Bestiarium Judaicum

Jay Geller is Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies Program, and has also taught at the University of Vienna, Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Swarthmore College, and Wesleyan University. He is the author of On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007), The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011), and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018), all from Fordham University Press; and the co-editor of Reading Freud's Reading (New York University Press, 1994).

"Jay Geller's Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews is a remarkable monograph that has no parallel in scholarly literature. The author offers a sophisticated conceptual and historical account of how the longstanding discourse about the animality of the Jew is accompanied by an iconography of an unnatural Jewish bestiary. The racial anti-Semitism that fueled the horrors of the Holocaust is contextualized in a new and thought-provoking way." -- -Elliot R. Wolfson University of California, Santa Barbara