Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey, “Sacred Storytelling as Lived Religion in Contemporary Jewish American Women’s Fiction"

About

Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey (she/her) is a Lecturer in the University of Colorado Boulder English department and Continuing Education division. Her recently completed dissertation examines how contemporary Jewish American novelists reconceptualize and generate religious thought and practice. Her work, published in Studies in American Jewish Literature, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and forthcoming in Shofar, examines intergenerational and transtemporal intimacies between characters. She identifies in literature the reverential, textual, and collaborative practices that cultivate new social ties between characters across time, and she interprets those ritualized forms of contact—mediated via letters, diaries, genre fiction, and alternative media—as religious, in that they bring symbolic or spectral ancestors and living readers into relationship.

This talk discusses a trope in popular contemporary novels by Jewish American women writers. Protagonists befriend Jewish ancestral figures through historical salvage, matrilineal inheritance, and intersubjective storytelling. For instance, Rachel Kadish’s 2017 bestselling novel, The Weight of Ink, presents a twenty-first century woman’s archival work as sacred labor that elicits feelings of heightened intimacy with a previously unknown, seventeenth-century Jewish scribe. An array of novels liken narrative custodianship to a gift between friends, and textual practices—careful interpretation, thorough research, shared findings—conjure affection between persons centuries apart and engender community among present-day readers. These literary and analytic practices, oriented to historic women’s writings rather than Torah or Talmud, should be recognized as a form of Jewish literacy foundational to women’s lived religion.