[6] Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City.

[3] As a student of modern Jewish experience and culture, he has investigated comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others.

[12] According to Brinkley M. Messick:[13] The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition.

"[14]Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical, interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture.

Boyarin writes:[1] I learned Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History", written in 1939 as the storms of war were gathering, and never published during his lifetime.

In that text, Benjamin analyzes the failure of the mid-1930s Popular Front to defeat the Nazis, and ascribes it at least in part to a philosophy of history that maintained a naïve faith in the ultimate inevitability of progress and the triumph of Reason.