Unheroic Conduct

Unheroic Conduct

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1997-06-13

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0520210506

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The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female, as Daniel Boyarin makes clear, is not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he recovers the studious and gentle rabbi as the male ideal and the prime object of the female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud. The book provides an unrelenting critique of the oppression of women in rabbinic society, while also arguing that later European bourgeois society disempowered women even further. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.


Unheroic Conduct

Unheroic Conduct

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1997-06-13

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780520919761

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In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis—studious, family-oriented—as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today. Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.


A Radical Jew

A Radical Jew

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-10-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780520920361

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Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic. What led Paul—in his dramatic conversion to Christianity—to such a radical critique of Jewish culture? Paul's famous formulation, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ," demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history. Boyarin posits a "diaspora identity" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others. An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian—and as human beings.


Dying for God

Dying for God

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0804737045

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Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.


Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2003-12-10

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0231508956

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The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing—outing—"queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.


The Invention of the Jewish People

The Invention of the Jewish People

Author: Shlomo Sand

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2010-06-14

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 178168362X

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A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.


Good Jew, Bad Jew

Good Jew, Bad Jew

Author: Steven Friedman

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-11-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1776148517

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Shows how anti-Semitism has been distorted to serve the Israeli state Good Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa’s foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of political objectives that support the Israeli state and global white supremacy. Looking specifically at the way in which language is used to shape identities, Friedman uses many examples to illustrate how anti-Semitism and anti-Semites are increasingly defined as anything and anyone that opposes the interests and policies of the Israeli state. The use of anti-racist language to defend racial domination distorts not only the meaning of what it is to be Jewish, but sheds light on how all dogmatic nationalisms function. Friedman uses India and South Africa as examples, but the analysis applies across the world too. Good Jew, Bad Jew does not offer a simplistic binary understanding of Jewishness and the actions of the Israeli state and ideology. It is a detailed, deeply researched and critical work that will appeal to both specialists and general readers looking for a considered view on how language shapes belief systems and how the powerful forces of racism and nationalism – and their opponents – are being misrepresented.


American Guy

American Guy

Author: Saul Levmore

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-08-04

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0199331383

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American Guy examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the intersection of American gender, legal, and literary issues. The collection opens with a set of papers investigating "American Guys" -- the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists that populate much of American fiction. Diverse essays examine the manly men of Hemingway, Dreiser, and others, in their relation to the law, while also highlighting the underlying tensions that complicate this version of masculinity. A second set of papers examines "Outsiders" -- men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. These essays take up counter-traditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Philip Roth's portrait of the Jewish lawyer. American Guy, a follow-up to Subversion and Sympathy, edited by Alison L. LaCroix and Martha Nussbaum, aims at reinvigorating the law-and-literature movement through original, cross-disciplinary insights. It embraces a variety of voices from both within and outside the academy, including several contributions from prominent judges. These contributions are particularly significant, not only as features unique to the field, but also for the light they throw on the federal bench. In the face of a large body of work studying judicial conduct as a function of rigid commitment to ideology, American Guy shows a side of the judiciary that is imaginatively engaged, aware of cultural trends, and reflective about the wider world and the role of the of law in it.


Rainbow Jews

Rainbow Jews

Author: Jonathan C. Friedman

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780739114483

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Rainbow Jews deals with the intersection of gay and Jewish identity in American and Israeli film and theater, from the 1960s to the present. Its main area of interest is the extent to which Jewish creative voices in the performing arts have constructed multidimensional images of, and a welcoming public space for, the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community as a whole. Through a close reading of the texts of numerous American and Israeli plays and films (some famous, but mostly lesser known), the author evaluates some of the key conventions and tropes that have been employed to construct, critique, and reflect the social reality of the connection between Jewishness and gay identity in the United States and Israel. Secondarily, the author explores ways in which gay-Jewish playwrights and filmmakers have assisted the re-evaluation of sexual norms within Judaism over the past three decades, inspiring and reinforcing measures across the spectrum of belief geared towards integrating Jewish members of the GLBT community into the overall Jewish historical narrative.


Border Lines

Border Lines

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-11-24

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0812203844

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The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.