Table Of ContentTAKING STOCK
THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors
Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
TAKING STOCK
Cultures of Enumeration in
Contemporary Jewish Life
Edited by Michal Kravel-Tovi and
Deborah Dash Moore
Indiana University Press
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1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For Yoel, Eviatar, and Shaul Tovi—the three who count
most in my life
For my fourth grandchild, Oren Jacob Moore, who
brings with his arrival the joys of taking stock
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Counting in Jewish / Michal Kravel-Tovi 1
Part I. Counting the Dead: Iconic Numbers and Collective Memory
1 Six Million: The Numerical Icon of the Holocaust /
Oren Baruch Stier 29
2 Breathing Life into Iconic Numbers: Yad Vashem’s Shoah Victims’
Names Recovery Project and the Constitution of a Posthumous
Census of Six Million Holocaust Dead / Carol A. Kidron 47
3 Putting Numbers into Space: Place Names, Collective
Remembrance, and Forgetting in Israeli Culture / Yael Zerubavel 69
Part II. Counting the Living: Putting the “Jewish” in Social Science
4 Jewish “Crime” by the Numbers, or Putting the “Social” in
Jewish Social Science / Mitchell B. Hart 95
5 Counting People: The Co-production of Ethnicity and Jewish
Majority in Israel-Palestine / Anat Leibler 114
6 Wet Numbers: The Language of Continuity Crisis and the Work
of Care among the Organized American Jewish Community /
Michal Kravel-Tovi 141
Part III. Counting Objects: Material Subjects and the Social Lives
of Enumerated Things
7 “Let’s Start with the Big Ones”: Numbers, Thin Description, and
the Magic of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center /
Joshua B. Friedman 167
8 “130 Kilograms of Matza, 3,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs, 100 Kilograms
of Haroset and 2,000 Balls of Gefilte Fish”: Hyperbolic Reckoning
on Passover / Vanessa L. Ochs 196
viii | Contents
Postscript: Balancing Accounts: Commemoration and
Commensuration / Theodore M. Porter 219
Bibliography 231
List of Contributors 253
Index 257
Acknowledgments
T
his volume has been long in the making, and it is a great pleasure for us to
have a chance to thank several people who have contributed to it in various ways.
It began as an idea for a workshop on the social life of Jewish numbers developed
by Michal Kravel-Tovi as her public contribution as Mandell L. Berman Post-
doctoral Research Fellow in Contemporary American Jewish Life. As Director
of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan, Deborah
Dash Moore brainstormed together with Michal to give shape and substance to
the proposed workshop, held on March 18–20, 2012. Both of us recognized that
numbers have long occupied Jewish imagination and practice, mediating and
shaping the ways in which Jews have constructed and narrated themselves and
their worlds. It seemed worthwhile to examine in greater depth how Jews have
produced numerical accounts of themselves and then employed these accounts to
negotiate their relationships with both God and meaningful social others. To this
end, we convened an international workshop and invited diverse scholars to both
write formal papers and present comments. Over several days, the Frankel Cen-
ter seminar table reverberated with lively discussions and sharp analyses, along
with respectful disagreements and personal stories. Invigorated, we agreed that
the papers deserved to reach a wider audience. However, we recognized that we
would have to narrow the focus for publication, so we decided to emphasize such
key issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, actualization of the Zionist dream,
meanings ascribed to numbers in the Holocaust, and the embrace of numbers by
American Jews to interpret political and religious notions of continuity.
The workshop and this volume benefited from the contribution of all of the
scholars who participated. In addition to those in Taking Stock, workshop par-
ticipants and their topics included: Robert Kawashima (University of Florida),
“Calculating Sacred Time: On the ‘Archeology’ of the Ancient Jewish Calendar”;
Gwynn Kessler (Swarthmore College), “Rabbinic Numerology: Making Lists,
Counting Numbers, and Creating Worlds”; Ian Lustick (University of Pennsyl-
vania), “Numbers and the Production of Quantification: Israeli Investigations”;
Noam Pianko (University of Washington), “Is Counting Counterproductive? To-
ward a Jewish Collectivity Beyond Numbers”; and Seth Schwartz (Columbia Uni-
versity), “Why Do Historical Demography of Ancient Jews?”; Ruth Behar, Karla
Goldman, Rachel Neis, Sammy Smooha, and Geneviève Zubrzycki, all affiliated
with the University of Michigan at the time of the workshop, contributed formal
as well as informal comments in their capacity as respondents. We are grateful
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