Fellow Spotlight: Max K. Strassfeld 

In his Academy project, “Disciplining Life,” Strassfeld examines the concept of life-cycle rituals-rituals connected to birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Implicit in the idea of the life cycle is the assumption that an autonomous individual is the basic unit of ritual, and that the goal of life is to reproduce. Drawing on feminist science, disability, queer, critical race, and trans studies, Strassfeld’s project seeks to challenge current scholarship that tends to trace the origins of life-cycle rituals to rabbinic literature, and the vision of hetero-reproductive life to classical Jewish sources.