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"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possibility through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin draws on Benjamins's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book's seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." –Religious Studies Review
"An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin's essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the 'other' and, conversely and recently, with 'othering' is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture." –Marianne Hirsch
Boyarin ( Polish Jews in Paris ) has crafted seven interlocking essays on the function of memory in contemporary Jewish thought, ranging from an elegant, scholarly evocation of the Orthodox community on the Lower East Side, seen as a palpable embodiment of the dynamics of forgetting, to such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the work of Native American novelist Gerald Vizenor and French Jewish writer Patrick Modiano and, above all, of critic Walter Benjamin. Boyarin's theme is ``Othering,'' the process by which Jews and other perennial outsiders are set apart. Taken individually, the essays are often frustratingly difficult, but the book closes with two brilliant and accessible pieces on the place of Jews in the progressive left and the relationship of Jews and Palestinians, offering a balance of radical politics and insistent Jewish identity that challenges facile political correctness. As he sagely points out, ``the silencing of discourse about Jewish difference'' is accomplished through eliding Jews into the ``Eurocentric white male'' camp and failing to register the reality of Christianity as a dominant (and often oppressive) force in Western history.
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