J Boyarin
Biographic Data
| ID | 10844 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Boyarin |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Boyarin |
| SIGNATURE | BOYARIN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4056-8704 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Instantiations of alterity
This article offers an anthropological and theoretical-archeological comparative exploration of agency, responsibility, and alterity in the Late Ancient Iranian Talmud and its reading in contemporary Manhattan. The guiding question is how the classical rabbinic imagery and conceptualization of the "Goy" or "non-Jew" are implicitly recast in the modern framework of subjectivity, in a social context of quasi-traditionalist Talmud study. The specifi…
Traditionalist Jews and the Question of Whiteness
This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives-which need not imply any lesse…
Stumbling Upon the Archive
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Does time stop in the world of Talmud Torah
In 2012 I began a certain engagement as a way to fill what the academy tellingly calls a period of ‘leave.’ That engagement constitutes study at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), the ‘last remaining’ yeshiva on New York’s Lower East Side, and it began and remains ambiguously situated between the rhythms of anthropological fieldwork and those of the adult, full-time occupant of a beis medresh. My experiences there provoke a number of critical que…
Yeshiva Days
An intimate and moving portrait of daily life in New York's oldest institution of traditional rabbinic learning New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. Yeshiva Days is Jonathan Boyarin's uniquely personal account …
Yeshiva Days
New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. This book is the author's uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of J…
A Stick of Wood, a Tree of Life
This Ets Chayim, a Tree of Life, is obsolete, redundant, out of time and out of place. It is detached both from the Torah scroll for which it was made, and from its mate that once served that scroll’s other end. It is not supposed to be here anymore
Portrait
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
On a more constructive relationship between the secular and religious left
Cynthia Baker. Jew. New Brunswick, NJ
Reviewed by: Jew by Cynthia Baker Jonathan Boyarin Cynthia Baker. Jew. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 190 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400941800051X Like other volumes in the Keywords in Jewish Studies series from Rutgers University Press, Baker's book begins with a historical retrospective on the term Jew, which she italicizes throughout in order to insist on the contingent rather than natural work it does, and on the manifold ways th…
Critical trajectories and the timing of critique
This editorial discusses the place of critique at different stages in research and writing. It evokes Foucault's conception of critique as transformative and draws from the symposium in this issue examining the role of critique in anthropology to shift the conversation to the question of when critique occurs. The editorial advocates for the notion of critique as a competency that is dependent upon context
On a balanced critique
Critical theory of religion vs. critical religion
Last year’s editorial, ‘‘How can mainstream approaches become more critical?’’ (Goldstein, Boer, King and Boyarin, 2015) provoked some strong responses. Initially, these occurred in social media-a place which one might think unlikely for intellectual discussion but in some ways has become its vanguard. There a debate ensued (mostly between Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin, and CRR Editor Warren S. Goldstein), which was published subsequently in R…
How can mainstream approaches become more critical
Jewish identification and critical theory
This symposium examines how various discursive frameworks inform Jewish and non-Jewish interpretations of Jewishness. Although the specific characteristics of these frameworks are context-dependent, the underlying themes remain the same: Jewish identification entails identifying "difference," and this process of drawing distinctions between Jews and non-Jews gets developed in discursive frameworks of temporality, "race thinking," nationalism, and…
Can a religious approach be critical
Text and Translation
The shared and inseparable gifts of Christianity and civilization were exemplified by the Gospel and the technology of writing in which it was embodied. Resistance to the Gospel and its message could sometimes be ascribed to perverse or inadequate humanity. In Christian Europe, possession of literacy and a privileged relation to texts was a mark of spatial integration within the polis and its microcosms in the New World. As far as passionate Chri…
Muslims
The emergence of Christian Europe coincided to a large extent with the rise of the new and aggressively expansive Islam and was an overt response to that expansion. The struggle against Islam provided a crucial template for Christian missionary warfare, in New Spain and beyond, long before Christopher Columbus set his sights on sailing through the Indian Ocean to retake Jerusalem from the east. The closely linked justification of crusade and miss…
Alanna Cooper. Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism. Bloomington and Indianapolis
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No Place of Rest
The shelf of recent books on medieval and early modern Jewish culture and society that yield to no other subfield in their combination of rigorous philology and sophisticated cultural analysis continues to grow. This surely gratifies those of us who have argued for decades now that, far from being a parochial or isolated specialty, the study of Jewish texts and culture should be understood as a vital connecting thread through the history of the M…
Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul
An Ugly Story
Among the many themes to which Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man speaks so richly and suggestively, I will focus here on three that seem especially pertinent to our understandings of American Jewish identity, as well as to the academic practice of Jewish studies, and that exhibit the film's blend of complexity, clarity, and opacity. All three are closely related aspects of a larger question about the possibility of communication and, hence, of …
(Post)colonial Jews
The Unconverted Self
Living Together, Living Apart
Diaspora
Voices around the Text
The Unconverted Self
Critical theory of religion vs. critical religion
Last year’s editorial, ‘‘How can mainstream approaches become more critical?’’ (Goldstein, Boer, King and Boyarin, 2015) provoked some strong responses. Initially, these occurred in social media-a place which one might think unlikely for intellectual discussion but in some ways has become its vanguard. There a debate ensued (mostly between Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin, and CRR Editor Warren S. Goldstein), which was published subsequently in R…
