Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Boyarin | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 6, 1946 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Goddard College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Columbia University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Notable students | Christine Hayes, Charlotte Fonrobert, Azzan Yadin |
| Website | nes |
Daniel Boyarin (
historian of religion. Born in New Jersey, he holds dual United States and Israeli citizenship. He is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Chava Boyarin, a lecturer in Hebrew at UC Berkeley. They have two sons. His brother, Jonathan Boyarin, is also a scholar, and the two have written together. He has defined himself as a "diasporic rabbinic Jew".[1]
Career
Of
Litvak background on all four sides, Boyarin was raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Boyarin attended Freehold High School.[2] A graduate of the class of 1964, Boyarin was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 2009.[3]
Boyarin was educated at
University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Enoch Seminar, and of the Advisory Board of the journal Henoch. In 2005, he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
.
A number of Boyarin's students, including Christine Hayes, Charlotte Fonrobert, and Azzan Yadin, occupy Rabbinics posts at various American universities. Joseph Cedar's Oscar-nominated film Footnote alludes in a running joke on a fine point of Talmudic scholarship to Boyarin and his reputation for vast erudition.[2]
Views and writings
His first book, Sephardic Speculation (written in Hebrew), examines the Talmudic methodology of
New Historicism
to the subject of Rabbinic attitudes toward sexuality.
In Unheroic Conduct (1997), Boyarin's interests mesh with those of others, such as
Holocaust
. Boyarin holds that passivity is an essential feature of Judaism, and that because this is a quality that is held in common with homosexuality, it has the power to inspire panic among Jews who fear the censorious gaze of authority.
Boyarin supports his argument that
manliness, making the astonishing claim that the true man sits still all day with a book, and has the bodily shape of someone who does just that".[5]
Border Lines (2004) examines the early stages of the partition of Judaism and Christianity into two separate and distinct religions. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (2009) explores the dialogic structure in
Babylonian Talmud. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (2012) carries on the line of exploration begun in Border Lines, developing the argument that "New Testament" ideas can be found in long-standing Jewish traditions.[6] Professor Boyarin also written extensively on Talmudic and Midrashic studies. His work focused on cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, and also includes the issue about gender and sexuality, and research as well on the Jews as colonized people.[7]
His current research interests center primarily around questions of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity and the genealogy of the concept of "religion."
Views on the State of Israel
Boyarin is a self-proclaimed
Jewish anti-Zionist and has been highly critical of Israeli governments.[8] In the preface to one of his books, where he discusses the many versions of Judaism in late antiquity
and the binary model that gatekeeps definitions of Judaism, he writes in passing:
"On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on
This remark, which, according to Sylvain Cypel, mirrored the attitude articulated by the Israel philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was considered blasphemous when it was published.[11]
In a highly publicised essay,
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism,[12] criticised Boyarin for these words—and in particular for the parallel to the Holocaust, which, according to Rosenfeld, is "a sure sign that lucid thinking has been replaced by bias"—and concludes that through these remarks, "Jewish identity is affirmed in opposition to the Jewish state".[13]
Bibliography
- A Critical Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nazir. (Doctoral dissertation, 1975).
- Sephardic Speculation: A Study in Methods of Talmudic Interpretation, (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1989).
- Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
- Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
- Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (University of California Press, 1997)
- Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, (Stanford University Press, 1999)
- Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, (Columbia University Press, 2003)
- Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
- Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, (University of Chicago Press, 2009)[14][15]
- The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, (The New Press, 2012)
- A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
- Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, with Carlin A. Barton (Fordham University Press, 2016)
- Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, (Rutgers University Press, 2019)
- The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, (Yale University Press, 2023)
See also
References
- ISBN 978-0-812-20384-4p.x.
- ^ a b c d Wall, Alix. "Daniel Boyarin: Talmudist, feminist, anti-Zionist, only-in-Berkeley Orthodox Jew", J. The Jewish News of Northern California, March 12, 2015. Accessed January 23, 2018. "Boyarin was raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and yes, he knew Bruce Springsteen, who was a few years behind him at Freehold High School."
- ^ "School announces new Hall of Fame honorees"[permanent dead link], News Transcript, December 17, 2008. Accessed January 23, 2018. "They all graduated from Freehold High School and will be the 2009 inductees into Freehold High School’s Hall of Fame.... Professor Daniel Boyarin, class of 1964, an author and professor at the University of California at Berkeley"
- ^ Professor Daniel Boyarin – Education Archived March 29, 2007, at the Wayback Machine (University of California, Berkeley) Retrieved: March 18, 2007.
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Man Overboard, The New Republic, June 22, 2006.
- ^ Schäfer, Peter (May 18, 2012). "The Jew Who Would Be God". The New Republic. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
- ^ "Daniel Boyarin". American Academy. Retrieved August 16, 2022.
- ^ "UC Berkeley Faculty and Staff Statement in Support of Palestine". May 20, 2021. Retrieved October 21, 2023.
- ^ Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 p. xiv.
- ISBN 978-0-802-14015-9.
- ISBN 978-2-348-04344-4p.301.
- ^ "Alvin H. Rosenfeld: Faculty Profile". Indiana University at Bloomington. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
- ^ Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, p. 17.
- ^ Becker, Adam H. (2011). Positing a "Cultural Relationship" between Plato and the Babylonian Talmud. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 101(2), 255-269. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41300136
- ^ Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. (2011). The Dialogical Talmud: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbinics. The Jewish Quarterly Review, 101(2), 245-254. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41300135
External links
- Professor Daniel Boyarin Home page at University of California, Berkeley
- A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity E-text at California Digital Library
- Enoch Seminar website
- Journal Henoch website
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