To Make the Hands Impure

How can cradling handling or rubbing a text be said ethically to have made something happen? What as readers or interpreters may come off in our hands in as we maculate or mark the books we read?For Adam Zachary Newton reading is anembodied practice wherein “ethics” becomes a matter of tact—in the doubled sense of touch and regard. With the image of the book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain To Make the Hands Impure cuts a provocative cross-disciplinary swath through classical Jewish texts modern Jewish philosophy film and performance literature translation and the material text.Newton explores the ethics of reading through a range of texts from the Talmud and Midrash to Conrad’s Nostromo and Pascal’s Le Mémorial from works by Henry Darger and Martin Scorsese to the National September 11 Memorial and a synagogue in Havana Cuba. In separate chapters he conducts masterly treatments of Emmanuel Levinas Mikhail Bakhtin and Stanley Cavell by emphasizing their performances as readers—a trebled orientation to Talmud novel and theater/film. To Make the Hands Impure stages the encounter of literary experience and scriptural traditions—the difficult and the holy—through an ambitious singular and innovative approach marked in equal measure by erudition and imaginative daring.