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JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS

Solomon Maimon, Rona Sheramy & Mark Gottlieb GoBackTo School!

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The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10022. For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or send $29.95 ($39.95 outside of the U.S.) to: Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Please send notifications of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected]. Letters to the Editor should be emailed to [email protected] or to our editorial office, 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited reviews and manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected], or to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be sent to [email protected] or call (212) 796-1665. Review copies should be sent to the attention of the associate editor at our editorial office.

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Prof. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Professor of American and Comparative Literature,

Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin

Dr. Justin Cammy Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Comparative

Literature, Smith College

Dr. Jonathan Dekel-ChenSenior Lecturer, Institute of Contemporary Jewry,

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dr. Glenn DynnerAssociate Professor of Religion, Sarah Lawrence College

Dr. Gershon Hundert Professor of Jewish Studies, McGill University

Dr. Naomi Seidman Koret Professor of Jewish Culture,

Graduate Theological Union

Dr. Daniel Soyer Professor of History, Fordham University

Eliyahu Stern Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and

Cultural History, Yale University

Dr. Magdalena Teter Professor of History, Wesleyan University

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Volume 4, Number 3 Fall 2013JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS

On the cover: “Back to School” by Mark Anderson.

LETTERS 4 Superpowered Thinking, Kant’s Dignity, Proust’s Jewish Melodies, & More

FEaTuRES

5 Yehudah Mirsky Fathers & Sons This summer, as the current Ashkenazi chief rabbi was being investigated for corruption, and issues of religion and state dominated public debate, Israel elected new Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis. The process was messy, complicated, and ugly. The result? Sixty-eight votes apiece for the sons of two previous chief rabbis. What does a broken rabbinate mean for Israel?

8 Rich Cohen The Hunter James Salter has been justly celebrated as a composer of gorgeous prose, and his new late-life novel All That Is confirms his reputation as a “writer’s writer.” How much of his artistic vision is predicated on being James Salter rather than James Horowitz?

REviEwS12 Curt Leviant Jake in the Box Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch by Yair Zakovitch, translated by Valerie Zakovitch

14 Matthew Holbreich Hebraic America American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev

16 Abigail Green Karl Marx, Bourgeois Revolutionary Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber

19 Mark Gottlieb A Student-Centered Tradition Chovas HaTalmidim: The Students’ Obligation and Sheloshah Ma’amarim: Three Discourses by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira

21 Abby W. Schachter On Not Bringing Up Baby What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last 23 Allan Arkush All-American, Post-Everything American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society by Shaul Magid26 Sylvia Barack Fishman Exogamy Explored ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America by Naomi Schaefer Riley

29 Michael Weingrad Fiction and Forgiveness A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novel by Dara Horn

32 Nadia Kalman Who Owns Margot? Margot: A Novel by Jillian Cantor

34 Eitan Kensky Meanwhile, on a Quiet Street in Cleveland Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators of Superman by Brad Ricca • Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way by Harry Brod

REadinG

38 Rona Sheramy The Day School Tuition Crisis: A Short History The day school tuition crisis turns out to be as old as day schools.

ConTRovERSy40 Patrick Tyler & Athens or Sparta? A Response and Rejoinder Benny Morris

LoST & Found

45 Solomon Maimon The Joy of Being Delivered from Jewish Schools Results in a Stiff Foot Before he became a brilliant, radical, and disreputable Enlightenment philosopher, Solomon Maimon was a miserable cheder student.

46 Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv Notice Posted on the Door of the Kelm Talmud Torah Before the High Holidays In the 1860s, Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv tried to found a new kind of yeshiva in which students would devote significant time to thinking about their moral lives.LaST woRd

47 Abraham Socher Hebrew School Days

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4 JEWiSH REviEW of BooKS • Fall 2013

LETTERS

Superpowered Thinking

As always, Mr. Laqueur’s considerable erudition is very welcome. (“From Russia with Complications,” Summer 2013) I fear that the phenomenon he points to—of Russian immigrants’ bringing a “su-perpower” mentality to bear on the small country where they now live—might mesh all too well with a parallel Israeli tendency on both the Right and the (increasingly eclipsed) Left. I speak of the mindset that Israeli actions alone can determine the future of the country. On the Right, this means the idea that the settlers can behave however they want, in complete defiance of U.S. and world opinion; on the Left, this means a belief that a “land for peace” deal is the only thing holding back a utopian peace.

Martin Berman-Gorvinevia jewishreviewofbooks.com

Kant’s Dignity

Alan Mittleman’s review of the books by Michael Rosen and George Kateb on the topic of dignity (“Two or Three Concepts of Dignity,” Summer 2013) effectively distills the historical and specula-tive aspects of their respective approaches to the topic in ways that make clear the limits of each work, not only individually and in comparison with each other, but also vis-à-vis the interests of the philosophically attuned Jewish thinker.

Mittleman’s attempt, however, to suggest some-thing of the Kantian character of Rosen’s “argument for respecting the dignity of the remains of deceased persons” badly misfires. He points out that accord-ing to Rosen “one would injure one’s own dignity by acting in ways that fail to express respect” for the dead. This is “reminiscent,” opines Mittleman, “of Kant’s infamous view that it is impermissible to tell a lie, even if it would save someone’s life.” True enough, when it comes to human dignity Kant holds no brief for mendacity: “By a lie,” declares Kant in “The Doctrine of Virtue” (1797), “a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being.” However, about the time of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Georg Ludwig Collins, an auditor in Kant’s course on moral philosophy, recorded the following: “If everyone were well disposed, it would not only be a duty not to lie, but nobody would need to do it . . . however, since men are malicious, it is true that we often court danger by punctilious observance of the truth, and hence has arisen the concept of the necessary lie . . . So far as I am constrained, by force used against me, . . . and I am unable to save myself by silence, the lie is a weapon of defense.” Relative to Mittleman’s remark that a “corpse as such no lon-ger has dignity,” a properly Kantian gloss would be that treating human remains with respect is a duty not to the dead, but with regard to the dead. Kant would classify this as an “indirect” duty to oneself, the fulfillment of which contributes to preserving the dignity of humanity in one’s person.

Phillip Stambovsky New Haven, CT

Alan Mittleman Responds:I thank Phillip Stambovsky for his comment on my review. I was not aware of the reminiscence of Col-lins that he cites. I find it rather shocking in light

of Kant’s mature and well-known opinion about lying. When I referred to Kant’s difficult view that lying is under all circumstances impermissible I had in mind his article “On the Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives.” Kant argues there for an extremely rigorous, exceptionless duty of truth tell-ing. He does not base his argument on another per-son’s right to the truth but rather on an uncondi-tional duty as an end in itself. (He does, somewhat inconsistently however, invoke the consequences of lying, however well intended or exigent under the circumstances. For him, the consequences are a weakening of what we would today call social trust. He foresees the destruction of the whole moral and judicial underpinning of society.) Kant suggests

another reason for the ban on lying, however. He says that while no one has a right to the truth—he thinks that is a meaningless claim—each of us has a “right to his own truthfulness (veracitas).” I took that to imply that we disfigure ourselves when we lie; being untrue to others means being untrue to ourselves. We diminish ourselves thereby. That seemed to me close to Rosen’s view that we would impair our own dignity by the malign treatment of a corpse, even if the cadaver’s “rights” (or the ca-daver) suffer no harm.

Proust’s Jewish Melodies

I was enriched by Adam Kirsch’s “Proust Between Halakha and Aggada” (Summer 2013). In the course of his essay, Kirsch quotes a particularly resonant passage of Swann’s Way: “[W]henever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home . . . my grandfather seldom failed to start humming the ‘O, God of our fathers’ from La Juive, or else ‘Israel, break thy chains,’ . . . I used to be afraid that my friend would recognise it.”

In trying to understand the world of 19th-century Jewry, a great deal is lost in not knowing how mu-sic expressed the interior being of both Jews faith-ful to tradition and those who wished to distance themselves from it. Halévy’s opera La Juive (The Jewess), for instance, was part of the standard reper-toire from its inception in the 1830s until the 1930s, when its subject matter became too uncomfortably relevant. When the central character, Eleazar, sings “O Dieu, Dieu de nos peres” (O, God of our fathers)

in the Seder scene, the text paraphrases “Shefoch chamatcha el ha-goyim” (Pour out Your wrath upon the nations . . . who have devoured Jacob,” from the haggadah), while seated next to his daughter is a Christian suitor pretending to be a Jew who later becomes justification for a horrible death sentence for his Jewish hosts.

For Jews who left the ghetto to enjoy the bour-geois world outside, opera was a place of fantasy realized. It gave voice to rebellion against oppres-sion. As it happens, in his classic “Culture and Edu-cation in the Diaspora,” reprinted in the same issue, Hayim Greenberg writes of the Jew who “cannot carry a part in that choir that gives voice, conscious-ly or not, to what I have called the Jewish melody.” That, I submit, is what the grandfather in Swann’s Way is trying to discover: a response to a melody not “drained of those powers that build a Jewish personality.”

Larry W. JosefovitzBeachwood, OH

Hayim Greenberg’s Legacy

Back in the late 1970s I spent a year and a half studying at Machon Greenberg, which was then located in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem (“Culture and Education in the Diaspora,” Summer, 2013). The school was as a training center for North and South Americans to learn about Jewish history and study Hebrew in order to become teachers either in Israel or in other countries. A fitting salute to the man, I think.

Andrew Tallisvia jewishreviewofbooks.com


Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover.

“What Jesus Wasn’t: Reza Aslan’s Zealot”

by Allan Nadler

Web Exclusive!

Read only at www.jewishreviewofbooks.com

Fall 2013 • JEWiSH REviEW of BooKS 5

FEaTuRES

Fathers & SonsBY YEHUDAH MIRSKY

On Wednesday, July 24, Israel’s new chief rabbis were chosen. It’s a curious process, held every ten years, in which a board of 150 electors composed of Orthodox

rabbis and lay people (mainly elected officials and functionaries), including a few (very few) women, horse-trade their way to the election of two men who are, at least in theory, the spiritual leaders of the na-tion. In practice, the office of chief rabbi has become the grand prize in a corrupt system of political spoils. Indeed, as his successor and that of his Sephardi col-league were being chosen, incumbent Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was already under house arrest on charges of bribery and corruption.

The competition this time was more bitter than it had been in years, and the scandals, unlikely allianc-es, and backroom deals made for great, if unedifying, political theater. When it was all over, the winners were both very familiar and fairly unknown: Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef is the son of former Chief Rabbi Ova-dia Yosef, a towering figure in Israeli religious life who held the office from 1973 until 1983 and, as founder and leader of the powerful Shas Party, has been the de facto Sephardi chief rabbi ever since; Rabbi David Lau is the son of former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a decidedly lesser but nonetheless distinguished fig-ure who held the office from 1993 until 2003. Both sons are men of some accomplishment, respected in their own political and religious circles, but neither one has been a key player in Israeli religious life, and, as I write, new revelations, allegations, and miscues (to which I shall return) are being reported about the younger Lau every day.

The biggest winners were the ultra-Orthodox haredim, who solidified their hold on an institution that, at least in the Ashkenazi case, they formally disdain even as they milk it for all it's worth as a source of patronage and a vehicle for religious coer-cion. The obvious losers were the Religious Zionists, who, of all Israelis, most deeply believe in the rab-binate—so much so that they tore themselves apart over it, losing the best chance they have had in de-cades to regain control of the institution.

And how did the Israeli public do, and for that matter, Judaism? The election was held, after all, precisely at a moment when questions of religion and state have returned to the center of Israeli pub-lic discourse, from the issue of haredi participation in the military to the rabbinate’s monopoly on mar-riage, divorce, and conversion to the question of how much ultra-Orthodox sensibilities should be accommodated with regard to women in the public sphere (or even public transportation).

So many candidates went up and down, came and went, that at times this summer it seemed

like anything could happen—until it finally be-came clear that nothing, or rather the same thing, is exactly what would, in fact, happen.

