Daniel Boyarin

#2

"We treat the word Judaism as a given for describing the religion of Jews. But the term is in some ways socially constructed, rather than inevitable. After all, exactly what would constitute "authentic" Judaism? Some have argued that there are multiple Judaisms, going in the direction of plurals that so many scholars find satisfying. But Boyarin takes a different tack, proposing that before the modern era there should be no "Judaism" at all. For Boyarin, there was no sphere of life that can be called Judaism that was separate from the political, artistic, and cultural elements of life. Moreover, he argues that Judaism is a Christian coinage to serve Christian discursive purposes by setting what we call Judaism in opposition to Christianity and that the term has little utility for Jews. The various Jewish languages have no such concept and no such term. He believes that categories drawn from outside the culture are anachronistic, not informative. Boyarin will be making a case for substituting Jewry for Judaism. Jewry is a concept that integrates many aspects of the lives of Jews, rather than separating out religion from other aspects of life"--

#3

The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female, as Daniel Boyarin makes clear, is not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he recovers the studious and gentle rabbi as the male ideal and the prime object of the female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud. The book provides an unrelenting critique of the oppression of women in rabbinic society, while also arguing that later European bourgeois society disempowered women even further. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.