Portrait
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book
The ethnographic study of Jews remains anomalous as a specialty within the profession of cultural anthropology in America, which is still largely organized according to the paradigm of culture or studies. Critical examination of this situation reveals the need for a re-examination of the area studies paradigm; the linkage between the history of anthropology and the unequal dialogue between Christians and Jews over the centuries; and textual/anamn…
How can mainstream approaches become more critical
Social Memory. James FENTRESS and CHRIS WICKHAM
Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said
Does time stop in the world of Talmud Torah
In 2012 I began a certain engagement as a way to fill what the academy tellingly calls a period of ‘leave.’ That engagement constitutes study at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), the ‘last remaining’ yeshiva on New York’s Lower East Side, and it began and remains ambiguously situated between the rhythms of anthropological fieldwork and those of the adult, full-time occupant of a beis medresh. My experiences there provoke a number of critical que…
Polish Jews in Paris
On a balanced critique
Can a religious approach be critical
Death and theMinyan
Reading Exodus into History
N AN EARLIER PAPER on the shifting significance of Palestine as the ground of Jewish historical identity, I broached several critical questions, one of which was phrased as follows: What are the grander links among the ancient Jewish state, the Western cultural complex of 'Zion' through the Bible, traditional Jewish culture in the modern period, Zionism, and what I will call here a postmodern ideal of Diaspora?' Here I will be considering the lin…
Traditionalist Jews and the Question of Whiteness
This article has two main purposes. First, it aims to unpack the question "Are Jews white?" by insisting that the assignment of even ambiguous racial identities to "Jews" as an undifferentiated collective is a categorical mistake. It argues instead for a highly contextualized approach to the racialization of certain Jews or groups of Jews in certain times and places for certain purposes and from certain perspectives-which need not imply any lesse…
Jewish identification and critical theory
This symposium examines how various discursive frameworks inform Jewish and non-Jewish interpretations of Jewishness. Although the specific characteristics of these frameworks are context-dependent, the underlying themes remain the same: Jewish identification entails identifying "difference," and this process of drawing distinctions between Jews and non-Jews gets developed in discursive frameworks of temporality, "race thinking," nationalism, and…
Discerning the ghosts and the interest of the living
Storied Lives
The Ethnography of Reading
How the Past Lives On
Un lieu de l'oubli
Boyarin Jonathan, Guibout Clémence. Un lieu de l'oubli : le Lower East Side des Juifs. In: Communications, 49, 1989. La mémoire et l'oubli, sous la direction de Nicole Lapierre. pp. 185-193
Brief review
History of the Yiddish Language
Un lieu de l'oubli
Boyarin Jonathan, Guibout Clémence. Un lieu de l'oubli : le Lower East Side des Juifs. In: Communications, 49, 1989. La mémoire et l'oubli, sous la direction de Nicole Lapierre. pp. 185-193
Voices around the Text
Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said
Palestine and Jewish history
An inquiry into inquiries and a representation of representations
Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book
The ethnographic study of Jews remains anomalous as a specialty within the profession of cultural anthropology in America, which is still largely organized according to the paradigm of culture or studies. Critical examination of this situation reveals the need for a re-examination of the area studies paradigm; the linkage between the history of anthropology and the unequal dialogue between Christians and Jews over the centuries; and textual/anamn…
Europe's Indian, America's Jew
The title of this piece could easily be taken to imply a playful inversion of a straightforward analogy. I once thought of using that analogy as my title, writing it as a question in logic: : Jew :: America : Indian? The question mark is not coy. Are the relations really that closely comparablebetween two empires, on one hand, and two peoples within those empires, both repressed to the point of genocide, on the other hand-that they could be reduc…
Reading Exodus into History
N AN EARLIER PAPER on the shifting significance of Palestine as the ground of Jewish historical identity, I broached several critical questions, one of which was phrased as follows: What are the grander links among the ancient Jewish state, the Western cultural complex of 'Zion' through the Bible, traditional Jewish culture in the modern period, Zionism, and what I will call here a postmodern ideal of Diaspora?' Here I will be considering the lin…
Savage Escapes from Anthropology Department, Captures Jewish Studies Professor
L'A. analyse l'ouvrage de Howard Eilberg-Schwartz « The savage in Judaism : an anthropology of israelite religion and Ancient Judaism » dans lequel l'auteur presente une analyse symbolique et une attaque contre les prejudices soulignant la separation academique de l'etude des religions « primitives » d'un cote et du Judaisme et du Christiasnisme de l'autre. La premiere partie consiste en une contribution schematique a l'historiographie critique d…
Placing Reading
Voices Around the Text
The quotes from Stephen Greenblatt and Wolfgang Iser suggest that, despite the apparent gap in time, the voices surrounding these texts are mutually dependent and coexistent. This chapter argues that the dialogism between reader and text identified in these quotes should not blind us to the social process among groups of readers collectively constructing given texts. It aims to address three primary issues: the ways people mark themselves as dist…
Polish Jews in Paris
How the Past Lives On
Diaspora
The Ethnography of Reading
Storied Lives
Interpreting Literacies
L'A. analyse deux ouvrages traitant de l'alphabetisation, de la relation entre l'ecriture et la lecture, entre le lecteur et le texte, entre l'ecriture, la lecture et l'oralite : « Cross-cultural approaches to literacy » de B. V. Street et « The ethnography of reading » de J. Boyarin reunissent plusieurs essais
The Ethnography of Reading
Polish Jews in Paris
Death and theMinyan
Social Memory. James FENTRESS and CHRIS WICKHAM
Polish Jews in Paris
In My Father's Study. BEN Orlove
Sociology (37 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · History (28 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Judaism (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Archaeology (17 works) · Art (17 works) · Law (16 works)