Jonathan Boyarin

Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (Yiddish: יונתן אהרן בוירין‎; born September 16, 1956) is an American anthropologist whose work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory and identity.^[5] Born in Neptune, New Jersey, he is married and has two sons.^[2] In 2013 he was appointed Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. His brother, Daniel Boyarin, is also a well-known scholar, and the two have written together.

Career

Boyarin was educated at Reed College, the New School for Social Research and the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language before earning his doctoral degree in anthropology at the New School for Social Research. In 1998, fourteen years after receiving his Ph.D., Boyarin received his J.D. at Yale Law School. He has taught at Cornell University, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, Dartmouth College, and The New School.^[2] He is the founding co-editor of the journal, Critical Research on Religion.^[6] In 2016, Boyarin was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR).^[7]

Research

Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City.^[8] Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience.^[5] He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading.^[5]

As a student of modern Jewish experience and culture, he has investigated comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others.^[9] He has conducted fieldwork in cities where those “Jews and others” live, including Paris, Jerusalem, and New York’s Lower East Side.^[9] Much of his work has also been in historical ethnography, primarily of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Jewish life.^[9] He is also a Yiddish translator.^[8]

The Ethnography of Reading

Boyarin edited an influential set of essays published in 1993 titled, The Ethnography of Reading,^[10] exploring how people read and talk about reading.^[11] In contrast to the older tendency to classify entire cultures as oral or literate, most of the essays explore the intermingling of silent reading, collective reading and commentary, recitations, and other text-related practices in a particular tradition or setting.^[11] Overall, the volume is concerned with how "insiders" and anthropologists talk and write about reading.^[11]

In his own essay, Boyarin describes collective reading practices in the New York City yeshiva where he studied Bible and Talmud.^[10] He relates the multivocality of the texts to the "dialogic" speech events in which students intermingle mass culture and vocabulary with sacred speech as a way of negotiating their own relationship to these highly authoritative texts.^[11] According to Brinkley M. Messick:^[12]

The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition. Its basic contribution...is to "expand the archive" of our knowledge of reading and other text-reception practices. ... For Boyarin, the study of reading challenges the "lingering anti-textual bias among practitioners of cultural anthropology."^[13]

Influence of Walter Benjamin

Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical, interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture. Boyarin writes:^[3]

Two things above all struck me on first reading Benjamin’s essays [in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections], and they stay with me almost forty years later. The first was that, for the first time, someone was telling me how I could engage a culture in ruins, based upon its fragments, and indeed without any pretense of recreating an image of it whole. And Jewish Eastern Europe was a culture in fragments par excellence. The second lesson was that the lives of those ancestors I so desperately wanted to touch could be made to matter today, and not just for purposes of creating a personal identity, but in the shaping of political perspectives and rhetorics as well. This I learned above all from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1939 as the storms of war were gathering, and never published during his lifetime. In that text Benjamin analyzes the failure of the mid-1930s Popular Front to defeat the Nazis, and ascribes it at least in part to a philosophy of history that maintained a naïve faith in the ultimate inevitability of progress and the triumph of Reason. Instead of that philosophy of linear progress, Benjamin put forward a much more contingent notion of history and temporality, one in which at any moment a point or points from the past might be articulated with a present situation to reveal a Messianic opening “in the fight for the oppressed past.”^[14] On the other hand, faced with the ongoing triumph of Fascism, Benjamin was hardly optimistic. As he wrote, in another of his eighteen Theses, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”^[15]

Bibliography

Monographs

• A Fire Burns in Kotsk: A Tale of Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland (translator), (Wayne State University Press, 2015)
• Jewish Families, (Rutgers University Press, 2013)
• Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer, (Fordham University Press), 2011)
• The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe, (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
• Jewishness and the Human Dimension, (Fordham University Press, 2008)
• Time and Human Language Now (with Martin Land), (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008)
• Powers of Diaspora (with Daniel Boyarin), (University of Minnesota Press, 2002; French edition, Editions du Cerf, 2007)
• Jews and Other Differences (co-editor), (University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
• Thinking in Jewish, (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
• Palestine and Jewish History, (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
• A Storyteller’s Worlds: The Education of Shlomo Noble in Europe and America, (Holmes & Meier, 1994)
• Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (editor and contributor), (University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
• The Ethnography of Reading (editor and contributor), (University of California Press, 1993)
• Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory, (University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
• Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory, (Indiana University Press, 1991)
• From a Ruined Garden (translator and editor, with Jack Kugelmass), (Schocken Books, 1983; Second edition, Indiana University Press, 1998)

