Storm from Paradise: Politics of Jewish Memory

Based on varied, cross-disciplinary readings, this text argues that the Jewish experience with being the "other" and, conversely and recently, with "othering" is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture. Taking Walter Benjamin's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by "a storm from paradise" as his point of departure, Boyarin launches an examination of the role of memory in the study of knowledge, culture and power; the complicated relationship between space and time in the constitution of memory and identity; and the dynamics of "othering" in 20th-century culture within the context of a long tradition of Jewish writings on the subject.