Jewishness and the human dimension
By: Jonathan Boyarin.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780823229222; 9780823229239
Subjects: Judaism and science; Judaism and the social sciences; Jews -- Historiography; Human ecology -- Religious aspects -- Judaism; Judaism and culture; Jews -- Identity; Globalization; Difference (Philosophy)
Description: "Jewishness and the Human Dimension is a leading scholar's progress report on an effort to bring Jewishness broadly construed into dialogue with a wide range of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. Each chapter emerges from and addresses the circumstances of its composition; a talk to New Jersey undergraduates inviting them to contemplate their lifespans vis-a-vis the life history of the species; a meeting to contemplate Jewish memory outside Europe and after 1945; an inaugural address as the author sought to make sense of leaving his home on the Lower East Side and making a new one in Kansas." "Two chapters on research and teaching in Jewish cultural studies as academic practice develop the notion of Jewish studies as a human science and examine how Jewish historiography, once a deeply conservative discipline, has integrated insights from anthropology and literary cultural studies. Boyarin also shares a dialogue with the Jerusalem-based physicist Martin Land on physical and cultural ideas of futurity and redemption. The book ends with a stark challenge to those who work in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: in order to be able to contribute to the possibility of sustained human life on Earth, we need to interrogate rigorously now the status of human differences."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A Jewish introduction to the human sciences; title: Responsive thinking: cultural studies and Jewish historiography; title: Seasons and lifetimes; title: Toward an anthropology of the twentieth century; title: Tropes of home; title: A moment of danger, a taste of death; title: Extinction and difference.