Book chapters

• "When Is a Jew? The Search for Authenticity in Recent Jewish Experience," in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 8: The Modern World, ed. Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels. Cambridge University Press, 2014
• "Simulated Shiur: Post-It Notes of an ArtScroll Amateur", in Jewish Rhetoric: History, Culture, Theory, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Jan Fernheimer. Brandeis University Press (volume in progress)
• "For a World of Shared Singularities: Fragments of a Response to Gilroy," in Retrieving the Human, Reading Paul Gilroy, ed. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher and Jay Garcia. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013.
• "Trickster's Children: Genealogies of Jewishness in Anthropology." in Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries, Representations, and Exhibitions of Ethnic Difference, ed. Simon J. Bronner. Oxford, UK, and Portland, OR: Littman, 2013.
• "The State Between Race and Religion: A Conversation (with Martin Land)," in Vincent Lloyd, ed., Race and Political Theology. Stanford University Press, 2011, 213–233
• "Neither Paradigm Nor Pariah: Jewish and Other Diasporas, Diasporas and Homelands," in Mikael Levin, Cristina’s History, Le Point du Jour, 2009, pp. 137–143.
• "Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography," in Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds., Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, Brill, 2007, pp. 475–493
• "The Lower East Side Union of All the Shuls I Go To," in Sara Blair and Jonathan Freedman, eds., Jewish in America. University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 37–47
• "Return of the Repressed? A Response from New York," in Grasping Land: Discourses of Space in Israeli Culture, ed. by Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 217–229
• "Jews and Palestinians: From Margin to Center and Back Again?," in Margins of Insecurity, ed. by Sam Nolutshungu, University of Rochester Press, 1996, pp. 131–153
• "The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life," in The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Perspectives on Multiculturalism, ed. Marla Brettschneider, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 207–216
• "Space, Time and the Politics of Memory," in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, pp. 1–37
• "Hegel’s Zionism?" in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, pp. 137–160
• "At Last, All the Goyim: Notes on a Greek Word Applied to Jews," in Postmodern Apocalypse, edited by Richard Dellamora, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 41–58
• "The Double Mark of the Male Jew" (with Daniel Boyarin), in Rhetorics of Self-Making, ed. by Debbora Battaglia, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 16–42
• "The Other Within and the Other Without", in The Other in Jewish Thought and History, ed. by Laurence Silberstein, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 424–452
• "Lecture, rêve et ethnographic," appendix to Olam (new French edition of Life Is With People), Plon 1992
• "Observant Participation: The Ethnography of Jews on the Lower East Side," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 1990, pp. 233–254
• "Yizker Bikher and the Problem of Historical Veracity: An Anthropological Approach" (with Jack Kugelmass) in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, Brandeis University/University Press of New England, 1989, pp. 519–536
• "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," in Between Two Worlds: Essays on the Ethnography of American Jews, ed. by Jack Kugelmass, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 52–76
• "Sholem-Aleykhem’s ‘Stantsye Baranovitsah’," in Identity and Ethos: A Festschrift for Sol Liptzin, ed. by Mark Gelber, Peter Lang Verlag, New York, 1986, pp. 89–99

Refereed articles

• "An Ugly Story?" (on the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man), AJS Review, autumn 2011
• "Another Abraham: Jewishness and the Law of the Father", Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Spring 1997, pp. 345–394
• "Circumscribing Constitutional Identity in Kiryas Joel", Yale Law Journal, March 1997, pp. 1537–1570
• "Death and the Minyan", Cultural Anthropology 9:1, 1994, pp. 3–22
• "Generation: Diaspora and the Ground of Jewish Identity" (with Daniel Boyarin), Critical Inquiry 19:4, 1993, pp. 693–725
• "Europe’s Indian, America’s Jew: Modiano and Vizenor", boundary 2 19:3, 1992, pp. 197–222
• "Reading Exodus Into History", New Literary History 23:3, 1992, pp. 523–554
• "Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book", Anthropological Quarterly 64:1, 1991, pp. 14–29
• "Voices Around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem", Cultural Anthropology 4:4, 1989, pp. 399–421

