Jewishness and the Human Dimension

by Boyarin, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780823229239
• ISBN10: 0823229238
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-17
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

Jewishness and the Human Dimension is a progress report on the effort of bringing Jewishness broadly construed into contact with broad currents of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. All of the book's chapters emerge from and address the circumstances of their composition: an address to New Jersey undergraduates inviting them to contemplate their lifespans vis-à-vis the life history of the species and the planet; a meeting to contemplate Jewish memory out of Europe and after 1945; an inaugural address as Boyarin sought to make sense of leaving his "home" on the Lower East Side and making a new one in Kansas. Two initial chapters focus on research and teaching in Jewish cultural studies as academic practice, as they develop respectively the notion of Jewish studies as a human science, and how Jewish historiography, once a deeply conservative discipline, has integrated insights from anthropology and literary cultural studies. Toward its conclusion, the volume encompasses 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 toward the possibility of sustained human life on Earth, we need to interrogate rigorously the status of human differences now. Neither straight 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 this project), this book attempts to put in place words of the late Moish Fogel, vice president of the Eighth Street Shul, that have long stood as a watchword for Boyarin's writing: "Whatever you know you gotta use!"

Author Biography

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).