On the Sephardi side, after a few months of elec-toral machinations, it became clear that as far as the

Shas Party was concerned, the only question was which one of Rav Ovadia Yosef ’s sons would inherit the seat their father had vacated nearly thirty years ago. One after another, however, they fell out of the running. Yaacov, the eldest, who was the most po-litically right-wing and the most remote from his father, passed away earlier this year. David, a close friend of Aryeh Deri, the chairman and chief demi-urge of the Shas Party, blotted his copybook when,

a year and a half ago, he penned an anonymous letter to a leading member of the Knesset decrying borderline-illegal attempts by the Shas Party to seize control of the country’s rabbinical adminis-tration city by city. This was done not out of civic duty, but apparently in order to keep his brother Yitzhak from becoming chief rabbi of Jerusalem, a job he himself coveted. Avraham Yosef, rabbi of Holon, emerged as a candidate, until journalists brought to light his questionable use of his office to promote a kashrut supervision organization head-ed by his brother Moshe. It was only a few days before the election that the family turned, reluc-tantly, to Yitzhak, who, as editor of his father’s vo-luminous halakhic writings, actually has the schol-arly credentials that entitle him to claim the office. Against the last scion of the Yosef family who re-

mained in the ring, the other Sephardi candidates didn’t stand a chance.

One caused a stir, though. Shmuel Eliyahu, rabbi of Safed, son of another former Sephardi chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu (1983-1993) and, like his father, a hard-right nationalist, was the candidate of Reli-gious Zionism’s new Jewish Home Party (Bayit Ye-hudi), headed by Naftali Bennett. Eliyahu is a con-troversial figure. In 2005 he suggested that the ap-

propriate way to punish secular Israelis for the Gaza disengagement of 2005 was “to make their children religious… [and] drive them crazy.” More recently, he has said that Jewish landlords ought not rent to Arabs, leading the attorney general to consider invalidating his candidacy on the grounds that he had violated the country’s incitement laws. Eliyahu’s near disqualification was far from the most sur-prising thing about his candidacy: that would have been his being on the same Religious Zionist slate as the Ashkenazi David Stav, chairman of a moderate rabbinic organization called Tzohar (literally, skylight), whose platform was as conciliatory as Eliyahu’s was divisive.

This was actually just the beginning of the di-visiveness within the Religious Zionist camp. The “chardal” wing of the party, which combines fervent

So many candidates went up and down, came and went, that at times this summer it seemed like anything could happen—until it finally became clear that nothing, or rather the same thing, is exactly what would, in fact, happen.

Newly elected chief rabbis, David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef, with Rabbi Israel Meir Lau and Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo by Amos Ben Gershom, courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)


Zionism with something like the anti-modernist worldview of the haredim, put forward yet another son of a former chief rabbi. In this case, it was Yaa-kov Shapira, the son of former Chief Rabbi Avra-ham Shapira (1983-1993) and the head of Mercaz Ha-Rav, the flagship yeshiva of Religious Zionism founded in the 1920s by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook. On election day, Rabbis Shapira, Stav, and Eliyahu split the Religious Zionist vote and were trounced by their haredi rivals.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The chief rab-binate was established in 1921, in the early days

of the British Mandate. For the British, it was a continuation of the Ottomans’ practice of appoint-ing local clerics to keep religion friendly and man-ageable and to run things like marriage, divorce, and inheritance. For the Zionists, it would be yet another new institution of the nascent state. For Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi, whose spirit still hovers over today’s debates, it was to be a means of modernizing Jewish law and leading the spiritual revolution that would be the ultimate fruit of the Jews’ secular nationalist revival. Rav Kook was a deep but ethereal thinker and lacked the political smarts and administrative acumen to enliven the institution. But after his death in 1935, a number of distinguished successors put the chief rabbinate on its feet.

For decades, the rabbinate served as the religious arm of the state, supervising kashrut, marriage, and divorce, and running a system of rabbinical courts, parallel to the state judicial system, which ruled ac-cording to Jewish law. It worked alongside other arms of the state charged with maintaining religious identity and practice—the Ministry of Religion, the Interior Ministry, and the local religious coun-cils—through which state funds are distributed for synagogues, ritual baths, and the like. The haredim, who did not recognize the ultimate legitimacy of the state and regarded its rabbinate as a theological monstrosity, had parallel institutions of their own.

Yet, in recent decades a curious dynamic took hold. The rabbinate steadily passed into the hands of the haredim, who, while formally disdaining Zi-onism, came to relish the rabbinate’s opportunities for patronage, profits, and power. Meanwhile, the Religious Zionists focused their energies on the settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. By the mid-1990s it had become clear that the rabbinate had lost much of whatever touch it had ever had with the Israeli public.

In response, in 1995, a group of Religious Zion-ist rabbis created Tzohar. Their first major innovation was simply to insist upon meeting with and actually becoming acquainted with couples before marrying them (while refusing the customary bribes). In the ensuing years, Tzohar has continued to stake out the classic territory of Religious Zionism, promoting a moderate, modern traditionalism. They have urged the rabbinate to serve its constituency and represent the state rather than seeking to undermine it or sim-ply milk it. In response, the rabbinate effectively shut down the marriage program, which was deemed ideologically deviant (and bad for business).

Beyond weddings, Tzohar has run user-friendly prayer services and sponsored public education pro-grams. It has also urged openness to converts. In 2008, in a decision that still resonates, a State rabbinic court led by haredi Judge Rabbi Avraham Sherman

annulled thousands of conversions. They had been presided over by Religious Zionist rabbis as part of an effort to integrate Russian immigrants into Israeli society. (Israel’s High Court of Justice affirmed the validity of the conversions in 2012.) In the face of such socially destructive, halakhically infamous, and

deliberately provocative acts, Tzohar has continued to argue for moderate, piecemeal reform.

For decades the haredim have benefited from the fact that their singular priority—funding for

the network of institutions that enable their self-enclosed lifestyle—was so narrow that they could negotiate their way into almost any government coalition. The installation of Yona Metzger as Ash-kenazi chief rabbi in 2003 was a perfect expression of their cynicism and contempt for the institutions of the state: He was a rabbinic nonentity with ques-tionable ethics, but he was an entirely reliable cut-out. (Earlier in his career, Metzger had agreed to be disqualified from serving as a municipal rabbi in order to forestall disciplinary charges; when he was put up for chief rabbi, he argued that he’d never been disqualified from serving the whole country, which showed chutzpah even by Israeli standards.)

But after the Israeli general elections of 2013, the political covenant between Bayit Yehudi’s Naftali Bennett and the secular centrist Yair Lapid effec-tively excluded the haredi parties from power. It also put their young men in the sights of the army and their budgets on the chopping block. If they had lost the chief rabbinate too, it would have spelled big, big trouble. Luckily for them, the Religious Zionists were their own worst enemies.

Rabbi Stav and his colleagues in Tzohar see them-selves as continuing Rav Kook’s teachings on toler-ance and cooperation with secularists in their push for a more responsive and supple (if still firmly Ortho-dox) rabbinate. Stav and his cohort are by no means religious liberals, but they do understand the popular alienation from the rabbinate and seek to ameliorate it as best they can. But they are not the only ones who claim Kook’s mantle. Rabbi Zvi Tau, the éminence grise of the chardalim whose disdain for Stav goes back decades, has argued that while responsiveness and flexibility may be good for camp counselors or neighborhood rabbis, the chief rabbinate must hold the line against the encroachments of Western cul-ture. In Tau’s dark and unsubtle interpretation of Rav Kook’s acutely dialectical worldview, religionists can work with secular Zionists because the latter do not understand their own place in the unfolding messi-

anic drama. “Secularists,” Tau has said, “have no future. All of their future reality will ex-plode when the kingdom of Israel will arise.” Tau and oth-ers went to work, badmouth-ing Stav to anyone who would listen, above all Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his retinue in the Shas Party.

Rabbi Yosef, in turn, issued scathing attacks on Stav, at one point calling him “wicked.” This was the latest in a series of sad moments in the career of Rav Ovadia (as he is known), who is now ninety-two. Had he never entered politics he would have gone down in his-tory as a staggeringly erudite, intellectually nimble, and compassionate halakhist. His refusal to ascribe redemptive significance to the State of

Israel while at the same time declining to join his Ashkenazi haredi counterparts in condemning it as the devil’s handiwork also seemed to hold out the possibility of societal compromise. But this is not how things turned out.

In founding Shas, which is a Sephardi social movement and network of institutions as well as a po-litical party, Rav Ovadia may have become the most powerful rabbi in Jewish history. He has also become the leader of a party with a well-deserved reputation for corruption. The emblematic figure here is Aryeh Deri, who recently returned to politics after serving twenty-two months in prison on bribery charges a decade ago. When asked about Rav Ovadia’s descrip-tion of Stav, Deri helpfully explained that it wasn’t de-famatory, it was just that Stav’s actions fit the halakhic criteria of “wickedness.” He should know. Machiavel-lian though he may be, nobody ever said Deri was dumb. And on election day, he proved his skill.

Shas party election poster, 2009. (Photo by Amos Ben Gershom, courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)

Rabbi David Stav. (Courtesy of Tzohar.)


On the Ashkenazi side, the haredim were uni-fied behind Rabbi David Lau. He had been success-ful as the rabbi of the mixed secular-religious town of Modi’in; he had the blessing of Rabbi Aharon Ye-huda Leib Shteinman, a venerable rosh yeshiva (he is somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred and one years old) who, since the passing last year of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, has emerged as the

leader of the relatively moderate haredim (Lau also took care to solicit the blessing of even more hard-line haredi rabbinic figures such as Rav Chaim Kanievsky); and his father had been almost as reliable a proxy as Metzger while maintaining his dignity and the stature of the office.

As the election drew near, Prime Minister Ne-tanyahu had close associates make calls to electors conveying the PM’s wishes to them: elect Yosef and Lau. Netanyahu favors the pliant, reliable haredim (whom he’d be glad to see back in the government) and seems to despise his former aide Bennett for empowering Lapid and outflanking him on the right. When the votes were in, the two haredi can-didates had each received an identical number of votes, sixty-eight.

What happens next? The Religion Ministry re-mains a part of Naftali Bennett’s portfolio,

and how a right-wing Religious Zionist (who backed the reform-minded Stav) and the haredim will man-age to work together is anyone’s guess. Bennett and Tzipi Livni have together put forward new legislation that would restructure the rabbinate, with one chief rabbi instead of two, and separate the post of chief rabbi from chief rabbinical judge. This streamlining would probably eliminate some of the institution’s corruption, but the odds of its passing are slim.

Meanwhile, Rabbi David Lau has called, with a gingerly diffidence reminiscent of his father, for the integration of haredim into the army and the work force, while cautioning that “a coercive process is not the way.” But this was quickly overshadowed by a one-week trifecta of scandals following his election. First he was caught using the Israeli equivalent of the “N-word” while admonishing the young men of Modi’in to study Torah rather than watch basketball on television. Next, it was revealed that he had brought in illegal crib sheets the first time he tried to pass the State Rabbinic exam in 1993. (He was disqualified and passed the next year.) And then the real scandal hit.

The newspaper Ma’ariv has reported that in se-cret meetings with haredi decision-makers before the vote, Rabbi Lau agreed to submit all of his de-cisions regarding conversion to Rabbi Avraham Sherman, the same haredi rabbinic judge who had annulled thousands of conversions in 2008. Wheth-er Lau turns out to be more like his predecessor Metzger or more like his father, any hopes that he would be the one who could effectively institute at least some of the reforms proposed by Stav and Tzo-har are now dead.

Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef will likely try to maintain the status quo on most issues, while being willing to explore limited forms of haredi national service.

Both will continue to oppose liberal religion in Is-rael, as well as the introduction of civil marriage and divorce, though they may try to make the religious court system more humane when it comes to agu-not, wives whose husbands have abandoned them without giving them a get (halakhic divorce), which would allow them to remarry. Indeed, Rav Ovadia, in a reminder of his past glories, spoke movingly

about the plight of agunot at the first gathering cel-ebrating his son’s election.

