Jonathan Boyarin

Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (; born September 16, 1956) is an American anthropologist whose work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory and identity. Born in Neptune, New Jersey, he is married and has two sons, Jonah and Yeshaya. In 2013, he was appointed Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University.

He is married to critical geographer Elissa Sampson.

His brother, Daniel Boyarin, is also a well-known scholar, and the two have written together.

Career Boyarin was educated at Reed College, the New School for Social Research, and the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, before earning his doctoral degree in anthropology at the New School for Social Research. In 1998, fourteen years after receiving his Ph.D., Boyarin received his J.D. at Yale Law School. He has taught at Cornell University, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, Dartmouth College, and The New School. In 2016, Boyarin was elected a Fellow of the Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR).

Research Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City. Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. He has conducted fieldwork in cities where those "Jews and others" live, including Paris, Jerusalem, and New York's Lower East Side.

The Ethnography of Reading Boyarin edited an influential set of essays published in 1993 titled, The Ethnography of Reading, exploring how people read and talk about reading. In contrast to the older tendency to classify entire cultures as oral or literate, most of the essays explore the intermingling of silent reading, collective reading and commentary, recitations, and other text-related practices in a particular tradition or setting.

The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition. Its basic contribution...is to "expand the archive" of our knowledge of reading and other text-reception practices. ... For Boyarin, the study of reading challenges the "lingering anti-textual bias among practitioners of cultural anthropology."

Influence of Walter Benjamin Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical, interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture. Boyarin writes:

Notable works The Ethnography of Reading (1993) Jewishness and the Human Dimension (2008) The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe (2009) Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side (2011) Jewish Families (2013) Time and Human Language Now (2013, co-authored with Martin Land) Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (2020)