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Jonathan Boyarin, a newly-hired professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies, will give a lecture entitled "Just Jewish Enough: Thinking Jewish in the Self-Portraits of Rafael Goldchain" on Thursday, October 11, at 7:30, in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center theatre on the UNC campus.
Boyarin's lecture examines the innovative work of Chilean-Canadian Jewish photographer Rafael Goldchain, who created a series of portraits of himself as a number of paternal and maternal ancestors: male and female, traditional and modern, in Poland and the New World. Goldchain reads his own work as a meditation on memory and loss. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Boyarin was most recently the Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in 1984 and received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998. His research and writing combine his backgrounds in anthropology and Yiddish studies to point toward new pathways in the study of Jewish culture. Among the books Boyarin has written are: Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (1991); A Storyteller's Worlds: The Education of Shlomo Noble in Europe and America (1994); Thinking in Jewish (1996); Palestine and Jewish History (1996); and Powers of Diaspora (2002), which he co-authored with Daniel Boyarin.
This distinguished professorship is named in honor of Leonard and Tobee Kaplan, who made a generous gift to the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies to establish the position. Leonard and Tobee Kaplan live in Greensboro, where they head the Toleo Foundation, which is devoted to a variety of philanthropic causes. Their past charitable work includes having played a key role in building a new home for North Carolina Hillel in Chapel Hill. Leonard Kaplan hopes the professorship will help "bring to the forefront the modern world of Jewish religious practices, culture and social issues that are significant to not only the Jewish world, but people of all faiths." The Center is confident that Boyarin's appointment will help to achieve this vision.
At UNC, Boyarin will teach a variety of courses on modern Jewish life with an emphasis on the role of memory and community. This fall, he is teaching an undergraduate course, "Studying Jews: Contemporary Approaches" and a graduate seminar entitled "Messiah and Modernity." Currently he is finishing a study and translation from Yiddish of the last book published by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and he has recently completed a manuscript on the relation between Jewish difference in late medieval Europe and the dynamics of the colonial encounter in Latin America.