Some are urging Rabbi Stav, Tzohar, and allied re-ligious bodies to create their own alternative institu-tions. Other rabbinic moderates have urged friendly cooperation with the new chief rabbis, though that may be less likely now that Lau’s secret deal on con-version has been revealed. In truth, it’s a hard call. Stav’s very public campaign, while electorally unsuc-cessful, may have succeeded in getting many Israelis to consider the possibility that the rabbinate could be something other than the ecclesiastical version of the DMV (or Tammany Hall). On the other hand, more people than ever before, including figures in the Religious Zionist camp, are publicly musing about whether the country needs a chief rabbinate at all. Some have suggested the tactic of letting things go from bad to worse until the system implodes. Yet, as much as one might want to abolish the rabbinate out-right—and then take a good shower—the institution still wields real power over people’s lives, and many of them, women and converts above all, are terribly vulnerable in the meantime.

Israeli society has only barely begun to have a se-rious conversation over what, if anything, the con-temporary rabbinate is for. The rich church-state discourse with which Americans are familiar has no analog here. Roger Williams’ classic theological ar-gument that the establishment of religion inevitably damages religion itself has, for all of Israel’s vaunted attachments to America, little purchase in Israel. And the American trade-off, by which religious in-tensity is lowered for the sake of civic peace, doesn’t sit well with Israeli intensities and primal identities. There is, as of yet, simply no civic language for argu-ing about the rabbinate, let alone a menu of policy options. What’s more, the country’s secular elites are still happy to consign the country’s religious life to the rabbinate, which conveniently excuses them from reckoning with the inescapably religious freight of Zionism.

Championed by one of the greatest Jewish think-ers of all times, the chief rabbinate began as a noble dream. In the end, Rav Kook and his intellectual heirs were tragically naïve about Judaism’s susceptibility to the corruptions of power. And that is a reality that only courage and a different kind of faith can undo.

Yehudah Mirsky, a former State Department official, is associate professor of the Practice of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. His new book, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), is forthcoming in early 2014.

Israeli society has only barely begun to have a serious conversation over what, if anything, the contemporary rabbinate is for.

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In my sophomore year of college, I took a class called The Jewish American Novel. I was hop-ing it would acquaint me with a culture I’d spent much of my youth trying to deny. I grew

up in a town in Illinois, where, on the playground, appearing exactly the same as everyone else was a matter of social survival. This was not Jesse Jackson’s Hymietown; this was the United States. We studied the greats in that class, Bellow and Roth, the red-brick Brooklyn of Delmore Schwartz, the Molochs of Allen Ginsberg. Most of the classic types were represented: the worriers and clowns, the big thinkers and survivors. But left out was the sort of Jew that mattered most to me, the Jew who’s trying to pass.

James Salter changed his name from Horow-itz for the same reason the Turks renamed Constantinople: He liked it better that way. His career, which began with spare war stories in the mid-1950s, has culminated, just now, with his magnum opus, All That Is, an autumnal novel that caps a stunning body of work. More than any other artist’s, Salter’s career, intention-ally or not, has perfectly described the situation of many American Jews, who feel at once free and not free, liberated from Judaism yet stub-bornly defined by it. Salter speaks to all those who intermarried and joined the club, donned white bucks and seersucker, who, lost in Sag Harbor and Hilton Head, have spent years try-ing to slip the shackles as Houdini, né Weiss, slipped his shackles before the multitudes. Be-tween Salter’s most elegant lines, I can still hear Horowitz scream. Neither Bellow nor Roth, it’s Salter—defined by what he’s left out—whose art depicts the Jew who has tried to dissolve the ancient in the American quotidian but still feels a pang of difference.

Life is contingent. In the summer of 1942, James Horowitz, having graduated from Horace Mann in Riverdale, where he was a third stringer on a high school football team that starred Jack Kerouac, was working “on a farm in Connecticut, sleeping on a bare mattress in the stifling attic,” as Salter wrote in his memoir, Burning the Days, killing time until the fall, when he was to enroll at Stanford. Then, a kid who’d been accepted to West Point failed the physical exam, and another kid failed the written exam, opening a spot for the second name on the waiting list: Horow-itz. He wanted to continue on to California, but his father, George, had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1918, and, fathers being fathers . . .

It’s instructive to look at Horowitz before he matriculated—“Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by po-

ems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point,” Salt-er wrote. “I would succeed there, it was hoped, as [my father] had”—as you would not be seeing that young man again.

He went in shaggy; he came out sheared. He went in dreamy; he came out steely, realistic, remorseless, and fascinated by machines. What do they do to a

plebe at the Academy? They line him up, shout him down, run him, humiliate him, punish and break him, burning away the eccentricities that make him unique. Horowitz resisted for a time, turning up, each Friday, for a synagogue service conducted by a local rabbi. Whereas church services were part of

the schedule, attending Friday night meant separat-ing yourself from the group, coming back alone, not wanting to explain. “After an hour of services, eter-nal and unconnected to the harsh life we were lead-ing, we marched back to barracks where everyone was studying or preparing for the next morning’s inspection,” Salter wrote much later. “I felt uncom-fortable about having been gone. Though no one ever said a word, I felt, in a way, untrue. In the end I dropped out and went to chapel with the Corps.”

In short, they broke him, then remade him in the image of the rest. The Jewish thing was driven in-side, where it remains in hiding, occasionally spill-ing out between the lines. “Of course, you cannot drop out—you may perhaps try—and I became part of neither one group nor the other, but it seemed to me that God was God, as the writings themselves

said, and what essentially distinguished me was an ingrained culture, ages deep, which in any case I wanted to put aside.”

This quote is interesting for what it says, but also for when: It was written many years after the fact, in a memoir published in 1997. Salter had obscured his background for much of his career. So here was a man in his 70s grappling, not with “all that is” but with all that had been put aside. Even so, you still hear the words—the truth of the biography—catch in his throat. He’s like an old le Carré spy who still can’t break cover even decades after the game ended.

Though it was years before he took the pen name, Horowitz became Salter at West Point. That’s where he assumed a new identity, a military cast of mind, learned to love neat hierarchies and the importance of rank. From his first publication, he’s been ob-sessed by physical trials, feats of endurance, heroic acts. Critics attribute it to the influence of Heming-way, but it really comes from the Academy: It’s the ideology that filled the vacuum when he switched from Friday night to Sunday morning, because “[t]he most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same.”

In 1944, Horowitz was sent to Pine Bluff, Arkan-sas for Army Air Corps flight training; he would eventually become a pilot in the Air Force, then in its golden age. By 1950, he was a flyboy out of Tom Wolfe, buzz cut in the cockpit, screaming over Europe. The military supplied him with material, history, and myth, a lore that predated him and would continue long after he was gone. Salter’s work is crowded with vainglory: immortal, imperishable, unconquerable.

Looking back, after a distinguished lifetime of avoidance, he wrote:

We were [stationed] not far from Dachau, the ash-pit. One of them. I had seen its flat ruins. That Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, had served as an officer in the German army in the First World War, I may not have known, but I was aware that patriotism and devotion had not saved him or others. They might not save me, though I swore to myself they would. I knew I was different, if nothing else marked by my name. I acted always from two necessities; the first was to be like everyone, and the second—was it foolish?—was to be better than other men. If I was to be despised I wanted it to be by inferiors.

In 1952, he volunteered for a fighter wing and was sent to Korea, which was then at war. For

several months, he operated at the tip of the spear, flying jets above the frozen 38th parallel, waste places and factories, the Yalu curving toward the Yellow Sea. It gave him a real-world credibility that would eventually make him an oddball in the lit-erary world, where no one does anything but go to parties, read, and write. He led squadrons, flew as a wingman, tumbling through the sky, chasing

James Salter in front of his F-86 Sabre jet fighter during the Korean War, 1952.

The HunterBY RICH COHEN

All That Is by James SalterKnopf, 304 pp., $26.95

He went in shaggy; he came out sheared.


the Russian MiGs that howled from the north. He made a study of “aces,” pilots in possession of the mysterious thing. But there still was a sliver of the old poem-saturated Horowitz, dreaming of the perfect phrase.

His first novel, The Hunters, was a story of Amer-ican pilots in Korea. He’d written it at night, in a notebook (stashed, one is tempted to say, beside his Judaism). Fly all day; report all night. The book ap-peared under the name James Salter in 1956. He later described the pseudonym as a necessary precaution. “It was essential not to be identified and jeopardize a career—I had heard the sarcastic references to ‘God Is My Copilot’ Scott. I wanted to be admired but not known.” He claimed he chose Salter because it “was as distant as possible from my own name.” But it seems no mistake that he chose an old Anglo-Saxon name, a Christian name first used to identify musi-cians who played the psaltery, a medieval harp. He’s always had a taste for pedigree. “A name is a destiny,” he wrote. “It is the first of all poems. Even after death it keeps its power; even half-buried in newsprint or dirt, something catches the eye.”

Salter suffered from a disease diagnosed by the early Zionists, for whom a Jewish nation—what if Horowitz had been flying a Mirage over Sinai instead of an F-86 over the Yalu?—was the cure. Simply put, Salter believed what they told him at West Point—about the world and about himself. He internalized it, then shaped himself around this conception. If he wanted to be a great pilot and a great American writer, he could not do it named Horowitz. It’s the same men-tality that turned Bernard Schwartz into Tony Curtis. And it’s the reason why, for many of us, the famous first line of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March—“I am an American, Chicago born . . . ”—is so liberating.

Perhaps surprisingly, this internal conflict does not weaken Salter as a writer but deepens and

complicates him. In this, he is akin to Isaac Babel, the great writer of the Russian revolution, a Jew who rode with the Cossacks in the war between the Reds and the Whites. It’s the telegraphic prose style as well as the dilemmas buried deep but still visible. Here’s another Jew riding through the goyishe countryside, dressed like a soldier. In one of Babel’s famous sto-ries, “My First Goose,” the narrator, a bespectacled intellectual, finally earns the respect of his comrades by slaughtering a destitute family’s goose.

I caught up with it and bent it down to the ground; the goose’s head cracked under my boot, cracked and overflowed. The white neck was spread out in the dung, and the wings began to move above the slaughtered bird . . . ‘The lad will do all right with us,’ one of [the Cossacks] said, referring to me, winking and scooping up some cabbage soup in his spoon.

For Salter, initiation came in the air, riding the wing of a laconic hotshot.

Never looking at me, absorbed by the instruments in front of him and by something in his thoughts, sometimes watching the world of dark forest that swept beneath us, hills and frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to belong. It was a baptism. This silent angel was to bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I

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would be made one with the rest . . . Afterwards he said not a word to me. The emissary does not stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling of being for a moment a true pilot—these things remained.

One should note the term baptism: a new name, a new faith. And you sit and eat the goose with the Cossacks.

Then there’s the point of view: For Babel, it was from horseback, an unusual position for a Jew. It’s about freedom and movement as much as perspec-tive. “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head,” writes Babel. “[A] gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads. The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into the evening coolness.” For Salter, writing only a few years later, it’s not horseback but the cockpit of a jet fighter at thirty thousand feet, a point of view once reserved for God: “We crossed Gibraltar, like a pebble far below, and then brown, hard Spain. We were go-ing home with new airplanes, the first of those that could routinely fly faster than the speed of sound.”

The Hunters was a hit. It sold and sold. It was purchased by Hollywood, where it was turned

into a film starring Robert Mitchum. Just like that, a new road opened before Salter. He had been career military, on the Pentagon path. He would forsake all that, go the Hemingway, which was Paris and publication parties and off-season resorts. He made the decision at thirty-two. No matter what else you might think of Salter, you have to acknowledge his bravery: To give up a career of rank and insignia for literature takes guts. He later wrote about wander-ing the Pentagon, in uniform, looking for someone who would accept his resignation. Then he went home and cried. When he told a friend what he had done, the friend said, “You idiot!”

In the mid-1960s, he began working on the book that would become his artistic breakthrough. It was like nothing he’d ever done: a chronicle of an affair, a young American and a French girl, their story narrated by a third-party voyeur. Everything is in retrospect, years later, a strange run of towns and restaurants, escapades in bed.

Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and began the descent to town . . . And then those great, lineal runs through neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making straight for the perfect square which marked the city like a signet.

His writing had matured, clipped and beautiful but also a threat. It gets in your head and comes out your mouth. The odd comma, the odd beat: “Sep-tember. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during Au-gust, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops.”

Salter is obsessed with light—it pours down, fills up, lingers. After light, darkness. After life, death. In this way, his books are about nothing and about everything. A Sport and a Pastime can be read al-legorically. It’s boy meets girl, but it’s also the writer

fantasizing about a world he can never truly pos-sess, not the Paris of hotel lobbies but the impen-etrable towns of bourgeois France. It’s a fever dream, a poem of unrequited love. Critics heard an echo of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller. Americans abroad, enraptured by foreign places. To me, it’s less Hemingway than Herzl—with his Christmas tree and fantasy of seamless assimilation. Salter is Herzl before Dreyfus, or whatever made him a Zi-onist, grasping at a mirage, always going but never arriving, always outside, humping through the exile. If you wear just the right coat, strike just the right pose, assume just the right name . . .

“They drive through the streets of an unknown town,” he writes in A Sport and a Pastime.

The rain pours down like gravel. In the green light of the instrument panel he feels as homeless, as desolate as a criminal. Gently she wipes his wet cheeks with her fingers. They have nowhere to go. They are strangers here, the doors of the town are closed to them. Suddenly he is filled with intimations of being found somehow, of being seized and taken away. He doesn’t even have a chance to talk to her. They are separated. They are lost to each other. He tries to cry out in this coalescing dream, to tell her where she should go, what she should do, but it’s too complicated. He cannot. She is gone.

The manuscript was rejected by his publisher. It was such a departure. And it was boring. And it was about nothing. And it was pornographic. It was then turned down by just about every other publishing house in New York, until it was finally put out by George Plimpton and The Paris Review. The ensuing trajectory of the novel describes the arc dreamed of by every author whose book has tanked: Three hun-dred copies sold the first year, three thousand sold the second, ten thousand the third, and so on. In 1995, it was republished by the Modern Library, a rare honor. It’s now rightly considered a classic.

Salter is often said to be a writer’s writer. He’s more like a writer’s writer’s writer, unread by the public. Yet

he goes on, page by page, a man with a message he knows will prevail in the end. He followed A Sport and A Pastime with Light Years, which many consider his great-est novel. He was living in New City, a suburb on the Hudson a few dozen miles above Manhattan. The novel tells the story of a seemingly perfect marriage as it comes apart. It’s about meals, cit-ies, people, habits, world-views, but its real subject is time, which does not exist and is also the only thing that matters. People age before your eyes, col-lapse like old houses, give up the ghost before they die. The book is a perfect example of the Salter aes-thetic: The taut sentences and icy scenes are orga-

nized to spotlight Salter’s brilliant prose and, perhaps also, to disguise Horowitz. I wouldn’t keep harping on this if he didn’t try so hard to disguise it. Of all the Jewish writers of his generation, Salter might be most influenced by his Jewishness.

Somewhere, in just about every Salter book, you’ll find a seemingly anti-Semitic passage. It’s not just what he says, but the way his narrators seem to regard Jews: less as individuals than as instances of a type. In Light Years, it comes at the beginning, when introducing a main character, who was based on a friend and neighbor of Salter:

He was a Jew, the most elegant Jew, the most romantic, a hint of weariness in his features, the

James Salter in Paris, October 1999. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.)

Original poster for The Hunters, a 1958 feature film adapted from the James Salter novel.


intelligent features everyone envied, his hair dry, his clothes oddly threadbare—that is it say, not overly cared for, a button missing, the edge of a cuff stained, his breath faintly bad like the breath of an uncle who is no longer well. He was small. He had soft hands, and no sense of money, almost none at all. He was an albino in that, a freak. A Jew without money is like a dog without teeth.

In the new novel, it comes near the end, when the protagonist finds himself among Jews:

As he sat there, Bowman was more and more conscious of not being one of them, of being an outsider. They were a people, they somehow recognized and understood one another, even as strangers. They carried it in their blood, a thing you could not know. They had written the Bible with all that had sprung from it, Christianity, the first saints, yet there was something about them that drew hatred and made them reviled, their ancient rituals perhaps, their knowledge of money, their respect for justice—they were always in need of it. The unimaginable killing in Europe had gone through them like a scythe—God abandoned them—but in America they were never harmed.

Why does Salter do it? It’s a question I’ve often considered—because I love his books, the best of which cast a spell that lasts for days. I’ve come up with three possible reasons. The first is that Salter always wanted to write his version of the great modern novel in the manner of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose

books were riddled with the kind, country club anti-Semitism that went out of fashion after World War II. In emulating the old models, he’s taken the bad with the good, the movable feast but also the preju-dice that gives the whole thing its neat tone of exclu-sion. It reminds me of a kid who copied a friend’s homework. In the middle of the page, without real-izing what he was doing, he wrote, “continued on the back.” But perhaps that lets him off too easy, because Salter really does seem to harbor a variety of the anti-Semitism that suffused the army’s officer corps before World War II. To be Jewish is to be venal, weak, and grasping, and he is the poet of a certain kind of glori-ous American masculinity. Or maybe it’s just a diver-sion, meant to demonstrate that he’s not really Jewish. I mean, what Jew would write, “A Jew without money is like a dog without teeth.”

Whatever its source, such artifice and obfusca-tion can make Salter’s work, at its weakest, seem phony, a fancied depiction of a world that exists only in the minds of a small community of East Coast WASPs. In this mode, Salter most resembles Ralph Lauren, another name-changing Jew who internal-ized the lie and the fantasy. Like Lauren, né Lif-shitz, Salter has drawn on an invented past to place himself at the center of an impenetrable world that is impenetrable only because it doesn’t exist. It’s a snipe hunt. It’s a joke. A guy told a guy who told a guy, and there you are, holding a burlap sack open in the forest and cooing like a dove. The result, in Salter’s case, is an art that is sometimes false. No one laughs in his books; no one wrestles, curses, or sweats. It’s a picture window in New Canaan where everything is just a little too perfect.

Salter’s new novel, All That Is, published when he was eighty-seven, is a masterpiece, a singular

work that restates his entire oeuvre. He’s been work-ing on it forever—his first novel in thirty years. The book is about what it feels like to be alive, captured through the life of Philip Bowman, a New York book editor whose story takes us from World War II to the day before yesterday. It’s beautiful and ter-rifying: beautiful because Salter can write like the wind, terrifying because it’s a life without rules or a code, where the only deities are human, the only immortality by daring act. God is gone, his place taken by roads a moment before sundown, love af-fairs, betrayals, hotels, beach grass, and houses by the sea (there are no oceans in Salter; just seas).

At Salter’s age, one expects an artist to reconcile his written and his actual self. With All That Is, it’s clear this will not happen. Salter will never make room in his work for Horowitz. It is, in fact, the distance be-tween that gives his work its candied, marzipan power. His novels capture the slipperiness of the world, where there’s no telling where reality ends and artifice begins. It’s the sensation you have when you see a beautiful girl vanish down a mysterious street in a foreign coun-ty, where the trolley cars clatter and the muezzins call the faithful as the bulls race between the high walls— a sensation that lasts right up to the moment when you actually chase down and talk to that girl.

Rich Cohen is the author of several books, including Tough Jews and The Fish That Ate the Whale. His newest, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, will be published in October.

“Kohav's book is a highly original and widely erudite derivation of a numinous-mystical core, based on inferred early initiation and esoteric practices, as the experiential and esoteric source of the early Judaism of the Pentateuch. [Applying] his extensive knowledge of critical-interpretive methodologies, Kohav… demonstrate[s] the plausibility of this numinous-mystical core in early Judaism, where it has been generally assumed to be absent.” - Harry T. Hunt, Brock University (Emeritus), author of On the Nature of Consciousness (Yale, 1995) and Lives in Spirit (SUNY, 2003)

“I am unaware of scholars who actually deal with the question of esoteric knowledge and secret interpretations of biblical texts during Iron Age II, ca. 920-586 BCE…. Biblicists of my ken assume that even though not everybody knew everything, knowledge was open.…Kohav is aware that scholars are unaware that a problem exists, that something interesting exists in the [Pentateuchal] text that has not yet been queried.…Everything…has been filtered and fined through his sophisticated approach. Kohav reads, synthesizes, and develops complicated arguments logically to a conclusion, drawing together data and ideas from disparate sources and disciplines….In the end, Kohav owns all of his arguments.” - Ziony Zevit, American Jewish University, author of The Religions of Ancient Israel (Continuum, 2001) and What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (Yale, 2013)

"What a ride! This document is, in and of itself, a phenomenon. Besides being a scholarly dissertation, it becomes, in a way, a manifestation of the Sôd. And the author...based on his view of the teachings of the Sôd, evaluates the course of Jewish spirituality and, for that matter, human spirituality, in a way that resonates with the Perennial Philosophy view that every genuine Tradition has its origin in an authentic encounter with Divinity....The [book] as written is brilliant....[Kohav] writes with immense energy, and great theoretical sophistication....His claims are vast and sweeping, and…could truly revolutionize the understanding of the history of Jewish -- and not only Jewish -- mysticism, spirituality, and theology." - Sheldon ("Shaya") Isenberg, University of Florida (Emeritus)

The Sôd Hypothesis establishes a

heretofore-nonexistent research area:

Pentateuchal mysticism and ancient

Israelite initiation tradition. The study

posits that the First Temple priests crafted

a "disaster-proof" transmission of their

initiatory lore to future generations. The J

and E strands are now seen as constituting

priestly esoteric matter par excellence,

while the traditional priestly sections, in

contrast, as exoteric.


REviEwS

Jake in the BoxBY CURT LEVIANT

Don’t be fooled by the number of pages in Yair Zakovitch’s slim volume. Zakovitch begins with the struggle of Jacob and Esau in the womb and follows the bibli-

cal account of Jacob’s fascinating life until, as his life ebbs, he speaks to all of his sons. His book packs a punch like a jack-in-the-box.

In Jacob we get more than a close reading of the biblical text. Zakovitch shows us Jacob in midrash, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha; he brings in the Septuagint, the famous Greek translation of the Bible, as well as the Samaritan and the Syriac Bibles, Qumran texts, and parallels even further afield. All of these shed light on the biblical nar-rative, especially when it is elusive, ambiguous, or silent, demonstrating that there were differing strands, nuances, and even details within the same basic story.

A fine example of Zakovitch’s method is his anal-ysis of one famous verse in Genesis. Rachel, Jacob’s favorite wife, has died giving birth to Benjamin. After Jacob names the boy and buries his wife, his son Reuben, son of Leah, “went and lay with Bilhah, his father’s concubine” (Gen. 35:22). Zakovitch sug-gests that Reuben intends to defile her so that Jacob will stop sleeping with her, and Leah’s honor will not be offended a second time. He quotes a striking mi-drash from Genesis Rabba:

When Rachel died, our father Jacob took Bilhah’s bed and placed it near his bed. [Reuben] said: Is it not enough that my mother was jealous of her sister during her lifetime, but even after her death?

More surprisingly, he also reminds us of a paral-lel in The Iliad. Phoenix, obeying his mother’s wish-es, takes his father Amyntor’s concubine, “so that the old man might be hateful in her eyes.”

There is more. In the very same verse describ-ing Reuben’s act, we see the words: “Israel (i.e., Ja-cob) found out.” At this point in the Masoretic text, Zakovitch notes, come a few empty spaces. But there is even more. Under the word “Israel” is an etnakhta, a sign showing the midpoint of a verse; let’s call it a semicolon. Then, after a few spaces comes the letter peh, a Masoretic indicator that—in mid-verse!—a new parsha (chapter or segment) is beginning. The verse continues with an apparent non sequitur: “Now the sons of Jacob were twelve in number.” Zakovitch is rightly puzzled by this strange pattern. Is it evidence, he asks, that Jacob’s response has been erased? He then looks to the Septuagint, where the verse continues, “and it was

evil to him”; while in the apocryphal Book of Jubi-lees (ca. 120 B.C.E.) we read: “and Jacob was very angry with Reuben.” In quoting these extra ancient readings, the author makes the empty spaces in the Torah text speak.

