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Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin Versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy
Daniel Boyarin makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.(1) His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a "Jewish anticolonial project" aimed at "changing ethos and culture" (xviii, xxi). He wants to persuade the Jews to reverse, at least in part, "the Westernization process" of which they have for centuries been the victims. Since the beginning of their absorption into the Western world, he maintains, they have been adopting the deplorable orientation to life eschewed by most of their ancestors. The "masculine" values that so many East European Jews once had the good sense to dismiss as goyim nakhes now shape the ideals of their descendants as well as other Jews. Boyarin wants contemporary Jews to relinquish these ideals and to return to a suitably modified version of "Eydlkayt; or, the civility of the Ostjude" (51). If they would do so, he believes, it would be good not only for the Jews but for other people as well. By celebrating "rabbinic Jewish maleness," Boyarin seeks "to retrieve it as an Archimedean lever to help move the world of the Western phallocentric culture" (11).
Boyarin's restorative project brings him into direct conflict with some of the most powerful forces in the modern Jewish world, including, above all, the Zionist movement and its vision of a "New Jew." A self-confessed "antizionist," he seeks to subvert Zionist ideology by demonstrating that it is, at bottom, nothing but a regrettably influential form of goyim nakhes. His method of doing so consists primarily of an examination of Theodor Herzl that exposes how he, like many other Jews of his time and place, succumbed to the pressure of fin-de-siécle antisemitism and sought to cure the Jews of faults they did not possess by transforming them into a nation that would be, all too unfortunately, just another warlike nation like all the others. What Boyarin most strongly wishes to do is to show the Jews the way to escape, as far as possible, the ill effects of the implementation of Herzl's ideas (311).
Unheroic Conduct is part of...