What is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a transformational practice. The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work. The second essay takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the discipline of classics. Lastly, the third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation.
