Books by Jonathan Boyarin

This series of meditations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argues that it represents a struggle not as much about land and history as about space, time and memory.

Taking Walter Benjamin's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by "a storm from paradise" as his point of departure, Boyarin launches an examination of the role of memory in the study of knowledge, culture and power.

A report that brings Jewishness construed into dialogue with a wide range of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. It attempts to put in place words of the late Moishe Fogel, vice president of the Eighth Street Shul.

What can you say after you say that the world - or at least human life on it - looks like it's nearing its end? How about starting with wonder at the possibility that dialogue and subjectivity, the bases of human language, are possible? This title discusses about the relation between cosmos and consciousness.

This story of one of the last remaining synagogues in the historic neighborhood and its congregation is ';as absorbing as a good cinema verite documentary' (Booklist). On New York's Lower East Side, a narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voicesthe generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. In this book, Jonathan Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, follows this congregation of ';year-round Jews' through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. Famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, the neighborhood has recently become the hip playground of twentysomething immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Yet, inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, lively disputes, andabove allthe ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul is both a portrait of a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification, and a poignant, humorous chronicle of vibrant, imperfect, down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.