Jonathan Boyarin, "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul"

Jonathan Boyarin is an anthropologist and an ethnographer who has studied the lifestyle and culture of Jews the world over. Although anthropology originally emerged as a way for outsiders to study and understand foreign cultures, the anthropology that Boyarin practices is of a different sort: he provides an insider's view of cultures and traditions that are, in some ways, his own.

Thus, in pursuing his fieldwork, Boyarin has been concerned not only with describing Jewish identity in Paris, New York, and Jerusalem, but also with contributing to the broader project of preserving Jewish culture. This approach to anthropology has helped Boyarin invent for himself a "funky Orthodox" Jewish identity, as "Waiting for a Jew" chronicles.

Currently the Beren Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Kansas University, Boyarin is considered one of America's most original thinkers about Jewish culture. Boyarin has written extensively about the roles that history, memory, and geography have played in the formation of Jewish identity. In A Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (1992), Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography (1996), and Thinking in Jewish (1996), Boyarin asks his readers to consider whether there is such a thing as an "essential" Jewish identity. While the notion that there is an essential, unchanging self at the core of every human being has fallen out of favor in academic circles, Boyarin bids his readers to recognize that identity does not serve the same function for marginalized groups that it serves for dominant groups. As Boyarin puts it in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (1994), "For people who are somehow part of a dominant group, any assertions of essence are ipso facto products and reproducers of the system of domination. For subaltern groups, however, essentialism is resistance, the insistence on the 'right' of the group actually to exist." As "Waiting for a Jew" documents, answering the question "Who are you?" is not as simple as it might seem, for the answer requires that one first consider the histories, traditions, and communal life experiences that have made the notions of "an identity" and "one's own identity" possible.  

Boyarin, Jonathan. "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul," Thinking in Jewish. (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8-34.
Digital image drawn from The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.

Links To Explore:

Judaism 101: an online reference for Jewish culture, written by a non-specialist for other non-specialists, provides a glossary that defines many of the terms and traditions discussed in Boyarin's essay.

"On Passing for Jewish": Ross Wetzsteon discusses the experience and the pleasures of being mistaken for being Jewish.

The Spoken Yiddish Language Project: a site devoted to the preservation of Yiddish as a spoken language.

"On the Lower East Side": provides links to a series of articles written between 1880 and 1920 that describe the urban experience in New York City at the turn of last century. The collection includes links to Jacob Riis' 1896 article, "The Jews of New York", and Abraham Cahan's 1898 article, "The Russian Jew in America."

Questions for Connecting:

• In "Waiting for a Jew," Jonathan Boyarin travels from New York to Paris to Jerusalem to Los Angeles, tracking the various ways that he is received and the varying ways he comes to identify himself as Jewish. In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer describes a rather different spiritual journey: Cris McCandless' voyage from Atlanta to Mexico, up through California and Canada on to Alaska. What is the difference, would you say, between Boyarin's search and McCandless' search? What role does tradition play in the search for identity?

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