Palestine and Jewish History

<div> <div> <p><i>Palestine and Jewish History</i> was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.</p> <p>This provocative and personal series of meditations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argues that it represents a struggle not as much about land and history as about space time and memory. Juxtaposing entries from Jonathan Boyarin's field diary with critical and theoretical articulations Palestine and Jewish History shows not only the unfinished nature of anthropological endeavor but also the author's personal stake in the ethical predicament of being a Jew at this point in history.</p> <p>Boyarin comes to Israel as a specialist in modern Jewish studies an individual who has kin friends and colleagues there a scholar with a long history of peace activism. He interweaves fascinating descriptions of ordinary life-parties walks classes visits to homes-with a selection of his related writings on cultural studies and anthropology. Some sections are polemical; others are witty analyses of bumper stickers slogans the ambiguities in conversations. Boyarin foregrounds the messiness and lack of closure inherent in this process presenting raw materials (field notes) in some sections of the book that reappear in other sections as various kinds of finished products (conference papers published articles).</p> <p>In the process we learn a good deal about the Middle East and its debates and connections to other places. Boyarin addresses two fundamental issues: the difficulty of linking different sorts of memories and memorializations and the importance of moving beyond objectivity and multiculturalism into a situated engaged and nontotalizing framework for fieldwork and ethnography.</p> <p>Palestine and Jewish History enacts rather than reports on Boyarin's process of error pain impatience uncertainty discovery embarrassment self-criticism intellectual struggle and dawning awareness challenging and engaging us in the process of discovery. Ultimately it gives the lie as the Palestinian presence does in Israel to any concept of a finishedness that successfully conceals its unruly and painful multiple processes.</p> <p>Jonathan Boyarin is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of <i>Storm from Paradise</i> co-author of <i>Powers of Diaspora</i> and the co-editor of <i>Remapping Memory</i> and <i>Jews and Other Differences</i> all available from Minnesota.</p> </div> </div>