Annette Yoshiko Reed
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annetteyreed.bsky.social
Annette Yoshiko Reed
@annetteyreed.bsky.social
5.1K followers 2.1K following 900 posts
Stendahl Chair at Harvard Divinity School / studying demons, apocalypses, and ancient identities, between memory and forgetting
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annetteyreed.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics, describe your vibe for today using an image from your gallery
Sleeping cat
December 5, 2025 at 2:40 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Winter tip from Shlomo: On cold days, warm your paws in your human’s beard 🐾
Man with beard napping, while cats takes the opportunity to warm paws
December 4, 2025 at 2:44 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Me: Let’s use this box to gather my kid’s old jackets to give away!
My other cat: ((snuggles firmly in lap, ensuring that I shall do nothing today))
Black cat cozy in my lap, insistent that I shall never get up from the couch ever again
November 30, 2025 at 3:54 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Me: Let’s use this box to gather my kid’s old jackets to give away!
My cat:…
Cat cozily in box filled with old jackets, which can now never leave my house
November 30, 2025 at 3:46 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Happy William Blake’s birthday!
Blake, “The Angel Michael Binding Satan ("He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up")” https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/298817
November 28, 2025 at 2:10 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Ahem
Cute black cat with little blep
November 24, 2025 at 10:34 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Oh no, how to choose
Pretty Hate Machine . Nine Inch Nails, 1989 Doolittle . Pixies, 1989 Paul's Boutique
November 17, 2025 at 1:58 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings. (5/20)

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Andrea Mantegna, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, ca 1480 - painting of the body of Jesus as if seen from the foot of a bed, brilliantly deft foreshortening, with mourners off to the left corner
November 15, 2025 at 8:22 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings. (4/20)

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Is there a painting that digitization captures as poorly as this one? Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge” from the 1870s, which in person breathes and glistens like nightfall
November 14, 2025 at 12:49 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings. (3/20)

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882 - https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/13259 / dark room, musicians in the back, woman in white skirt dancing
November 13, 2025 at 7:49 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Open access! Special issue of Textual Reasoning, Vol. 16 No. 2 (2025): Elijiah Zvi Soloveitchik, The Jewish Jesus, and the Problem of Supercessionism journal.libraries.wm.edu/jtr?fbclid=I...
A Jew Who Loved Christianity As A Jew: The Strange Nineteenth-Century Orthodox Case of Elijiah Zvi Soloveitchik Shaul Magid From Volozhin to London: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Jewish-Christian Holy Spirit Shira Billet How Nice: On R. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik and Christianity Martin Kavka Can God Reject the Jewish People?: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, Supersessionism, and Modern Jewish Thought Elias Sacks Response to Shaul Magid’s the Bible, the Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary on the Gospels Susannah Ticciati
November 13, 2025 at 10:26 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings. (2/20)

