Jonathan Boyarin, "Waiting for a Jew"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. As Jonathan Boyarin describes his childhood in Farmingdale, New Jersey, he takes us into a world of Jewish traditions and references that may be unfamiliar to some readers: indeed, Boyarin's article is concerned, in part, with tracing his own efforts to grow more familiar with and gain a greater understanding of his own tradition. In the process, he describes many different kinds of Jews: an Orthodox Jew, a Jewish socialist, a Lubavitcher Hasid, an observant Jew, Zionists, Jews who have been acculturated into American academic life, to name a few. What is the difference between the groups that Boyarin identifies? Why is he drawn to one group more than another?

2. "Waiting for a Jew" opens with the statement, "My story begins in a community . . .". What is the difference between an essay and a story? Why has Boyarin elected to tell his fellow anthropologists a story? What are the major events or pieces of this story? Is this a story that has a point? A moral? An argument?

3. The subtitle Boyarin has selected for his essay is "Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul." What is "marginal redemption"? What is it that gets redeemed in "Waiting for a Jew"?

Questions for Writing:

1. "[O]n the abandoned farm," Boyarin writes, "my first memories are tinged with a sense of traces, of mystery, of loss. Do all who eventually become anthropologists have this experience in some form, at some time in their early lives?" In posing this question, Boyarin suggests that there might be a connection between anthropology and a sense of loss. What might this connection be? In what ways has Boyarin's own research been shaped by this sense of loss?

2. Boyarin believes that "any marginal group in mass society may be subject without warning to the loss of its cultural landscape, and therefore those who are able to create portable landscapes for themselves are the most likely to endure." What is the difference between a "cultural landscape" and a "portable landscape"? At the end of Boyarin's story, what kind of landscape does he inhabit?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Lila Abu-Lughod, an anthropologist of Arab descent, and Jonathan Boyarin, a Jewish anthropologist, can be considered "insiders," part of the very cultures they are studying. What difference does it make whether a culture is studied by insiders or outsiders? Who benefits from such work? And how does one determine whether such work has been successful or not?

2. In "The Myth of the Ant Queen," Steven Johnson argues that complex systems have an intelligence of their own. And he suggests that as such systems develop, the individuals involved-whether humans or ants-may remain largely oblivious to the larger patterns of change. Individuals may assume they are doing one sort of thing, but the system as a whole is doing something else. Does Boyarin appear to share this way of thinking? Is culture also a complex system that unfolds in directions the individual actors might not always control or even understand fully? When we look at cultural change as exemplified by Boyarin's religious odyssey, does that change appear to be directed by a "unified, top-down" intelligence, or does it take place from the bottom-up, as a result of individual choices made by many different people? Are some cultures, institutions, and religions organized differently-that is, in a more top-down way?

More Boyarin assignments...