Daniel Boyarin profiled

JWEEKLY.COM: Daniel Boyarin — the Talmudist, feminist, anti-Zionist, only-in-Berkeley Orthodox Jew (Alix Wall). Excerpt:

Today Boyarin, 68, is a world-class authority in his field — one of the true giants, in this country as well as in Israel. But he’s far from the typical Talmud scholar. He has a kippah on his head, yes, and is shomer Shabbos, but he’s also a confirmed anti-Zionist, a serious collector of fine kosher wines, and has an abiding interest in feminism and queer theory.

Daniel Boyarin is, in short, quite the iconoclast, even in a city that prides itself on defying the mainstream.

Boyarin has been on the U.C. Berkeley faculty since 1990 and is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern studies and rhetoric. He has written 12 books, ranging from rabbinic ideas about sexuality to the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism; he has another book in the works and two more in contract; and he has co-edited five others, including one with his brother Jonathan, a professor of Jewish studies at Cornell University.

His scholarship is so vast that practically every graduate student in his field encounters it at some point, and he is so well-known in academia that a discussion about his views on a particular talmudic point was a running joke in the 2011 Israeli film “Footnote.”

A long and interesting article. More on Professor Boyarin's work is here and links.