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
S Dali, “Fallen Angel,” 1960 - angel, head down, feet crossed, torso marked by lots of open drawers
November 12, 2025 at 1:33 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Lee Krasner, The Seasons - https://whitney.org/collection/works/6153 - a big painting, fluid lines of green and pink abstraction reminding one of fruits, flowers, and the flow of dancing bodies
November 11, 2025 at 7:13 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Needs more cats though
Two cats sitting on chair in a room with many books
November 10, 2025 at 8:48 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Describe your cat's personality with one photo
Black cat, paws crossed daintily, judging
November 9, 2025 at 4:21 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
….I submitted the book!!
Two print pages with ToC of full draft MS
November 4, 2025 at 2:45 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
The top of my desk is visible. Those who know me know this can only mean one thing…
Office with flowers, books, and a clean desk
November 4, 2025 at 2:06 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
As HDS’s post on my piece inadvertently demonstrated why this work is so difficult in practice; most prefer easy path of self-congratulating a majority & imposing one perspective VS hard work of understanding across majority/minoritized perspectives. But this is arguably why the work is important +
To engage in such work, we may well need to set aside our yearning for peace at any price. Such work requires making space for tensions to stand without resolution, accepting that honest and inclusive conversations can’t always avoid conflict, and letting multiple stories from multiple perspectives stand as true without assimilating them into one narrative, polarizing them into “two sides,” or otherwise effacing multivocality in the name of harmony. It is not a goal quite as lofty as peace, let alone “Religion and Just Peace.” But it is perhaps a place to begin.
October 5, 2025 at 12:05 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
When I speak of hope, it pertains to this friendship across difference—precisely the opposite, thus, of the suggestion just to laud the *Christian* Harvard prof in isolation from his Jewish colleague and friend +
Yet I must confess that I felt some hope when working in the Harvard University Archives and finding those little notes. I found some hope in this smaller story, this local story, which resounds with the reminder that empires may proclaim peace and glorify war and erase difference, but sometimes between individuals, it can be possible to take up the harder, slower, and far more humbling work of talking and listening across difference.
October 5, 2025 at 12:00 PM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
The point of my piece, and how it ends, though, is with the part of the story that’s NOT told—Wolfson’s parallel work on the Church Fathers and their friendship as one glimpses in his archives +
Wolfson lauds Moore’s 1927 Judaism for precisely this, including in a talk at Harvard Divinity School where he credits Moore’s efforts with inspiring him to write—as a Jew—a book on philosophy that takes the Church Fathers seriously.48 Within Wolfson’s ample archives at Harvard, one can also glimpse the little story behind this bigger one. His files include tiny pieces of papers, scraps and stray receipts, onto which are written notes between the two.49 Tiny but nevertheless kept. Notes that speak to their friendship.
October 5, 2025 at 11:57 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Moore is rightly lauded, not least for his commitment to taking post-Christian Judaism seriously at a time other Christian scholars of Judaism didn’t +
Moore was one of Wolfson’s teachers and played a part in Wolfson’s hiring at Harvard. His efforts thus contributed to the establishment of the very first chair dedicated specifically to Jewish Studies in the United States.46 In addition, Moore—as a Christian—famously wrote a history of Judaism that takes Jewish perspectives and Rabbinic sources seriously.47
October 5, 2025 at 11:55 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
When we tell the history of research on ancient Judaism, it is conventional to just celebrate those *Christians* who spoke against anti-Judaism; this is how Moore is usually understood, but the habit reinscribes the denial of Jewish agency—inaccurately in this case +
I have read Moore’s “Christian Writers on Judaism” more times than I can count. One of my teachers, John G. Gager (himself a Harvard PhD), always assigned it in his classes. I’ve assigned it in many of my own classes. But I didn’t connect it to the context of the debate here at Harvard about limiting Jewish enrollments until I was working through the archives of his Jewish colleague, Harry Austryn Wolfson, and encountered a 1922 letter in which Wolfson adduces the article in this context.
October 5, 2025 at 11:53 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
My discussion of Moore is not lauding him for his understanding—it’s about his friendship with Harry Austryn Wolfson, and the hope that I found seeing how this friendship rooted real conversations across difference +
“Moore was a brilliant scholar. It is tempting to credit his rigor and erudition with enabling him to see beyond centuries of erasures, but also to see and name the erasures. What I suspect, however, is that his insights may also pertain to something far more quotidian, but arguably much more powerful—namely: friendship.”
October 5, 2025 at 11:48 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
Hmm… I wrote a piece about the epistemic erasure of Jews & my institution posted about it in a manner that doesn’t mention Jews—should I be happy they proved my point or upset…? 🤔
October 5, 2025 at 11:36 AM
annetteyreed.bsky.social
“Poll: Public Confidence in Higher Ed Growing” www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...
Despite the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on colleges and universities, American confidence in higher education is growing. According to a poll the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy published Thursday, 47 percent of 1,030 Americans surveyed said they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education institutions, with a net positive rating of 33—up 13 percentage points since 2023. Survey respondents reported more confidence in higher education than in the police (44 percent), the medical system (38 percent) and large tech companies (25 percent)
September 26, 2025 at 3:17 PM