Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory

Storm from Paradise was first published in 1992. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possibility through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin draws on Benjamins's famous image of the Angel of History blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book's seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." –Religious Studies Review

"An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin's essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the 'other' and, conversely and recently, with 'othering' is indeed relevant to theorists of contemporary culture." –Marianne Hirsch

Jonathan Boyarin is the author of Palestine and Jewish History, and co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin, of Jews and Other Differences and Powers of Diaspora.

Jonathan Boyarin is an anthropologist who works in the area of critical theory and Jewish ethnography. He has taught at the Center for Studies of Social Change at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Polish Jews in Paris: Ethnography of Memory and was coeditor, with Jack Kugelmass, of From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry.