A Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory

by Jonathan Boyarin

Storm from Paradise was first published in 1992. 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. "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 Jonathan Boyarin is the author of Palestine and Jewish History , and co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin, of Jews and Other Differences and Powers of Diaspora .

161 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1992

Reviews

[W.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boyarin here looks further into the implications of his project to create a "Jewish ethnography." By he means not just that he wants to look into pre-Holocaust European Jewish village life (among other settings, including New York's Lower East Side), but that he is hoping to determine if there may be particularly Jewish ideas that could help shape an ethnography that differs at its core from the imperialist-centered norm. The gem among the essays here is "Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book." The major terms in the title--"Jewish" and "Book"---may suggest a narrowing, or yet another take on a cliched set of ideas, but this is not the case. Instead, Boyarin proceeds through a flys-eye-various viewing of the ideas of and links between the sequential and narrative; between simultaneity, space and argument, and the subtle implications the manipulation of these terms produce. He looks into the handling of these linkages by Levi-Strauss, Stephen Tyler and others. This book (originally published in 1991) is denser than Boyarin's more recent "Jewishness and the Human Dimension," but not to the point where it is choked with academic language. This is not a long book, but strong ideas rise from every page.