The NoState Solution, Daniel Boyarin
The NoState Solution, Daniel Boyarin
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The No-State Solution
A Jewish Manifesto

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Narrator: John Lescault

Unabridged: 4 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/31/2023


Synopsis

A provocative manifesto arguing for a new understanding of the Jews’ peoplehoodToday there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as “Zionism,” and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view.In this provocative audiobook, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

About Daniel Boyarin

Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, where he held joint appointments in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Department of Rhetoric.

About John Lescault

John Lescault has been an audiobook narrator for over twenty-five years and has recorded more than three hundred titles, spanning works of fiction and nonfiction. He has also provided narration for NPR’s Performance Today, Nightline, and Deaf Mosaic. He has appeared with the National Symphony Orchestra as Beethoven and Dvorak at the Kennedy Center.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Shira

Another chapter on my quest to unlearn some of my reflexive Zionism... My experience with this book was the inverse trajectory of Shaul Magid's The Necessity of Exile in that I was a little put off by some of the early material (the entire 'what is "the Jews"' with that phrase consistently in scare q......more

Not perfect, but a truly insightful read.......more

While in general I'd recommend this work and agree with a lot of the ideas it is exploring on Jewish identity, even if the notion of a "Diasporic nation" seems a little forced. When the author adopted anti-Patrilineal Jew ideas without comment or exploration I was immediately insulted and turned off......more

Goodreads review by Diana

This book is trying to answer a very difficult question: are Jews a religion or are they an ethnicity/state? Written almost as a thesis, it presumes a knowledge of many who have written previously on this topic. It has a 10-page bibliography. It has 25 pages of notes, presented at the back of the te......more


Quotes

“A self-consciously radical statement that is both astute and joyous.” Kirkus Reviews

“Daniel Boyarin’s stirring manifesto for a Jewish diaspora nation proposes an expansive anti-statist argument that makes common cause with the freedom of Palestinians and the rights of Black Lives. His rousing call for subaltern solidarity provokes me to ask: how does the ‘no-state’ solution address the claims for an independent nation-state or a bi-national state as articulated by the Palestinian people whose sovereignty has been repeatedly subverted and whose dignity is daily disfigured? Read this daring essay that invites your argument, not your agreement.” Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University

“In his intrepid manifesto, Daniel Boyarin calls for a Jewish nationalism not sited in a nation-state. Far beyond the Jewish case, it provokes both those who see no more need for national identity and those who insist on a territorial home for each. As unexpected in his arguments as he is witty in his prose, Boyarin is in characteristically good form in this essential new statement.” Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and professor of history at Yale University

“Daniel Boyarin’s book delves into the very heart of what it means to be Jewish in the world today not as an assertion of exclusiveness, but rather as the starting point for a universalist idea about Jewishness drawn from its complicated multifaceted history. The manifesto is thus a provocation to think anew about what constitutes nation, society, culture, and the ultimate goals of cosmopolitan humanistic enquiry. A masterpiece!” Ato Quayson, author of Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

“Trenchant, plangent, and courageous, Daniel Boyarin’s polemic rewrites the ground rules of what has been known for centuries as ‘the Jewish question.’ Any future discussion must take his ‘no-state solution’ into account.” Haun Saussy, University of Chicago