Overview

A provocative manifesto, arguing for a new understanding of the Jews' peoplehood Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what the Jews are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as Zionism, and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different--and very old--answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the nation and the state, only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

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Reviews

Daniel Boyarin's book delves into the very heart of what it means to be Jewish in the world today not as an assertion of exclusiveness, but rather as the starting point for a universalist idea about Jewishness drawn from its complicated multifaceted history. The manifesto is thus a provocation to think anew about what constitutes nation, society, culture, and the ultimate goals of cosmopolitan humanistic enquiry. A masterpiece! -- Ato Quayson, author of Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature Daniel Boyarin's stirring manifesto for a Jewish diaspora nation proposes an expansive anti-statist argument that makes common cause with the freedom of Palestinians and the rights of Black Lives...Read this daring essay that invites your argument, not your agreement. -- Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University In his intrepid manifesto, Daniel Boyarin calls for a Jewish nationalism not sited in a nation-state. Far beyond the Jewish case, it provokes both those who see no more need for national identity and those who insist on a territorial home for each. As unexpected in his arguments as he is witty in his prose, Boyarin is in characteristically good form in this essential new statement. -- Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University

"Daniel Boyarin's book delves into the very heart of what it means to be Jewish in the world today not as an assertion of exclusiveness, but rather as the starting point for a universalist idea about Jewishness drawn from its complicated multifaceted history. The manifesto is thus a provocation to think anew about what constitutes nation, society, culture, and the ultimate goals of cosmopolitan humanistic enquiry. A masterpiece! -- ""Ato Quayson, author of Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature"" Daniel Boyarin's stirring manifesto for a Jewish diaspora nation proposes an expansive anti-statist argument that makes common cause with the freedom of Palestinians and the rights of Black Lives...Read this daring essay that invites your argument, not your agreement. -- ""Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University"" In his intrepid manifesto, Daniel Boyarin calls for a Jewish nationalism not sited in a nation-state. Far beyond the Jewish case, it provokes both those who see no more need for national identity and those who insist on a territorial home for each. As unexpected in his arguments as he is witty in his prose, Boyarin is in characteristically good form in this essential new statement. -- ""Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University"""

Author Information

Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley. He is author of many books, including Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, and The Jewish Gospels: The Story of Jesus Christ.

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