2008 Woodie Awards
A Shtickle Faygele, Uber Nisht a Zionishe Kayfer
Josh Harrison
Issue date: 5/16/05 Section: Features
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When the Hassid in Boro Park saw me reading Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines he asked if I had "sefeikos in emunah." I told him that he might sympathize with Boayrin, seeing as how both of them are anti-Zionists. Sadly he was a "modern" Hassid and he told me that he didn't "judge people just on Zionism one way or the other." [sic]
Boyarin challenges our assumptions in many ways. His first challenge comes merely through being Boyarin. Elusive and brilliant, this Talmudist doesn't have the classical rabbinic mien. Despite his short gig teaching at YU, Boyarin admits that he falls "seriously out of step" with his "self-identification as an Orthodox Jew."
I am seriously out of step with my community at this moment, in a position of marginality...The present is a time in which Jewish Orthodoxy has been redefined as including the unquestioning support for a political entity, the State of Israel, and all of its martial adventures...On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on Rosh Hashana...I was told that I should be praying in a mosque.
Beyond his anti-Zionism, Boyarin admits to a love for Christianity. He has "always been in love with some manifestations of Christianity...For an oddly gendered teenager, Saint Francis, the sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man." This from an intellectual whose output includes a book on the mysterious chug HaIyun group of Spanish Jewish exegetes, not to mention a book on Midrash!
The challenge of dealing with a figure as different as Boyarin might faze some Centrist Orthodox students. It certainly flummoxed my "modern" Hassidische friend. Boyarin is weird, and he admits it in the front of his book. He has gender identity issues, and he likes Christians and Palestinians, not to mention the Talmud. In the beginning of his Dying for God, he actually thanks his therapist for counseling him through the writing of his previous books. Yet, it would be a shame if these idiosyncrasies led us to abandon the actual theories in Border Lines. After all, if there is a challenge beyond that of Boyarin himself, it might be Boyarin's cutting-edge theories.
Boyarin challenges our assumptions in many ways. His first challenge comes merely through being Boyarin. Elusive and brilliant, this Talmudist doesn't have the classical rabbinic mien. Despite his short gig teaching at YU, Boyarin admits that he falls "seriously out of step" with his "self-identification as an Orthodox Jew."
I am seriously out of step with my community at this moment, in a position of marginality...The present is a time in which Jewish Orthodoxy has been redefined as including the unquestioning support for a political entity, the State of Israel, and all of its martial adventures...On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on Rosh Hashana...I was told that I should be praying in a mosque.
Beyond his anti-Zionism, Boyarin admits to a love for Christianity. He has "always been in love with some manifestations of Christianity...For an oddly gendered teenager, Saint Francis, the sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man." This from an intellectual whose output includes a book on the mysterious chug HaIyun group of Spanish Jewish exegetes, not to mention a book on Midrash!
The challenge of dealing with a figure as different as Boyarin might faze some Centrist Orthodox students. It certainly flummoxed my "modern" Hassidische friend. Boyarin is weird, and he admits it in the front of his book. He has gender identity issues, and he likes Christians and Palestinians, not to mention the Talmud. In the beginning of his Dying for God, he actually thanks his therapist for counseling him through the writing of his previous books. Yet, it would be a shame if these idiosyncrasies led us to abandon the actual theories in Border Lines. After all, if there is a challenge beyond that of Boyarin himself, it might be Boyarin's cutting-edge theories.