Discovering parallels within the biblical text is another of Zakovitch’s strengths. When Jacob has to labor another seven years for Rachel (in addition to

the seven he has just completed), the years passed as if they were “a few days because of his love for her” (Gen. 29:20). With a keen eye, Zakovitch reminds us that earlier, when Rebecca had sent her son away to Laban to avoid Esau’s wrath, it was also for “a few days” (Gen. 27:44). And, of course, in both instanc-es the days stretch into years.

Zakovitch sees similarity in the parting of Abra-ham and Lot, each going his own way (Gen. 13:5-12), and the peaceful parting of Jacob and Esau (Gen. 36:6-8); both deeds were done to avoid fa-milial strife. The author also likes the echo of the

phrase b’not ha’aretz, literally “the girls of the land,” or, more colloquially, “the local girls.” Rebecca uses these words, fearing that Jacob might marry one of “the local girls” (Gen. 27:46), and later, the text tells of Dinah going out to see “the local girls” (Genesis 34:1), which proves to be her undoing.

The garment trick is another fine parallel spotted by Zakovitch, which he calls a “measure for measure

punishment.” Jacob fooled his fathe r by wearing his brother’s clothes to get the blessing (Gen. 27:15-16); later his sons fool him with Joseph’s ripped, blood-stained garment (Gen. 37:32).

When Rebecca was pregnant with twins she went to consult God about the tumult with-

in her, and was given an ambiguous blessing (Gen. 25:23), ve-rav ya’avod tzair. Zakovitch’s transla-tion, “Older younger shall serve,” is ingenious, for it reflects the either-or aspect of the Hebrew. The author’s unique and absolutely correct grammati-

cal rendering can mean that the younger will serve the older; and it can mean precisely the opposite.

Jacob’s enterprising spirit be-gan in the womb when he strug-gled to exit first, before Esau, in order to secure the rights of the first born, and reached its high point when as a young man he used tactical advantage—a very hungry Esau dying for a meal—to “buy” the rights of the first born. Whether intentionally or not, Za-kovitch shows that Jacob was not only the “unexpected patriarch,” but also a sad, morally ambiguous, and finally tragic figure, despite his being blessed by God.

Zakovitch reminds us that Ja-cob didn’t pack when he ran away from home. At Bethel, he needed a stone for a pillow. That night, God promises him plenty (Gen. 28:14-15), which makes Jacob happy. Jacob, the clever entrepreneur (re-call how he managed to enlarge his flock through an ancient form of selective breeding), is the only one of the patriarchs who puts condi-tions on his acceptance of God. “If God remains with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house,” (Gen. 28:20) Jacob vows, then the

Jacob was not only the “unexpected patriarch.” He is, finally, a tragic figure.

Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch by yair Zakovitch, translated by valerie Zakovitchyale university Press, 216 pp., $25

“Jacob and Rachel at the Well,” ca. late 1890s by James Jacques Joseph Tissot. (© The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY.)


Lord will be his God. Curiously, the bargain-cum-vow is made after God has already promised him much of what he is requesting.

In a phrase the early rabbinic tradition seized upon, the Torah calls Jacob a tent dweller (Gen. 25:27), which they took to mean a quiet schol-ar. But the biblical Jacob is by no means a tent- dwelling, bookish, weakling shepherd—a man op-posite to the strong hunter Esau. A shepherd spends his time outdoors fending off the very beasts that Esau no doubt encountered as a hunter. Shepherds were no tent-dwelling sissies. When Jacob meets Rachel by the well, a huge stone is blocking it, which he removes single-handedly. In that same verse in which Jacob is called a “tent dweller,” he is described as tam, which can mean, “simple,” “pure,” “inno-cent,” “naïve,” or all of them at once. The juxtaposition between that mild word—in fact, the new JPS translation uses “mild” for tam—and, just a few verses later, Jacob’s fool-ing Esau out of the birthright is a deliberate bit of biblical irony. The Jacob of the Bible, like some other ancient heroes, seems to have been both strong and devious.

In rabbinic literature, the strong and sturdy, evil hunter Esau is nonetheless con-trasted to the good, studious, tent-dweller Jacob. This tradition, which persists to this day, also makes Jacob a scholarly type, im-mersed in Torah study. Some two thousand years ago the sages re-created Jacob to fit their ideal of a Jew, having him study in the famous yeshiva of Shem and Ever (which, not surprisingly, is not mentioned anywhere in the Torah, for such an institution did not exist then). Alas, for study one needs texts, and for texts one must be literate. Alas, again, there is little reason to believe that Ja-cob, or his father, Isaac, or his grandfather, Abraham, were literate. Indeed, when Jacob and Laban make a peace pact (Gen. 31:45-49), they do not sign anything; rather, they erect a pile of stones that marks their cove-nant. (The verb khaf-tav-vet, write, does not appear until Exodus.)

When Jacob stands before Pharaoh near the end of the book of Genesis

and says, “few and bad (me’at ve-ra’im) have been the days of my life” (Gen. 47:9), he is not exaggerating. “Awful” might be a better translation. Speaking to Joseph’s royal em-ployer, Jacob states crisply what his unhap-py life has been all about. And then Jacob blesses Pharaoh.

Despite all of God’s blessings and all the promises for the future about being a great nation, Jacob’s personal happiness has been almost nil. He stole Esau’s blessing, fled his homeland, and served Laban for twenty years. In mid-life, he lost his beloved wife Rachel in childbirth; he was cuckolded by his own son; his daughter Dinah was raped; and his two sons, Simeon and Levi, dis-graced him by murdering the inhabitants of an entire town in revenge. Meanwhile, he mourned the apparent loss of his favorite son Joseph for years. And, perhaps, beneath it all was his guilt at tricking Esau out of his birth-right in exchange for a bowl of lentil broth.

Somehow, for the “unexpected patriarch,” the rosy future promised to him and the bleak and tragic present go hand in hand. In fact it is immediately af-ter God promises that “the land I assigned to Abra-

ham and Isaac I assign to you,” that Rachel dies in childbirth (Gen. 35:12-20).

Let’s conclude with Jacob’s “blessing” his sons before he dies. Look carefully at the twenty-seven verses in Chapter 49 that comprise this speech and

see if it can realistically be called “Birkat Ya’akov” (Jacob’s Blessing), as we persist in calling it. In fact, Jacob himself doesn’t call it a “blessing.” Rather, he proclaims to his sons, calling each one by name, that

he will tell them what will happen to them at “the end of days,” the only time this apocalyptic phrase is uttered in Genesis. He starts by severely castigat-ing Reuben for the Bilhah affair. Then he turns to Simeon and Levi, the murderers of Shechem, to curse them. “Jacob is so enraged at them,” Zakov-itch says, “that he avoids addressing them directly and speaks in the third person.” Blessing, indeed! (I would argue that a close reading of Genesis shows indirect address is Jacob’s usual manner of speaking, but it does not spoil Zakovitch’s point.)

With such a beginning, the other nine sons must have wondered what would follow, but it does get a little better. Nonetheless, it is only with Joseph, the eleventh of the twelve sons, that the root for bless-ing “bet-resh-khaf” appears, and in plenitude—six times. And then, in Genesis 49:28, as if to compen-sate for the no-blessing, the Bible goes on to blandly declare that Jacob blessed his sons. Five of them are compared to animals: Judah, a lion’s whelp and lion; Issachar, a strong-boned ass; Dan, a serpent and vi-per; Naphtali, a hind; Benjamin, a devouring wolf. Others Jacob merely describes: Dan will be a judge; Gad, a warrior; Joseph, a fruitful vine.

Jacob shows no hint of affection to his grown sons, but his attitude to Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph’s sons by his Egyptian wife, is far different. “Bring them to me,” he tells Joseph simply, “and I will bless them.” He then kisses and embraces them in an act that has been repeated for centuries, as Jew-ish fathers recite these verses in blessing their chil-dren on Friday nights. But just as Jacob’s remarks to his twelve sons were no blessing to most of them, so Jacob’s blessing of his two grandsons is no blessing either. Both Ephraim and Manasseh were of the lost tribes. Which father would really want his children to be like Ephraim and Manasseh?

Poor Jacob! With the exception of Judah, neither his blessings nor his curses were efficacious. The de-scendants of Joseph, Ephraim, and Manasseh disap-peared. And Levi, the cursed son, whom Jacob had tried to punish by not allotting him any portion in the land and predicting that he would be “dispersed in Israel,” became the progenitor of Moses, Aaron, and the priestly class: kohanim and leviyim, who are still active and honored in synagogues even today.

Zakovitch’s accomplishment in this challeng-ing and incisive book is to force us to re-read the Jacob stories afresh, to follow up on his observa-tions and suggestions, and to inspire us to make new discoveries of our own. Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch has also been so felicitously translated by Valerie Zakovitch that it reads as though it was composed in English.

Curt Leviant is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels. His most recent book is the short story collection Zix Zexy Ztories (Texas Tech University Press).

Despite all of God’s blessings and all the promises for the future about being a great nation, Jacob’s personal happiness has been almost nil.

“Jacob’s Vision and God’s Promise,” from a Bible card, 1906. (Courtesy of the Providence Lithograph Company.)

“Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Rembrandt, ca. 1659.


On July 4, 1776, the Continental Con-gress assigned Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson the task of designing the Great Seal for the

United States of America. Adams turned to Greek mythology; Franklin and Jefferson turned to the Hebrew Bible. Franklin’s design had Moses “stand-ing on the Shore, extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds, reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.” Jefferson chose the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Franklin wanted the national motto to be “Rebellion to Ty-rants is Obedience to God.” While that motto was not ultimately chosen, Jefferson admired the phrase so much he decided to put it on his personal seal.

That the Exodus was the first choice of these two great figures of the American Enlightenment to symbolize the new nation testifies to the influence of Hebraic motifs in early America. But there is much more, as Eran Shalev shows in American Zion, and it is not just a matter of imagery. For some years, scholars involved in Hebraic political studies have sought to demonstrate the influence that biblical and even talmudic notions of limited government and separation of powers exerted on early modern Protestant political thought in Europe. Now Shalev is making similar claims about the influence of the Hebrew Bible in America.

To read Shalev’s book is to be transported to “a lost intellectual world” in which Americans saw themselves re-enacting the biblical drama of the ancient Israelites. The early Puritan “immigrants and succeeding generations interpreted the Great Migration of the 1630s as a crossing of the Red Sea and an escape from the British Egypt.” They were the new chosen people, elected by God for a divine mission in the wilderness of the new world. Shalev shows how Americans’ self-understanding as the elect living out God’s divine plan reverberated with these ideas long after the Puritans and the Revolu-tion, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a style of writing arose that Shalev calls pseudo-biblicism. In 1793, for instance, Richard Snowden wrote a two-volume history entitled The American Revo-lution: Written in the Style of Ancient History. Composed in an English archaic even for the late

18th century, it is littered with constructions such as “spake” and “thou.” America was called “the Land of Columbia” and the town of Concord “Concordia.” In other such newspaper articles and pamphlets,

authors began sentences with the King James-esque “And it came to pass . . . ” and described the Unit-ed States as stretching from “Dan even unto Beer-sheba.” Americans not only read the Hebrew Bible, some wrote American history in biblical style.

It is, of course, one thing to see the United States as re-enacting the Hebrew narrative of Exodus,

chosenness, and covenant in a metaphorical sense. It is quite another to believe it as a matter of fact. Shalev shows how belief mingled with pseudo- science to produce the theory that the Indians were the biological descendants of the Hebrews. Not content with seeing themselves as the metaphori-cal descendants of the ancient Israelites, some 19th-century Americans were convinced that the

“actual Israelites, or their biological descendants, [were] walking in their midst.” On this account the Amerindians were descendants of one of the Lost Ten Tribes, which were the progeny of the north-ern Israelite state that Assyria conquered and then dispersed in 722 B.C.E.

