Jonathan Boyarin

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Jonathan Aaron Boyarin
Born(1956-09-16)September 16, 1956
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Kansas
Dartmouth College
The New School
Notable ideas"ethnography of reading"[3]
Websitehttp://anthropology.cornell.edu/jonathan-boyarin

Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (

Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University
.

His brother, Daniel Boyarin, is also a well-known scholar, and the two have written together.

Career

Boyarin was educated at

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, Dartmouth College, and The New School.[1] He is the founding co-editor of the journal Critical Research on Religion.[5] In 2016, Boyarin was elected a Fellow of the Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR).[6]

Research

Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City.[7] Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience.[4] He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading.[4]

As a student of modern Jewish experience and culture, he has investigated comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others.[8] He has conducted fieldwork in cities where those "Jews and others" live, including Paris, Jerusalem, and New York's Lower East Side.[8] Much of his work has also been in historical ethnography, primarily of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Jewish life.[8] He is also a Yiddish translator.[7]

The Ethnography of Reading

Boyarin edited an influential set of essays published in 1993 titled, The Ethnography of Reading,[9] exploring how people read and talk about reading.[10] In contrast to the older tendency to classify entire cultures as oral or literate, most of the essays explore the intermingling of silent reading, collective reading and commentary, recitations, and other text-related practices in a particular tradition or setting.[10] Overall, the volume is concerned with how "insiders" and anthropologists talk and write about reading.[10]

In his own essay, Boyarin describes collective reading practices in the New York City yeshiva where he studied Bible and Talmud.[9] He relates the multivocality of the texts to the "dialogic" speech events in which students intermingle mass culture and vocabulary with sacred speech as a way of negotiating their own relationship to these highly authoritative texts.[10] According to Brinkley M. Messick:[11]

The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition. Its basic contribution...is to "expand the archive" of our knowledge of reading and other text-reception practices. ... For Boyarin, the study of reading challenges the "lingering anti-textual bias among practitioners of cultural anthropology."[12]

Influence of Walter Benjamin

Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical, interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture. Boyarin writes:[2]

I learned Benjamin's "

Popular Front to defeat the Nazis, and ascribes it at least in part to a philosophy of history that maintained a naïve faith in the ultimate inevitability of progress and the triumph of Reason. Instead of that philosophy of linear progress, Benjamin put forward a much more contingent notion of history and temporality, one in which at any moment a point or points from the past might be articulated with a present situation to reveal a Messianic opening "in the fight for the oppressed past."[13]

Notable works

  • The Ethnography of Reading (1993)
  • Jewishness and the Human Dimension (2008)
  • The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe (2009)
  • Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side (2011)
  • Jewish Families (2013)
  • Time and Human Language Now (2013, co-authored with Martin Land)
  • Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (2020)

References

  1. ^ a b c Jonathan Boyarin Curriculum Vitae
  2. ^ a b Boyarin on Benjamin, Cornell Arts and Sciences Retrieved: 2015-03-07
  3. ^ Smith, Jonathan Z. (2009). "Religion and Bible" (PDF). JBL. 128 (1): 11. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  4. ^ a b c Cornell Department of Anthropology Website Archived 2015-06-12 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Critical Theory of Religion Archived 2015-07-19 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved: 2015-07-20.
  6. ^ Glaser, Linda B. "Jonathan Boyarin elected to AAJR". Cornell University. College of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
  7. ^ a b Cornell Chronicle Published: 2015-05-03
  8. ^ a b c Cornell Department of Near Eastern Studies Website
  9. ^
    ISBN 9780520081338
    .
  10. ^
    S2CID 146905769
    .
  11. JSTOR 682438
    .
  12. ISBN 9780520081338
    .
  13. ISBN 9780805202410
    .
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