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Jewish Learning at Reed Jonathan Boyarin remembers walking through Southeast Portland at daybreak, seeing Mount Hood float over the city in a red dawn. “It was easy for me to understand how this mountain would be worshipped,” he recalls. “I was struck by the physical splendor and regret to this day I was too neurotic to enjoy more of the physical splendors.” Oregon was novel for Boyarin in other respects as well. “As a college student I arrived in Portland, looked around the solid working-class neighborhood where Reed was located, and said to myself, ‘My God, everybody here is American,’” Boyarin recounts. “A few months later I flew home for winter vacation, arrived at Newark Airport and brought myself back down to earth, thinking, ‘That’s silly, there are lots of different kinds of Americans: Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, black Americans. . . . ’ And then I returned to Portland, where I could not shake, once again, the powerful impression of ‘Americans’ as a distinct ethnic group, one to which I did not belong.” Boyarin managed to find kindred souls at Reed. Long-time friend Martin Land ’77, a physicist who teaches computer science at Hadassah College in Jerusalem, says, “I first noticed Jonathan when he worked the grill in the Reed coffee shop and he called out the finished orders like a grease-jockey from Brooklyn—‘I got a tuna melt, please.’” Land says he and Boyarin bonded as fellow “immigrants” to the Pacific Northwest and to Reed. “Unlike most other Reedies from back East,” Land says, “we shared a fascination with our place in the westward migration that began with our grandparents leaving Eastern Europe for New York. We spent a lot of time talking about the differences between Portland and the places we came from. In a way, we imagined ourselves to be ‘exiles’ . . . treasuring memories from some other place that most people around us either didn’t understand or were eager to forget.’’ Boyarin’s path to self-discovery led back to his Jewish identity. “I was surprised that at the end of my first year at Reed, nearly all my closest friends were Jewish,” he recalls. While Reed was engaging, something was absent. “I had the sense that with all the academic knowledge abundant at Reed, in my seminars I missed that sense of the vital unity of learning and life,” Boyarin says. “I had to figure out in my own mind what seemed to be missing.” |