Though reviled by Jefferson and other sober

thinkers, the Hebrew-Indian thesis proved remark-ably resilient, surviving well into the 19th century. There is, of course, something bizarre about the idea, given that Americans were supposed to be the

chosen people and the Indians those who stood in the way of advancing “civilization.” Nonetheless, the idea exerted a strange cultural fascination. In-deed, the most successful religious movement of the 19th century, Mormonism, incorporated elements of pseudo-biblicism and the Hebrew-Indian thesis. Shalev even suggests that “[t]he Book of Mormon should thus be seen in the context of contempo-rary texts written in biblical idiom which presented themselves as ancient, often Hebraic, in origin, mys-teriously recovered, and translated from an exotic language for presentation before an American audi-ence.” Placing Mormonism within the genus of He-braic influence is thought-provoking, but one won-ders whether an apple that has fallen so far from the tree is really of the same species.

In addition to envisioning themselves as re- enacting Hebraic narratives, Americans also looked to the Hebrew Bible for political teachings. Pastors such as Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard,

and Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, gave sermons in which they culled political lessons from bib-

lical stories. During the Revolution, the story of Gideon resonated strongly with the anti-monarchical rebels, who identified with the man of military prowess who saved the Israelites from their enemies on the bat-tlefield, but refused to be their king. The colonists also enlisted the story of Esther and Haman to condemn the corruption of the British monarchy. Haman, the model

of a corrupt advisor to a gullible monarch, “did not attempt to attack the polity from

the outside with military power. Instead he manipulated and duped a monarch to subvert

the empire from within.” Esther’s conduct taught that ambition corrupts and that power needs to be checked. That such references were readily under-stood is testament to the widespread biblical literacy of early America.

Apart from noting the frequent appropriation of biblical narratives, Shalev provides an account of the repeated efforts on the part of Americans, from the time of the Revolution onward, to “fully elaborate on the republican nature of the ancient Hebrew form of government and its correlations to its American counterpart.” In 1784, for instance, a Connecticut preacher named Joseph Huntington described the United States governed by the rather

Hebraic AmericaBY MATTHEW HOLBREICH

American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil Warby Eran Shalev yale university Press, 256 pp., $40 In newspaper articles and pamphlets, authors

described the United States as stretching from “Dan even unto Beersheba.”

Interpretation of the first committee’s seal proposal, Benson Lossing, 1856.


loose Articles of Confederation as living under “the best civil constitution now in the world, the same in the general nature of it, with that he gave to Is-rael in the days of Moses.” Sixty-nine years later, in his monumental Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews, Enoch Wines, a Congregationalist minister from New Jersey, drew a similar compari-son between ancient Israel and America under the Constitution. The Israelite “states,” he wrote, pos-sessed power that “was sovereign within the limits of their reserved rights. Still, there was both a real and a vigorous government.” Just as in the United States, “the Hebrew tribes were, in some respects, indepen-dent sovereignties, while, in other respects, their in-dividual sovereignty was merged in the broader and

higher sovereignty of the commonwealth of Israel.” In the eyes of Huntington and Wines, republican-ism, separation of powers, and federalism were both American and Hebraic.

It is hard to pick the right word for the work the Hebrew Bible did in the United States. Is it in-

fluence or reflection, appropriation or inspiration? There is no doubt that the Bible was central to Puritan culture and that ideas of exodus and cov-enant and chosenness reverberated down through the American generations. But it is harder to assess the magnitude of that influence when one moves from the 17th to the 18th and 19th centuries. Per-haps we ought to distinguish between strong and weak versions of the thesis. In the strong version, the Hebrew Bible played a decisive role in shaping American culture and political thought. Accord-ing to the weaker thesis, Hebraic narratives were used as metaphors and tropes to explain, and rec-oncile people to, what was in reality a new order for the ages.

One can argue both sides. But Shalev does little to address the preponderance of evidence that runs counter to the formative influence of Hebraic ideas.

Most of the dramatis personae Shalev brings on stage did not play central roles in the American dra-ma. It is hard to tell the story of American political culture without longer discussions than he provides of the great figures of the founding era, including, for instance, George Washington, Alexander Ham-ilton, George Mason, and James Madison. These architects of the American Constitution—including Franklin and Jefferson, their ideas for the Great Seal notwithstanding—are almost completely absent from Shalev’s book.

The case of James Madison is particularly in-structive. He stayed at Princeton in order to deep-en his study of Hebrew, but in his pre-Convention personal writings the Hebrew Bible rarely surfaces.

In his notes entitled “Of Ancient and Modern Con-federacies,” written in 1787, for example, he looks to the confederacies of the Greeks, the Romans, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Germans; he cites Montesquieu, Polybius in Latin, and the historian Malby. There is nothing about the Hebrew Repub-lic or from the Hebrew Bible. With regard to the defining features of the American government—separation of powers, checks and balances, a sin-gular elected executive, republican government with the majority of office holders elected by a (relatively) large suffrage, vesting the vast majority of powers in a bicameral legislature—it is hard to say that any of this is really taken from the Hebrew Bible.

There might be some affinities, a few points in the 17th century when a few wires were crossed here and there that produced an evanescent spark. But when one turns from Samuel Langdon to James Madison, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the political institutions of Jerusalem did not exert a decisive influence on the political institutions that came out of Philadelphia.

While the magnitude of the influence of the He-brew Bible is hard to gauge, there is no doubt that it

waxed from the Puritans to the Second Great Awak-ening and waned in the years leading up to the Civil War. Shalev attributes this to a change in American culture: Hebraic themes were better suited for in-stitutional design and grand cultural and political narratives, while the New Testament was a better fit for the individualistic democracy of the mid-19th century, heavily populated by new adherents of evangelical creeds focused on their own personal salvation.

The Hebrew Bible also lost ground because it ap-peared to many Americans to sanction slavery. Pro-slavery apologists made use of it to show that slavery was permitted. They famously cited the curse that Noah laid on the progeny of Ham, whom they sup-posed to be the progenitor of black Africans. They noted that Mosaic Law permitted the enslavement of “heathens” and cited other passages from Gen-esis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy to support slavery. While abolitionists retorted by distinguishing bib-lical servitude from the quite different race-based chattel slavery in the United States, they could not prevent the Hebrew Bible from being tarnished and eclipsed by the New Testament (despite its own fail-ure to condemn slavery explicitly). During the Civil War itself, the Hebrew Bible enjoyed something of a resurgence, only to wane again afterward.

Surprisingly, Shalev presents no substantial analysis of the greatest political Hebraist of Ameri-can history, Abraham Lincoln. It is hard to judge the true influence of Hebraic ideas in America without giving him his due. Indeed, Lincoln’s likeness is lit-erally enshrined in his memorial between the Get-tysburg Address and his second inaugural address, each containing Hebraic ideas.

On the whole, Shalev’s work provides little sup-port for those who would like to believe that the way of life, moral lessons, and political institutions of the Hebrew Bible overlap with liberal, capitalistic, republican America. But American Zion will also be unwelcome to those who think that America is a secular country entirely built on secular ideals. There is no doubt that the Hebrew Bible was an important piece of the American cultural mosaic. But if it shaped American culture, Americans also shaped it to fit their particular needs: It supported the British monarchy in the French and Indian War, and it was then against the British tyranny and for republican liberty during the Revolution. It first supported the Articles and a loose confederation, but was then also the new national power under the Constitution. Americans employed it both for slav-ery and against it.

Perhaps the soundest American use of the Bible is to reinforce the idea that we Americans are not the chosen people, but, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the almost chosen people. He thought that the Bible’s moral vision stood above our best efforts, beckoning us to improve, to reach upwards toward our better selves. We are in an American covenant that we have yet to achieve and that we must continually strive to achieve. In wanting God to be behind us, we are li-able to forget that He is above us. That was the view of America’s greatest biblical republican.

Matthew Holbreich is a resident scholar at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University and a Jacobson Scholar at New York University School of Law.

Gideon and his army enter the Midianites’ camp, depicted by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860. (© CCI/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.)


Karl Marx, Bourgeois RevolutionaryBY ABIGAIL GREEN

How should we read the life of a man whose colossal impact on the modern world only became apparent decades—or even more than a century—after his

death? This problem lies at the heart of Jonathan Sperber’s magisterial new biography of Karl Marx, a book that brings the world of the 19th-century revolu-tionary brilliantly to life but, for the most part, avoids tackling the more contentious problem of his legacy. Indeed, Sperber explicitly sets out to write a post- ideological biography of a man who, in retrospect, became the founding figure of communism but nev-er quite made it in his own era, either as an economic and political thinker or as a revolutionary leader.

For, as Sperber reminds us, despite producing occasional pamphlets of genius, Marx never got be-yond Volume 1 of Capital in his lifetime and was disappointed by its subdued public reception. The bulk of his literary output consisted of journalistic articles for papers such as the New York Tribune. Too often, Marx’s energies were diverted into well-publicized scraps with fellow exiles and revolution-aries or the exposition of firmly held but frankly ec-centric views—most obviously his contention that Lord Palmerston, the great figurehead of patriotic liberalism in mid-Victorian Britain, had for decades been a Russian secret agent.

The revolutions of 1848-1849 were the pivotal moment in Marx’s political life, defining his view of the world and the decades of penny-pinching exile that followed. Yet his activity in these years placed him firmly in the second rank. His posthu-mous reputation may tower over figures such as the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth or the Italians Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. But Marx never led a revolutionary regime or a successful uprising. Unlike these great 19th-century figureheads of insur-rection, he had no prospects on the radical Anglo-American lecture circuit, not least because he was a truly uninspiring public speaker. Even the Interna-tional Working Men’s Association, in which Marx was a prime mover, proved a short-lived failure, in stark contrast with its more famous successor, the Second International. What then is the relationship between this life of frustration and unrealized po-tential and Marx’s subsequent impact? If Sperber is to believed, perhaps not all that much.

The central premise of this biography is that Marx is no longer—and never was—our contem-porary. He was, instead, “a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philoso-phy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it.” This

emphasis on Marx as a quintessentially early 19th-century figure strikes me as particularly original. Later generations of activists looked to Marx as the prophet of communist revolution, but Sperber ar-gues that neither his political activity nor the over-

whelming majority of the writings published dur-ing his lifetime bear out this interpretation. Sper-ber’s Marx is irredeemably bourgeois: bourgeois in his origins and cultural formation, bourgeois in his lifestyle and aspirations, and surprisingly bour-geois in his approach to revolution.

As we all know, Marx was born Jewish. Baptized in early childhood, the ways in which his Jew-

ishness shaped him remain difficult to grasp. Pos-terity has emphasized Marx’s Jewish origins—and criticized the “self-hating” quality of his 1844 es-say On the Jewish Question, in which he identified capitalism with the Jews in derogatory fashion, ar-guing that “[t]he emancipation from haggling and from money, thus from the practical, real Jewry would be the self-emancipation of our time.” As Sperber notes, this identification of capitalism and moneymaking with Jews and Jewish practices finds echoes in the work of his friend, the pre-eminent forerunner of Zionism Moses Hess, and in the at-titudes of his contemporary Heinrich Heine, who only converted in early adulthood and whose con-tact with Jewish culture was consequently far more meaningful. Indeed, Sperber is at pains to empha-

size Marx’s self-identification as a German, aware of his Jewish origins and ambivalent toward them, but predominately shaped by his socialization from early childhood into a very different cultural world. Fifteen years before Darwin heralded the rise of ra-

cial thinking and the modern preoccupation with ethnicity, Jewishness remained primarily a reli-gious affiliation, and conversion was more than a piece of paper for children like Marx, whose educa-tion set them on a different cultural trajectory from such an early age.

