What Is "the Jews"?
bostonreview.net/articles/what-is-the-jews/
bostonreview.netPosted May 10, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC
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bostonreview.netThey idea that Jews are a people or a nation is not a new idea!
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This article is just a review of a book by a scholar I hadn't heard of. It has a POV but I was more interested in the ideas and history it examines than its argument as such.
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Boyarin is almost a parody of literary critical theory. I have a few of his books but they read like the pretentious sophistry of “theory” scholars attempting to write like Derrida they read in translation. Very self-indulgent, and seemingly with the goal of making a provocative statement and seeing if you can send your way to a semblance of a justification for it.
If you like Foucault and Baudrilliard, or even better, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze & Guattari, then you’ll like Boyarin.
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A sequence of words that are followed by the most craziest batshit insane conspiracies ever.
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Review is near-impenetrable gibberish, and seems to describe perspectives that have no real Earthly constituency.
This part jumped out at me:
The No-State Solution adapts a Bund election poster used in Kiev around the turn of 1918 for its frontispiece, the poster’s Hebrew letters reprinted above the image of a hard-looking Jew framing his open mouth with both hands, the man screaming in English now: “Wherever we live, that’s our homeland.”
23 years after the Jews of Kiev created that poster (so, less than the distance between "The Matrix" and today), they mostly wound up in the ditch at Babi Yar. Any who survived were then pogrommed again by Ukrainians in September 1945 - after the war ended. Ukraine was still paving its streets with Jewish tombstones until 2013.
Bundism is dead. Doikeyt is dead. There was a real argument over all of these concepts for about 50 years, and that ended in the middle of the last century. I truly wish it hadn't happened that way but it did. Israel is the largest surviving Jewish population, the only one that is growing, a majority of Jewish children live there, by maybe 2030 it will house a majority of all Jews. Israel stays. Leftists really need to get over that.
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I definitely don’t agree with him on everything, but there are ideas in there worth engaging with. Unfortunately, we have cultivated a knee jerk reaction to anything that isn’t Zionism, and also Boyarin, as the reviewer points out, is going out of his way to be provocative.
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He hates Zionism except he likes it enough to go to Israel and enjoy himself
Meh
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Based on this review, Boyarin is a provocateur steeped in ivory-tower ideology fueled with a superiority complex that only a tenured academic could have. He misunderstands the Talmud, a document ensuring the survival and continuation of the knowledge of an indigenous culture to the land of Israel, to instead be a “metaphorical land”. It does not take a PhD to understand that a book and a land are not the same thing.
Why should we listen to anybody who begins their preposition with “actually, the antisemites were right about some of the things regarding the Jews”? That is what I am angry about when it comes to Boyarin, not his sloppy redefinitions of words to suit his neo-satmar ideological profile.
Answer from the book review:
"Besides genealogizing, Boyarin’s favorite way of doing the history of Judaism has always been to dance across Christian anti-Semitism, turning its claims upside down as he goes: the Jews are obsessed by fleshly things, he thus agrees in Carnal Israel (1993), rendering an accusation made famous by Augustine into the highest compliment."
someone doesn't know what "metaphorical" means