Refereed oral presentations

• Panelist, roundtable on "Being there…and there, and there: Place, Research Sites and Co-Presence in Jewish Studies", Association for Jewish Studies, Atlanta, December 19–21, 2010
• "Growing Up Not Religious and Not Secular", panel on "Religious/Secular Again?", American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, December 3, 2009
• "Fictive Berzhaner: Or, Does the Building Make the Landsman?", Association for Jewish Studies, San Diego, December 20, 2006
• Response to Talal Asad’s "Genealogies of Religion", American Academy of Religion, Chicago, November 1994
• "Discipline and Exclude", Modern Language Association, Toronto, December 1993
• "Gravity in Fieldwork: Earthbound Bodies and the Pull of Identity", American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 1993
• "The Double Mark of the Male Jew" (with Daniel Boyarin), American Anthropological Association, December 1992
• "Semitism: The Absent Keyword?", American Academy of Religion, November 1992
• "Politics of the Portable Homeland", Modern Language Association, December 1991
• "Jews and Native Americans as Absent Other and Living Voice" (with Greg Sarris), Modern Language Association, December 1991
• "In Search of Israeli Identity", American Anthropological Association, November 1991
• "The Jewish Lower East Side: A Space of Forgetting", American Anthropological Association, November 1990
• "Benjamin, Aragon and Polish Jews in Paris", Canadian Ethnological Society, Ottawa, May 1989
• "Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book", American Ethnological Society, Santa Fe, April 1989
• "The Ethnography of Mourning", Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 1987
• "Landsmanshaftn of Polish Jews in Paris", Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 1984
• "Paris Landsmanshaftn as Burial Societies", American Anthropological Association, Chicago, November 1983
• "Memorial Books as a Source for Jewish Ethnography" (with Jack Kugelmass), Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 1981

Unrefereed publications

• Invited response to Sarah Hammerschlag’s "The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought"^[16]
• "Moving Partitions Past: Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony", Diaspora 14:2/3 (Fall/Winter 2005), pp. 397–410
• "Becoming Jewish and the Politics of Difference", Wasafiri, 57 (Spring 2009), pp. 69–70
• "Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe", Association for Jewish Studies Perspectives, Fall 2005, pp. 12–13
• "Commentary: Discerning the Ghosts and the Interests of the Living", American Ethnologist 32:4, 2005, pp. 516–518
• "Le Porc en dieu Pôros", Penser/Rêver 7, 2005, pp. 151–176
• (with Martin Land) "A Moment of Danger, A Taste of Death", Cardozo Law Review 26:3, 2005, pp. 1119–1138
• "The Jewish Question and the Reason of the State", Diaspora 2002, pp. 1–22
• "Spare Time: Professional Responsibility in Business Law and the Humanities", Graven Image 1999
• "Law, Literature and the Resurrection of Contract", Law and Social Inquiry 24:1, 1999, pp. 195–220
• "Narratives of Jewish Identity" (review essay), American Anthropologist 98:4, 1996, pp. 869–872
• "The Gender of the Angel", Shofar, 1996
• "Memory and Generation: Unsettling Words", Culturefront 4:1, Spring 1995
• "Changing Colors: Jews, Muslims and the Idea of Europe", Nexus (Holland), 1994
• "Before the Law There Stands a Woman: In Re. Taylor v. Butler" (With Court-Appointed Yiddish Translator), Cardozo Law Review 16:2, 1995, pp. 1308–1322
• "The Missing Keyword: Reading Olender’s Renan", Qui Parle, Fall 1994
• "Ruins, Mounting Toward Jerusalem", Found Object, Spring 1994
• "Jewish Geography Goes On-Line", Journal of Jewish Folklore and Ethnography, 1994
• "Savage Escapes from Anthropology Department", Captures Religion Professor (review essay), Anthropological Quarterly 72:1, 1992, 195–199
• "An Inquiry Into Inquiries and a Representation of Representations" (review essay), Sociological Forum 6:2, 1991, pp. 387–395
• "Palestine and Jewish History", Working Papers of the Center for Studies of Social Change No. 92, January 1990
• "Un Lieu de l’Oubli: Le Lower East Side des Juifs", Communications 49, 1989, pp. 185–193
• "Toward a Dialogue With Edward Said" (with Daniel Boyarin), Critical Inquiry 15:3, 1989, pp. 626–633
• "La Synagogue de la Huitième Rue", Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Automne 1988
• "Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language" (review essay), New German Critique 26, 1982, pp. 217–228
• "During the Night, Deaths: The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow", Response, Winter 1979–1980
• "On the Cultural Dialectics of Slavery", Dialectical Anthropology, Summer 1978