Born as he was into the newly Prussian Rhine-land in the aftermath of French occupation, religion nonetheless defined Marx’s intellectual formation and place in society, but, Sperber argues, that reli-gion was Protestant Christianity. The Rhineland was predominately Catholic, but Marx’s father Heinrich, an aspiring lawyer, chose to embrace not the Catholi-cism of the majority but the Protestant religion that defined the ethos of the Prussian state. This enlight-ened, rationalist version of Protestantism also in-fused the work of thinkers like the philosopher Georg Hegel and the theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, both of whom were key intellectual influences for Karl and the Young Hegelian circles in which he moved as a student. As Arnold Ruge, lecturer at the University of Halle and organizational mastermind of the Young Hegelians, put it, “Prussia is the Protestant state and its principle is light and scholarship.”

These influences continued to define key facets

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Lifeby Jonathan SperberLiveright, 672 pp., $35

Sperber’s Marx is irredeemably bourgeois: in his origins and cultural formation, in his lifestyle and aspirations, and surprisingly bourgeois in his approach to revolution.

A painting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the pressroom of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which they jointly edited, ca. 1840s. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.)


of Marx’s thought, even as he rejected both religion (“the opium of the people”) and the authoritarian Prussian state that pursued him relentlessly for de-cades to come. As a political exile in Paris and Brus-sels before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, Marx was exposed to the classics of political econo-my by Adam Smith, James Mill, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say (the English texts in French trans-lations) and to the work of Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and other early French socialists. Exiled again in 1849, he engaged seriously with the positivist and Darwinist ideas that were current in mid-Victorian London. Yet the philosophical underpinning of Marx’s mature social thought re-mained fundamentally German. As Sperber writes, “he reformulated Hegel’s idealism in materialist terms and replaced Hegel’s dialectical philosophy with a philosophically inflected political economy.”

In other ways too, Marx clung determinedly to the social expectations and cultural norms that conditioned his upbringing. His life choices, to be sure, were far from conventional. He married Jenny von Westphalen, a woman four years his senior, be-fore he had achieved financial security, set his face against a respectable career, and embraced a revo-lutionary world that supported his disorderly, bo-hemian lifestyle, writing into the small hours and sleeping until noon. Compared to his peers, howev-er, Marx’s domestic situation was a model of social conformity. Unlike his early collaborators Moses Hess and Friedrich Engels, or younger protégés like Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx took up neither with working-class women nor with prostitutes. His liai-son with the family servant Lenchen Demuth may have been shocking to his followers and immediate social circle, but it was very much in keeping with the habits of a Victorian paterfamilias. Dependent as he was on handouts from the prosperous, factory-owning Engels, and hovering as he did on the verge of financial disaster, Marx and his wife maintained a constant struggle to keep up appearances.

His daughters attended a private school for prop-er young ladies and took expensive extras such as Italian, French, drawing, and music. On learning in 1866 of his daughter Laura’s involvement with Paul Lafargue, a radical French student living in exile and a member of the General Council of the Inter-national Working Men’s Association, Marx warned that his approval was conditional:

Before the final arrangements of your relationship to Laura, I must have serious information about your economic circumstances. . . You know that I have sacrificed my entire fortune in revolutionary struggle. . . Were I to start my career over again, I would do the same. Only I would not marry. As much as it is in my power, I wish to keep my daughter from the cliffs on which the life of her mother has been shattered.

In this and in his readiness to engage repeatedly in the duel—a quintessentially German expression of masculinity—Marx remained true to his Rhenish bourgeois origins.

The gulf between all this and Marx’s revolution-ary agenda was smaller than one might think.

Marx had firmly nailed his colors to the commu-nist flag on the eve of the 1848 revolution with the

publication of Communist Manifesto, which he co-authored with Engels. As Sperber points out, their analysis of history under the sign of class struggle has been read as universal historical and socio-political commentary. Yet perhaps a third of the pamphlet attacked radical political opportunists

who denounced their conservative opponents as communistic (something Marx himself had done when editing the Cologne-based Rhineland News in the early 1840s) and praised the brutal energy of the bourgeoisie, which would tear down the 18th-century society of orders and the anachronistic, au-thoritarian Prussian government that endorsed it.

Here, Sperber relies on an important re-reading of one of Marx’s most famous passages: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” This has often been taken as a prophetic defi-nition of all modernity, but Sperber convincingly recasts it in far more socially specific 19th-century terms as “Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate . . . ” It is a re-reading that illuminates Marx’s commitment to the ideal of bourgeois revolution in the mold of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Jacobin Republic as a crucial step in the transition from capitalism to

communism. This commitment was entirely consis-tent with his practice as editor of the New Rhineland News, which was his chief venue for political action during the 1848 revolution. It was an open secret that Marx and his fellow editors were communists, yet the New Rhineland News clearly targeted an edu-cated rather than popular audience, published few denunciations of capitalism, and provided minimal coverage of the nascent labor movement. At a public meeting of the Cologne Democratic Society in the aftermath of the June Days, when the French gener-al Cavaignac had defeated a popular uprising in the most brutal fashion, Marx denounced the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship in the name of a “single class” and called for a revolutionary government, composed of “heterogeneous elements” that would “reach agreement about the most appropriate form of administration through the exchange of ideas.” This condemnation of the class struggle was conso-nant with Marx’s ceaselessly anti-Prussian editorial policy and the attempts of the New Rhineland News to rally the population of the Rhineland against au-thoritarian Prussian rule by disregarding his prior commitment to anti-capitalism.

There was nothing unusual in 1848 about this slippage between radical democratic and com-munist politics, but the divisions between these different groupings became increasingly marked. Yet Marx’s willingness to embrace short-term anti-communism for long-range communist purposes persisted through subsequent decades of political activism. In important ways, his ideas continued to reflect radical democratic assumptions and the lib-eral economic theory of classical English economists

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Compared to his peers, Marx’s domestic situation was a model of social conformity.


that characterized the party of movement during the first half of the 19th century. Even before he became a communist, Marx had been in favor of free trade, and he continued to hold this position as a critic of capitalism, rather than embracing the cooperative solutions of French utopian socialists or the faith in government intervention displayed by the left-wing German professors known as Kathedersozialisten in the 1870s. His vision of revolution remained mod-eled on the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution,

and he never adopted Lasalle’s practice of referring to fellow socialists as comrades, preferring instead to remain “Citizen Marx.” His fanatical opposition to tsarist Russia was an equally consistent feature of Marx’s politics and colored his view of events in Britain in unexpected ways: He despised Gladstone

and the Liberals as lackeys of Russia, but greatly ad-mired the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli for his firm anti-Russian stance.

The actual intellectual connections between such ideas and Marx’s extraordinary political

legacy were, according to Sperber, in some ways beside the point. Subsequent generations of politi-cal activists have, in his view, been inspired less by Marx’s ideas than by his “passionately irreconcil-

able, uncompromis-ing, and intransigent nature” and by the life of struggle he led. This goes too far. As a revolutionary, Marx was nothing out of the ordinary. His personal diffi-culties and political martyrdom were no more impressive than that of contem-poraries like Mazzi-ni, Garibaldi, and Kossuth, all of whom have been canonized by posterity for their

intransigent political commitments. Yet Marx is re-membered less as an activist than a thinker whose ideas have provided a remarkably rich soil for gen-erations of economic, political, social, and histori-cal analysis. Many of Marx’s writings were indeed parochial and eccentric, but a few have a timeless

quality that renders them almost as fresh now as when they first appeared. Not for nothing did Claude Lévi-Strauss, hardly a Marxist, admit that he “rarely broach[ed] a new sociological problem without first stimulating my thought by reading a few pages of The 18th Brumaire . . .”

It is here that the comparison with Mazzini ap-pears most illuminating. For Mazzini, too, was a prolific and influential writer with international reach, whose political ideas have been regularly mis-interpreted in ways that reflect our contemporary concerns. Both Mazzini’s Duties of Man and Marx’s Communist Manifesto were written at a particular historical moment and in response to concrete his-torical circumstances. Both Mazzinian democratic nationalism and Marxian communism have prov-en remarkably influential ideologies. Yet Duties of Man is known only to specialists, while Communist Manifesto retains at least some of its fame and power even today.

Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx is a wonderful book and will remain the standard biography of Marx for a generation. It succeeds admirably in its mission to return Marx to his proper place in his-tory. But in failing to explore adequately Marx’s profound intellectual resonance it falls—perhaps inevitably—short.

Abigail Green is a tutor and fellow in history at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press).

100 mark note featuring Marx and introduced in 1975 by the Staatsbank of the former German Democratic Republic.

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In the early 1930s, John Dewey, America’s lead-ing philosophical pragmatist and a founding father of progressive educational theory, re-tired from Columbia University. By then, his

Copernican revolution in education was well under way. The child, with his individual needs, was now at the center of a new educational universe, and the idea of the child’s formation guided by the wisdom embedded in a tradition was banished to the periph-ery. In those same years, half a world away in War-saw, Poland, a Hasidic rebbe was writing his own educational primer on the primacy of the individual student. If, in the West today, Dewey’s progressive legacy is deeply contested—the current state of the American public schools, heavily influenced by his ideas, is decidedly not pretty—the teachings of Kal-onymus Kalmish Shapira, the martyred Rebbe of Piaseczno, are regarded as foundation stones for a contemporary renaissance in Jewish pedagogy and spirituality by a wide range of readers.

Recent attention to the Piaseczner, as Rabbi Sha-pira was known, attests to his enduring appeal. His writings are featured in the schmussen and on the shtenders (lecterns) of yeshivas of all stripes. He has even entered contemporary literature as the pro-tagonist’s third great father figure, along with Freud and Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, in Joseph Skibell’s novel, A Curable Romantic. Some of this at-tention stems from Shapira’s dramatic life: He was a prodigy, a polyglot, and the last scion of a Polish Hasidic dynasty whose startlingly original theologi-cal voice was silenced in the Holocaust.

Born in 1889, the young Kalonymus Kalmish assumed the role of rebbe and community leader in Piaseczno at the age of twenty. His own educa-tion had been decidedly traditional, but he was also known and admired in the wider Warsaw Jewish community for his talent on the violin, his medi-cal knowledge, and his deep human insight, as well as his unquestioned mastery of the rabbinic can-on. It is possible, but not likely, that he read Freud (Zamenhof is even less likely). In any case, Rabbi Shapira was certainly aware of the recent revolu-tions in psychology. Nehemia Polen, author of The Holy Fire, a powerful study of the Piaseczner’s Ho-locaust writings, relates a story of one of the Piasec-zner’s hasidim who came to the Rebbe complaining that his headaches had returned ever since the Reb-be’s prescription had faded. When Rabbi Shapira wrote a new prescription, the Hasid placed it firmly in his hatband. To amused onlookers, Rabbi Shapira gently explained, “the modern world would classify this as ‘suggestion,’ but we who hold fast to the way

of the Baal Shem Tov call it emuna peshuta—simple faith.” This ability to address the particular person and moment was central to both his charisma and his approach to education.

Until her untimely death in 1937, Rabbi Shap-ira’s wife, Rachel Hayyah, was a full partner in his projects, reviewing manuscripts, making notes, and raising critical questions that his followers might

have been too reticent to pursue. With the outbreak of the war and the German invasion of Poland in 1939, more personal loss would follow in devastat-ingly quick succession. First, Rabbi Shapira’s only son and most trusted disciple, Rabbi Elimelekh Ben Zion, was mortally wounded by shrapnel during

an air assault. A second bomb fell on the hospital entrance, killing both Rabbi Elimelekh’s young wife and aunt. Amidst all this horror, the Piaseczner’s re-ligious and pastoral leadership continued unabated.

When the Nazi’s established the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, the Rebbe’s home became a haven for refu-gees. With the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, he managed a soup kitch-en serving fifteen hundred people daily. With the German closure of the Ghetto’s mikvaot, the Rebbe

raised funds to ensure that the mikvah in nearby Pi-aseczno was heated daily and made available for the women of Warsaw. In 1942, the Piaseczner’s daring and increasingly anguished theological writings fi-nally ceased, and he apparently buried them near his home before being deported to the Trawniki la-bor camp outside Lublin. Eyewitness accounts from Trawniki tell of a solidarity pact made between

twenty prominent artists, physicians, lawyers, po-litical activists, and communal leaders—including Rabbi Shapira—not to leave the camp individually without safe passage of the entire group. In honor-ing this pact, he apparently passed on an opportuni-ty to escape the labor camp in the summer of 1943.

