Biography

Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism at Fordham University in New York City. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her first book, titled Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, is under contract with Princeton University Press. It examines the ways in which time was conceptualized and organized in rabbinic texts to create and disrupt difference – between rabbis and Romans, Jews and Christians, men and women, heaven and earth.

 

Sarit has also published articles about other aspects of time in antiquity, including the use of women’s bodies as metaphors for time; the correspondence between Philo and Seneca’s philosophical approaches to quotidian time; and the recent “temporal turn” in the fields of Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies. 

Project Abstract

My project investigates how rabbinic and patristic authors in the first centuries CE thought about the organization and use of daily time, and how they mandated that their followers spend their time. In a recent article, I explored the ways in which the first-century philosophers Philo of Alexandria and Seneca the Younger approached the unit of the day, quotidian time, and the question of what constitutes a valuable use of time and a waste of time. In my work at the Einstein Center Chronoi, I intend on extending this work into subsequent periods. I ask whether and how the ideas about time advanced by Philo and Seneca were adopted and adapted by later thinkers, including in the writings of Christian authors such as Origen and Clement, and how such philosophies of time compare with approaches to daily time use in rabbinic sources, including the Mishnah and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. What do these texts teach us about these differing ancient philosophies of daily time and the broader values that underlie them? 

During my time at the Center, I will also be working on conceptions of divine time in rabbinic sources, investigating in particular how God’s daily and nightly schedule was imagined in Palestinian and Babylonian texts and how it related to the daily schedules of human beings. Rabbinic sources contain playful and profound reflections on what God does all day – from studying Torah and sustaining the world’s creatures to playing with the Leviathan and making matches between couples – that provide a new angle to approaching questions about time and theology in the rabbinic corpus. 

Curriculum vitae

Since 2014

Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism and Associate Director of Jewish Studies (Fordham University)

   

2017-2018

Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Study, Jerusalem

2013-2014

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Jewish Theological Seminary) 

Starr Fellow in Judaica (Harvard University)

2007-2013

PhD from the Department of Religion (Princeton University)

2006-2007

Fulbright Fellowship in Talmud and Archaeology (Hebrew University)

2002-2006

BA in Religion, Jewish Studies, and Near Eastern Studies (Princeton University) 

Selected Publications

'The Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies'. Currents in Biblical Research 17.3 (2019): 332-395, co-authored with Lynn Kaye.

'The Festival of Every Day: Philo and Seneca on Quotidian Time'. Harvard Theological Review 111.3 (2018): 357-381.

'Time, Gender and Ritual in Rabbinic Sources', in Religious Studies and Rabbinics (ed. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth A. Berkowitz; Routledge, 2017), 139-157.

'Women’s Bodies as Metaphors for Time in Biblical, Second Temple, and Rabbinic Literature', in The Construction of Time in Antiquity: Ritual, Art and Identity (ed. Jonathan Ben-Dov and Lutz Doering; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 173-204. 

'A Matter of Time: Writing Jewish Memory into Roman History'. AJSReview 40.1 (2016), 57-86.