Assignments: Boyarin Group Work

Goals:

1. Give you practice in identifying, analyzing, and extending critical concepts in an essay.
2. Give you an introduction to collaborative work.
3. Move you towards your rough draft.

Assignment:

Each group will present to the class a “tool” for mediating either between individuals and communities or between communities. Start by introducing yourselves to each other, and then select one of the passages below (time is limited, so you may just want to pick one at random). Take time to read through the passage and then as a group discuss how it suggests a tool. Select a group spokesperson to present your group’s findings to the class. The spokesperson will give the quotation and page number, explain what the tool is, and explain how that quotation from Boyarin points to that tool.

This is much of the work you’ll be expected to do in your first paper: arguing for a tool supported by textual evidence from Boyarin.

Use one of the following passages:

1. p.149: “In classic ethnographies” through “the end of childhood”
2. p.150: “The moral is that” through “my own degradation”
3. p.151: “The coldness of the building” through “community in Farmingdale”
4. p.151: “Five years too late” through “historical challenges”
5. p.153: “Rejecting suburban Judaism” through “Der Yid”
6. p.153: “Of course, not only” through “generosity that results”
7. p.154: “Those first, fragmentary enounters” through “to shape an identity”
8. p.157: “By contrast, it is” through “next time, if possible”
9. p.157: “The second thing that draws me” through “Eight Street”
10. p.158: “But I am drawn” through “he is flattered”
11. p.160: “We practice our French” through “for anonymity”
12. p.161: “Gradually I settle in” through “from his town”
13. p.162: “I mention to one” through “wholehearted commitments”
14. p.163: “I will hazard agues” through “autonomous adulthood”
15. p.164: “The fact that I have found” through “which to do so”