Ritual Failure and the Politics of Jewish MemorydissertationsStern, CeliacreatorNahme, PaulAdvisorBush, StephenReaderHonig, BonnieReaderFarneth, MollyReaderBrown University. Department of Religious Studiessponsor2026xii, 183 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2026thesesTurning to J. L. Austin’s philosophy of language, recent work in ritual studies has argued for understanding rituals as performatives to explain how rituals change and influence our worlds. This work overwhelmingly presumes that rituals always go according to plan. Austin’s performativity provides the necessary tools to theorize ritual failure, yet this work has not been carried out in ritual studies, uncovering a blind spot in ritual studies concerning acts that in some way go wrong. By focusing on instances and possibilities of failure, I uncover some performative dimensions of ritual that other accounts have missed: ritual’s more irreverent inclinations and the potentially productive work of infelicitous acts. This dissertation, then, critically recovers ritual studies’ turn to performativity as one way to critique conventional norms that govern the narrations of Jewish history and memory. In this dissertation, I argue that a new take on performativity in ritual theory—one that takes examples of failure seriously, and as a starting point—may offer a picture of ritual that better represents its impulse to expand, improvise, or go wrong, and a picture of Holocaust memory that better embraces its performative and fallible dimensions.performativityRitualHolocaust memoryJewish ThoughtEnglishRPB20260516