Jonathan Aaron Boyarin

Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies

224 McGraw Hall
jboyarin@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

American Studies Program
Anthropology
Jewish Studies Program
Near Eastern Studies
Religious Studies Program
Society for the Humanities

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Academic interests

Ethnography
Historical Anthropology

Overview

My work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory and identity. I have investigated these fields in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City. Much of my work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, almost always from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. I have extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading. I am also a Yiddish translator.

Research Focus

Since graduate school, I have been primarily a student of modern Jewish experience and culture. That concern has led me to investigate comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others. I have had the opportunity to do fieldwork in some of the greatest cities where those “Jews and others” live, including Paris, Jerusalem, and New York’s Lower East Side. Much of my work has also been in historical ethnography, primarily of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Jewish life.

Jewish populations outside of Israel/Palestine have long been regarded as the diasporic communities par excellence, and thus scholars of Jewish studies are well-placed to participate in the new and rich field of comparative diaspora. This fact affords me continued engagement with colleagues doing post-colonial studies or studying a wide range of resistant and emergent identities worldwide.

One of my most enduring and rewarding engagements has been with the enduring importance of text in Jewish life—from the foundational scriptures, to the almost 2,000-year long tradition of rabbinic debate and commentary centered on the monumental Babylonian Talmud, to the remarkably central role of Jews in modern and postmodern Euro-American literature and criticism. The way Jewishness is shaped by text is fertile ground for blurring the lines between anthropology, history and literary cultural studies, and assures a field that is vastly richer than one scholarly career can encompass.

Publications

book

Jewish Families. New Brunswick, New Jersey ; London: Rutgers University Press. 2013
Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Lower East Side Summer. New York : Fordham University Press. 2011
The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009
Time and Human Language Now. Prickly Paradigm Press. 2009
Jewishness and the Human Dimension. New York : Fordham University Press. 2008