Jewishness and the Human Dimension - by Jonathan Boyarin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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-à-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.

Neither ethnography (though it relishes the particular), memoir (though a personal voice is readily audible), nor criticism (though the work and figures of Jacques Derrida and especially Walter Benjamin are indispensable to its project), this book attempts to put in place words of the late Moishe Fogel, vice president of the Eighth Street Shul, that have long stood as a watchword for the author's writing: "Everything what you know you gotta use!"

Review Quotes

Boyarin avoids both extended academic dryness and the false chipperness of the hers of popularizers now stampeding through the fields of science writing-- "--Rain Taxi"

In this fascinating collection of essays, Jonathan Boyarin explores
with considerable subtlety the connections between Jewish studies and
Jewish lives. This is an important contribution to understanding the
modern identity of Jewishness.

-----Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center

A brilliant, powerful, and original book, exploring the multiple connections and tensions between what it means to be a Jew and what it means to be a human being.-----Naomi Seidman, Graduate Theological Union

The essays are at once scholarly, witty, personal, incisive, anecdotal, and theoretical.-----Leslie Morris, University of Minnesota

About the Author

JONATHAN BOYARIN is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent books are Powers of Diaspora (with Daniel Boyarin), Jewishness and the Human Dimension (Fordham), and Time and Human Language Now (with Martin Land).