Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin Versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy

Abstract

aniel Boyarin makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.' His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a anticolonial aimed at changing ethos and culture (xviii, xxi). He wants persuade Jews reverse, at least in part, the Westernization process of which they have for centuries been victims. Since beginning of their absorption into Western world, he maintains, they have been adopting deplorable orientation life eschewed by most of their ancestors. The masculine values that so many East European Jews once had good sense dismiss as goyim nakhes now shape ideals of their descendants as well as otherJews. Boyarin wants contemporaryJews relinquish these ideals and return a suitably modified version of Eydlkayt; or, civility of Ostjude (51). If they would do so, he believes, it would be good not only for Jews but for other people as well. By celebrating rabbinicJewish maleness, Boyarin seeks to retrieve it as an Archimedean lever help move world of Western phallocentric culture (11). Boyarin's restorative project brings him into direct conflict with some of most powerful forces in modern Jewish world, including, above all, Zionist movement and its vision of a New Jew. A selfconfessed antizionist, he seeks subvert Zionist ideology by demonstrating that it is, at bottom, nothing but a regrettably influential form