My abiding memory of Daniel Boyarin is sitting with him on the top deck of one of London’s famous red buses. We were traveling to Golders Green to eat a kosher meal after a conference in central London. It was the summer of 1994, at the height of Western optimism that the Oslo Accords would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. This optimism, however naive, resulted in an extraordinary phenomenon. Closeted Jews in the British academy attended the conference by the hundreds. The late Laura Marcus and I, who organized “Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew,’” were expecting a handful of specialists along with the invited speakers, such as Daniel Boyarin. Instead, the audience was made up of a rainbow alliance of out-Jews and other others who could no longer fit on a single red bus but needed a fleet of double-deckers. This was a time when a new iteration of Jewish studies—feminist, fluidly gendered, postcolonial, antiracist, anti-Eurocentric—came into being and has, thankfully, influenced future generations of scholars.2 No less important, it was a time of a momentary and unspoken hope that the world could be healed and that tikkun olam (the “repair of the world”) might at long last be on the horizon.

我对 Daniel Boyarin 的永久记忆是和他一起坐在伦敦一辆著名的红色巴士的顶层甲板上。在伦敦市中心的一次会议之后，我们正前往戈尔德斯格林吃一顿犹太餐。1994 年夏天，西方对奥斯陆协议将结束巴以冲突的乐观情绪达到顶峰。这种乐观主义，无论多么天真，都导致了一种非同寻常的现象。数百名英国学院的非公开犹太人参加了会议。已故的劳拉·马库斯（Laura Marcus）和我组织了“现代性、文化和‘犹太人’”，他们期待着一些专家以及​​受邀的演讲者，比如丹尼尔·博亚林。取而代之的是，观众是由异教徒和其他人组成的彩虹联盟，他们不再适合乘坐一辆红色巴士，而是需要一支双层巴士。2同样重要的是，这是一个短暂的、不言而喻的希望，希望世界可以得到治愈，并且tikkun olam（“世界的修复”）可能终于出现在地平线上。