Unrefereed presentations

• "Rethinking ‘Diaspora," conference on Religion and Diaspora, Wadham College, Oxford, July 11–12, 2012
• "Kin and Kind: Medieval Christian Notions of Jewish-Christian Difference and the Problem of Turning Jews into Christians", keynote lecture for conference on “Between Experience and Narrative: Conversion as Self-Description in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period", Humboldt University, Berlin, May 10, 2012
• "Jewish Rhetorics and the Contemplation of a Diminished Future" (with Martin Land), conference on Topoi of Time: Jewish Interpretations of Human and Other Temporalities, King’s College London, May 25, 2011
• "The Shul That Wouldn’t Sit Still for Its Ethnographic Portrait", conference on Narratives of and in Jewish Studies, University of Kansas, April 3, 2011
• Respondent, Workshop on Conversion, CUNY Graduate Center, December 3, 2010
• Roundtable Panelist, conference on Les Judaismes, Universite de Toulouse-Mirail, October 28, 2010
• "Whose Nostalgia for ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Identity?’", Early Modern Workshop 7, Middletown, Connecticut, August 16, 2010
• "New York: The Stanton Street Shul", Musée de l’art et l’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, May 6, 2010
• "A Storyteller's Worlds: The Education of Shlomo Noble in Europe and America", Uhlman Family Seminar, Chapel Hill, March 4, 2010
• "Placing the Other Within: Kin and Kind as Categories for Thinking Christian/Jewish Difference", MEMS/CLAMS Research Workshop, King’s College, London, March 11, 2010
• "Simulated Shiur? Post-It Notes of an Amateur ArtScroll Scholar", Working Group on the History of the Jewish Book, Center for Jewish History, New York City, December 4, 2009
• "Jewish Anthropology and the Anthropology of Jews", The Ruth Fredman Cernea Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Washington Area Professional Anthropologists, Washington, D.C., November 1, 2009
• "Trickster’s Children: Paul Radin, Stanley Diamond and Filiation in Anthropology", Anthropology Colloquium, London School of Economics, May 15, 2009
• "Hasidic Modernity: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rebbe of Kotsk", series of four lectures, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, May 2009
• Respondent, Conference on the Work of Paul Gilroy, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, January 18, 2008
• Respondent, panel on Jewish Topographies, Association for Jewish Studies, December 18, 2007 (snowed out!)
• "Borders and Boundaries of the Jewish and the Human", opening address at symposium on Borders and Boundaries in and around Dutch Jewish History, Amsterdam, November 18, 2007
• "Just Jewish Enough: Rafael Goldchain’s 'Familial Ground'", Conney Conference on Jewish Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, April 25, 2007; University of North Carolina, October 18, 2007
• "Old Jews: Diaspora and the Generations of Jewish Ethnography", conference on No Direction Home: Re-Imagining Jewish Geography, Lehigh University, March 25, 2007
• Discussant, panel on The Languages of Contemporary Hasidim, conference on ‘Beyond Eastern Europe,” Rutgers University, March 19, 2007
• "A Jewish Introduction to the Human Sciences", University of North Carolina, January 22, 2007
• "Fictive Berzhaner: Or, Does the Building Make the Landsman?", University of Minnesota, December 11, 2006
• "Tropes of Home" (inaugural lecture), University of Kansas, November 7, 2005
• "Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe", George Washington University, November 3, 2005
• "The Problem With Jewish History", Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, September 22, 2005
• "Extinction and Difference", conference on Sex and Religion in Migration, Yale University, September 15, 2005; Center for Studies in Diaspora and Transnationalism, University of Toronto, March 2006; University of Minnesota, March 2006
