleagues and starved through breakfastless breakfasts, it was all kinds of wonderful. In my roundtable, moderated by the eminent Jewish feminist, Susannah Heschel, we debated the goals of interfaith dialogue, the term ‘interfaith,’ the role of Israel-Palestine in UK-based endeavours. In a panel of de-Ashkenazifying the Jewish Studies curriculum, we came up with ways to make Sephardic and Mizrahi histories and literature core to our education. In a session on creative writing, we discussed the opportunities that fiction and poetry could provide as translation for our research. At another on Holocaust literature, we questioned the very category of Holocaust literature and the purposes such categorisation served. Between the panels and round tables, we lifted our masks furtively to sip our drinks and catch up with people we hadn’t seen since—so it seemed—forever.

I know the merits of online conferencing—last year AJS’s participation actually rose 50% by running online!—but my goodness, there is nothing like spending time with colleagues in person. I learned, I laughed, and I loved every minute of it. All that was lacking were my colleagues robbed of their attendance by this stupid never-ending virus.

Also, my team won in trivia — viva Gin and Jews!