"Usefully complicating common sense understandings of history, catastrophe, loss, otherness, and possiblity through reflections on contemporary Jewishness, Boyarin dreaws on Benjamins"s famous image of the Angel of Histroy blown into the future by a "storm from paradise" to constantly interrogate and recuperate the past, "without pretending for long that we can recoup its plentitude". The book"s seven thoughtful essays are at times deliberately intangible but always worth reading. An important book for the rethinking of the relevance of Jewishness to anthropology and cultural studies." -Religious Studies Review "An essay in the richest sense of that term, inspired by and modeled on Walter Benjamin"s essays. Based on varied, diverse, and abundantly cross-disciplinary readings, it moves and builds, questions and interrogates, and ultimately convinces us that the Jewish experience with being the "other" and, conversely and recently, with "othering" is indeed relevant to theorists of...