Jonathan Boyarin

The Unconverted Self proposes that questions of difference inside Christian Europe not only are inseparable from the painful legacy of colonialism but also reveal Christian domination to be a fragile construct. Boyarin compares the Christian efforts aimed toward European Jews and toward indigenous peoples of the New World, bringing into focus the intersection of colonial expansion with the Inquisition and adding significant nuance to the entire question of the colonial encounter."--Pub. desc.

"Jewishness and the Human Dimension is a leading scholar's progress report on an effort to bring Jewishness broadly construed into dialogue with a wide range of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. Each chapter emerges from and addresses the circumstances of its composition; a talk to New Jersey undergraduates inviting them to contemplate their lifespans vis-a-vis the life history of the species; a meeting to contemplate Jewish memory outside Europe and after 1945; an inaugural address as the author sought to make sense of leaving his home on the Lower East Side and making a new one in Kansas." "Two chapters on research and teaching in Jewish cultural studies as academic practice develop the notion of Jewish studies as a human science and examine how Jewish historiography, once a deeply conservative discipline, has integrated insights from anthropology and literary cultural studies. Boyarin also shares a dialogue with the Jerusalem-based physicist Martin Land on physical and cultural ideas of futurity and redemption. The book ends with a stark challenge to those who work in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: in order to be able to contribute to the possibility of sustained human life on Earth, we need to interrogate rigorously now the status of human differences."--BOOK JACKET.

How does one "think" in Jewish? What does it mean to speak in English of Yiddish as Jewish, as a certain intermediary generation of immigrants and children of immigrants from Jewish Eastern Europe has done? How does thinking in a Jewish body, situated within a Jewish milieu, ground and constrain one's thought? A fascination with these questions prompted Jonathan Boyarin, one of America's most original thinkers in critical theory and Jewish ethnography, to offer the unexpected Jewish perspective on the vexed issue of identity politics presented here. Building on Boyarin's previous work on Jewish communities, texts in culture, and the links among space, time, and memory, Thinking in Jewish explores the ways in which a Jewish - or, more particularly, Yiddish - idiom complicates the question of identity. Ranging from explorations of a Lower East Side synagogue to Fichte's and Derrida's contrasting notions of the relation between the Jews and the idea of Europe, from the Lubavitcher Hasidim to accounts of self-making by Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, Thinking in Jewish will be provocative reading for students of critical theory, cultural studies, and Jewish studies.

In the years after World War II, Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had made their way to the Americas and Israel compiled memorial books to preserve the memory of their destroyed communities. From a Ruined Garden gathers some 77 sections from the nearly 1,000 memorial books published. The texts describe daily life in the shtetl as well as everyday life during the Holocaust and the experiences of returning survivors.