• Before a Boundary: A First Essay in Antiquity, conference of International Association for Law and Mental Health, Paris, July 2005
• Panelist, Conference on Jiddisch und die Mittel Europas, Berlin, April 29, 2005
• "Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography", Wesleyan University, October 2004; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, April 2005; Humboldt University, Berlin (W.E.B. duBois Lecture Series), May 2005; University of Potsdam, May 2005; Penn State University, September 2005
• "Neither Paradigm Nor Pariah", conference on Comparative Diasporas, Northwestern University, November 4, 2004
• "Toward an Anthropology of the Twentieth Century" (keynote), conference on representation after 1945, University of Wisconsin at Madison, April 29–30, 2004
• "Seasons and Lifetimes: Reflections on a Career Amidst the Cycle of Generations", Inaugural Lecture of Rutgers Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Undergraduate Speakers Series, February 17, 2004 (also presented at Trinity College, Hartford, November 2004; Dartmouth College, January 2005)
• "What We Do When We Talk About Jews and Space", Conference on Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space, Stanford University, May 18–19, 2003
• "Notes Toward a Personal Ethnography of a Large Law Firm", conference on How Class Works, SUNY Stony Brook Center for the Study of Working-Class Culture, June 2002
• Panelist, faculty retreat on Itineraries: Jewish Studies Today, Vassar College, May 2002
• "A Modern Meeting, or How Jewish Was the Man with the Scar?", University of Minnesota, April 2002
• "Partition and Forgetting", conference on Partition and Memory, University of Notre Dame, December 2001
• Keynote speaker, Conference of American Jewish Museums on “The Future of the Jewish Past,” Center for Jewish History, New York City, April 2001
• Respondent to Gregg Bordowitz’s Long Jump, Fast Drop, conference on Eye and Thou: Jewish Autobiography in Film, Part II, New York University, March 2001
• In Re Taylor v. Butler (With Court-Appointed Yiddish Translator), Conference on Law and the Post-Modern Mind, Cardozo Law School, September 26, 1993, pp. 119–138
• "Der Yidisher Tsenter, or What Is a Minyan?", Conference on Detraditionalization and Retraditionalization, Lancaster University, England, July 1993
• "From Derrida to Fichte? The New Europe, the Same Europe and the Place of the Jews", Conference on European Identity and Its Intellectual Roots, Harvard University, May 1993
• "Jewing Feminist Theory", Conference on the Inclusive Curriculum: Setting Our Own Agenda, Parsippany, New Jersey, April 1993
• "Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe", Center for Historical Studies, New School for Social Research, April 1993
• "The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life", Jewish Faculty Conference, UCLA, February 1993
• "Memory and Generation: Unsettling Words", conference on The Future of Memory, Yale University Holocaust Video Archives, October 1992
• "That Jew’s an Animal!", conference on People of the Body/People of the Book, Stanford and Berkeley, April 30, 1991
• "Jews and Palestinians At Home and In Diaspora", SSRC Research Planning Group on the Security of Marginal Populations, Baltimore, November 16, 1990
• "Jewish Geography" as a Model for Identity Formation, Conference on The Role of Geography in Jewish Civilization, Ohio State University, October 21, 1990
• "Reading Exodus Into History", Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, October 19, 1990
• Commentator, Conference on The Necessity of Violence for Any Possibility of Justice, Cardozo Law School, New York, October 1, 1990
• Voices Around the Text: Dialogue at Yeshiva Tifereth Yerushalayem, YIVO Conference, New York, April 1987
• Memorial Books as a Historical Source (with Dr. Jack Kugelmass), Conference on The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, Brandeis University, April 1986

References