Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, University of California, Berkeley
Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Fall 2001
Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, received his PhD in 1975 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has been an NEH Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and a Ford Foundation Fellow. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2006, Boyarin will be spending the academic year 2012-2013 as a fellow of the WissenschaftsKolleg, in Berlin. Boyarin has written extensively on talmudic and midrashic studies, and his work has focused on cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, including issues of gender and sexuality, as well as research on the Jews as a colonized people.
His current research interests center primarily around questions of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity and the genealogy of the concept of “religion.” His books include Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), and Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) all published by the University of California Press. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism appeared at Stanford University Press in the fall of 1999 [French and Italian translations published]. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004 (winner of the AAR award for best book on religion in the area of historical studies in 2006 [German translation 2009; French 2011]), Socrates and the Fat Rabbis in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press. His The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ is currently in press (New Press, 2012).