Daniel Boyarin

Daniel Boyarin (; born 1946) is an Israeli–American academic and historian of religion. Born in New Jersey, he holds dual United States and Israeli citizenship. He is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Chava Boyarin, a lecturer in Hebrew at UC Berkeley. They have two sons. His brother, Jonathan Boyarin, is also a scholar, and the two have written together. He has defined himself as a "diasporic rabbinic Jew".

Career Being of Litvak background on all four sides, Boyarin was raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Boyarin attended Freehold High School. A graduate of the class of 1964, Boyarin was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 2009.

Boyarin was educated at Goddard College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University before earning his doctoral degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He moved to Israel but developed anti-Zionist views in response to what he has claimed was an Israeli policy of breaking the arms and legs of Palestinian demonstrators during the First Intifada.

Border Lines (2004) examines the early stages of partitioning Judaism and Christianity into separate and distinct religions. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (2009) explores the dialogic structure in Plato and the Babylonian Talmud. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (2012) carries on the line of exploration begun in Border Lines, developing the argument that "New Testament" ideas can be found in long-standing Jewish traditions.

Boyarin has written extensively on Talmudic and Midrashic studies, and about the Jews as a colonized people. His current research interests include the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in the modern era.

Views on the State of Israel Boyarin is a self-proclaimed Jewish anti-Zionist and has been highly critical of Israeli governments. In the preface to one of his books, where he discusses the many versions of Judaism in late antiquity and the binary model that gatekeeps definitions of Judaism, he writes in passing: "On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on Rosh Hashanah this year, I was told that I should be praying in a mosque, and versions of this, less crude perhaps, are being hurled at Jews daily by other Jews. [...] More piercing to me is the pain of watching a tradition, my Judaism, to which I have dedicated my life, disintegrating before my eyes. It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. I fear, God forbid, that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Deheishe, Betein (Bethel), and El-Khalil (Hebron). [...] If we are not for ourselves, other Jews say to me, who will be for us? And I answer, but if we are for ourselves alone, what are we?"

In a highly publicised essay, Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, Alvin H. Rosenfeld criticised Boyarin for these words—and in particular for the parallel to the Holocaust, which, according to Rosenfeld, is "a sure sign that lucid thinking has been replaced by bias"—and concludes that through these remarks, "Jewish identity is affirmed in opposition to the Jewish state".