Thinking in Jewish

by Jonathan Boyarin

How does one "think" in Jewish? What does it mean to speak in English of Yiddish as Jewish, as a certain intermediary generation of immigrants and children of immigrants from Jewish Eastern Europe has done? How does thinking in a Jewish body, situated within a Jewish milieu, ground and constrain one's thought? A fascination with these questions prompted Jonathan Boyarin, one of America's most original thinkers in critical theory and Jewish ethnography, to offer the unexpected Jewish perspective on the vexed issue of identity politics presented here. Building on Boyarin's previous work on Jewish communities, texts in culture, and the links among space, time, and memory, Thinking in Jewish explores the ways in which a Jewish - or, more particularly, Yiddish - idiom complicates the question of identity. Ranging from explorations of a Lower East Side synagogue to Fichte's and Derrida's contrasting notions of the relation between the Jews and the idea of Europe, from the Lubavitcher Hasidim