His martyrdom would come a few months later in early November, when Waffen SS units surrounded the camp and shot all the inhabitants.

After the war, a Polish construction worker unearthed the Piaseczner’s writings together with a note requesting that they be sent to his brother in Israel. One of the resultant books, Eish Kodesh, published in English as Sacred Fire, is a collection of deep theological meditations on the problem of evil by way of commentary on the weekly parsha.

A Student-Centered TraditionBY MARK GOTTLIEB

Chovas HaTalmidim: The Students’ Obligation and Sheloshah Ma’amarim: Three Discoursesby Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish ShapiraFeldheim, 644 pp., $26.99

Shapira’s ability to address the particular person and moment was central to both his charisma and his approach to education.

Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. (Illustration by Val Bochkov.)


It was the last piece of Jewish scholarship written in Poland.

Chovas HaTalmidim, rendered in this new translation as “The Students’ Obligation,” is

the Piaseczner’s educational manifesto and the only work published during his lifetime. When it appeared in 1932, Hillel Zeitlin, the great Hebrew and Yiddish essayist, wrote a celebratory review calling it a “gateway for anyone, and in particular for the modern Jew who has felt a genuine call-ing to return to his tradition, to enter the palace

of Hasidism.” Shapira’s goal was actually two-fold: to dissuade Polish Hasidic youth from defecting to the secularist—socialist, Zionist, and Yiddish-ist—forces then laying siege to the traditional life of faith, and to cultivate an elite cadre of spiritual seekers (bnei aliya) who would infuse the tradi-tional world with renewed religious energy.

In his posthumously published Hakhsharat HaAvrekhim (The Young Men’s Preparation), a sort of sequel to Chovas HaTalmidim, Rabbi Shapira wrote that his goal, and really the ultimate goal of any form of religious education, was to “uncover one’s soul,” to “grab one’s soul by the scruff of its neck,” and force it into an encounter with reality. By first sensitizing the individual student to the holi-ness within him or her—through imagination, song, and spiritual fellowship—the sanctity of the Torah and the living tradition of holy texts and personali-ties would eventually be grasped and understood.

The Piaseczner’s teachings on childhood steer a middle course between a Rousseauian celebration of childhood and a more classical positioning of the child as a kind of incomplete adult. He begins the book by arguing that habituation and socialization, the hall-marks of a classical education whether sacred or secu-lar, were no longer sufficient. Children were maturing faster than ever; were more likely to become alienated from parents, culture, and tradition; and were increas-ingly robbed of the kind of personal investment that fosters lasting meaning and commitment. He reads, sometimes, like a Hasidic Neil Postman.

Repeatedly, Rabbi Shapira points to the spiritual force latent in the young student’s soul and the duty of teachers to develop it.

Since a Jewish child has the spirit of God, the breath of the Lord, hidden and concealed within him from the moment of birth, it is necessary to raise and educate him to bring out and reveal this godliness and allow it to flourish.

In Eish Kodesh, Shapira expands on a suggestive kabbalistic image from Tikkunei HaZohar that iden-tifies schoolchildren with “the face of the Divine Presence” (Anpei de-Shekhina).

This might be instructively contrasted with anoth-er theological account of the child, one made famous by St. Thérèse of Lisieux. St. Thérèse (1873-1897), a Carmelite nun whose Story of a Soul has influenced readers from Jack Kerouac to the present pope, was inspired by the Gospel’s insistence that “unless you be

converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 18:3). For Thérèse, spiritual childhood is a form of con-sciousness acquired when complexity of thought and calculation are abandoned: “It is enough to acknowl-edge one’s nothingness and surrender oneself like a child into God’s arms . . . I rejoice in my littleness be-cause ‘only little children and those who are like them shall be admitted to the Heavenly Banquet.’” In con-trast, Shapira invokes the image of “the face of the Di-vine” to stress the creativity and spiritual dynamism inherent in the youthful soul.

Rabbi Shapira teaches that the child is the most potent expression of the possible. The pupil occu-pies a space between what is dynamic and changing and what is eternal. In this way, the child is an apt symbol for the meeting point of the divine and the human, the “face of the Shekhina.” The intensity and immediacy of our childhood experiences express this continuous connection to the divine, which is precisely why they are capable of leaving such a last-ing impression on us.

By developing a distinctive personality and call-ing, every human being can instantiate the Anpei de-Shekhina, that quality of the divine that is most identifiable and accessible in this material world and is most powerfully embodied in the person of the young. It is the main task of the parent or edu-cator to tap into the particular spiritual excellence of the individual child, cultivating her distinctive qualities and drawing them up from the realm of the potential into the realm of the actual.

These student-centered ideas have been enthusi-astically embraced by many in today’s Jewish world. In some neo-Hasidic circles, however, the Piasec-zner’s insistence on the concrete demands and com-mitments of God-given law has been bypassed in favor of meditation upon the autonomous self. This was not Rabbi Shapira’s intention: “in writing this book, we have no intention of releasing you from the obligation and necessity of poring over the Tal-mud, Midrash, Shulchan Arukh, and all the other holy books that guide us upward on the path to God.” Shapira’s great pedagogical insight is precisely that one could adapt to the child without forsaking tradition. Indeed, both the pupil and the tradition require just such an approach.

We must adjust ourselves to [the student], and speak in a language that he can understand—almost to the extent of becoming children ourselves . . . It is not enough to merely teach the youth that they are duty-bound to listen to their teachers . . . the most important thing is to teach them that they themselves are their own educators. They are seedlings that Hashem has planted in the vineyard of Klal Yisrael, and they alone bear the responsibility for their development into towering atzei chayim, trees of life—righteous and deeply learned servants of Hashem.

For the Piaseczner, while each single student has a distinctive essence waiting to be realized, the re-

finement of mind, will, and character necessary for that realization lies within the traditional teachings of the Torah and in apprenticeship to its demands.

This is the second English-language translation of Rabbi Shapira’s educational treatise to ap-

pear in the past twenty years. Accompanying it is a biographical sketch by Aharon Sorasky, originally written in Hebrew and appended to most editions of the book, which betrays the influence of stan-dard Hasidic hagiography:

When the child was two, he suddenly became seriously ill. Hasidic elders relate many miracles which took place during those days. As a segulah (mystical remedy) against the convulsions, his father requested that some of the child’s fingers be bound together with the leaves of his lulav, which he had set aside to be used for baking matzos.

Nevertheless, it manages to convey something of the genuine holiness and deep human wisdom of the Piaseczner’s personality. As for the translation itself, it betrays its origins in the work of a committee com-missioned by Feldheim Publishers. Unlike the ear-lier rendering by Micha Odenheimer, published in 1995 and still in print, it substitutes a certain stylistic flatness for the author’s often finely worked turns of phrase and suggestive plays on words. For instance, the Feldheim translation has the author ask:

But what are we supposed to do in our generation where children’s independence and emotions develop far before their time? . . . then that enthusiasm will find its outlet elsewhere—in the false beauty and decadent culture of the secular world.

Odenheimer renders the same passage as follows:

But what choice do we have in our generation, when feelings and sense of self develop so precociously? . . . [our young people] will be moved and excited by foolish stimulants, by the base beauty that is found in the world.

In a few cases, entire passages have been either removed or condensed, one suspects out of a paternalistic inten-tion to shield the uninitiated from the more mystically recondite elements of Rabbi Shapira’s thought.

Still, the benefits of this edition—it is handsome-ly produced and bilingual, with the English trans-lation facing the Hebrew original—should not be overlooked, aiding both newcomers and seasoned students in the study of a seminal work of pedagogy and theology.

We may well wait in vain in this new century for a transformative figure of Rabbi Shapira’s stature to appear again. In the meantime, one can encourage educational traditionalists and progressives alike—in fact anyone who has, in Hillel Zeitlin’s words, “felt a genuine calling to return”—to read and think about The Students’ Obligation.

Mark Gottlieb is senior director of the Tikvah Fund. Prior to joining Tikvah, he served as head of school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and as principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline.

The intensity and immediacy of our childhood experiences express a continuous connection to the divine, which is why they leave such a lasting impression on us.


In January 2013, Jane Eisner, editor of the English-language Jewish Daily Forward, wrote that what “keeps [her] up at night” and “haunts” her is worrying that young lib-

eral Jews are not marrying within the faith or even choosing to marry at all:

The non-Orthodox birthrate in America is far below replacement level . . . In this and so much else, most younger Jews in America simply reflect trends in the larger society, where highly educated people are marrying later, giving birth later, and living in a far more pluralistic environment than even a generation ago.

Jonathan Last, who catalogues the current fer-tility crisis in his wittily titled book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demo-graphic Disaster, puts parochial worries (will there be as many people like me in the next generation?) in a larger context. A senior writer at The Weekly Standard, Last explains that the current below replacement-level birth rate is a national, even glob-al, affliction for which there are multiple explana-tions—including religious affiliation and practice—and which we ignore at our peril.

One reason for the current birth-rate crisis is that the number of children one views as “ideal” depends very much on one’s level of religious obser-vance. As Last notes, recent “surveys show that just 21 percent of non-religious Americans view three or more children as being ideal family size . . . Among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say that three or more children is ideal.” This means that as “Americans have become more secular, they’ve cut back on having children.”

Of course, there are other reasons. Middle class American women are reproducing at below replace-ment level because more women are going to college than ever before, because more women (and men) are delaying marriage, because of the Pill, which gives us greater choice about when to have a child, because of housing, because you don’t need your kids to take care of you in your old age when there is Social Se-curity, not to mention car seat laws, the high cost of strollers, daycare (the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies reports that full-time care for an infant cost, on average, between $9,630 and $14,591 per year in 2008, depending on where the care was provided), college, and all of the other expenses that go along with having kids.

The combination of all of these factors means

that today, when you look at what people say is their ideal number of children, the answer has changed dramatically compared with a couple of decades ago. In the 1980s and 1990s the percentage of people who said either no children or one child was their

ideal family size more than doubled, while the per-centage that idealized four (or more) kids dropped by more than half. And overall, the fertility rate in America, is for the first time, tilting below replace-ment level.

Last analyzes surveys from other countries, like Austria and Germany, and worries that just as in

those countries, a sub-replacement U.S. birth rate may come to be seen as the “ideal” family size be-cause of what people see around them. “When peo-ple grow up in a world without babies, they might stop wanting babies for themselves. Even in the ab-stract,” Last writes.

Everyone knows that college costs so much these days that parents might limit the num-

ber of kids they have in an effort to “afford it.” But what is it about car seats? Is Last really arguing that making kids safer in cars has depressed fertility? As the author correctly notes, car seat laws “didn’t make life any easier for parents with lots of kids.” In 1976 when car seat laws began to be enacted “16 percent of American women had four children and 20 percent had five or more,” Last writes. The per-centage who had five or more kids by 2010 was 1.8 percent. So kids are somewhat safer (Last reports that an average of 263 children’s’ lives are saved by car seats each year), but there are fewer of them. And the fact that having more than two kids obli-gates parents to purchase a bigger car because they need more room for car seats shouldn’t be underes-timated as an economic deterrent, either.

In Last’s estimation, housing has had both nega-tive and positive effects on fertility, depending on particular trends. Apartments push people to have

fewer kids, as happened in Europe af-ter World War I. After World War II in America, there was an acute hous-ing shortage until the advent of the mass-produced, single-family homes such as those in the famous Levittown. By 1948, the number of newly built homes was 1,183,000, and of those units the vast majority were single-family homes. Lo and behold, the years 1946 to 1964 coincide with the Baby Boom. As Last explains, “Levittown became home to so many children that locals jokingly referred to it as ‘Fertil-ity Valley’ and ‘The Rabbit Hutch.’ Such was the awesome power of the single-family home.” Powerful yes, but not completely dominating. In the 1960s tenements made a comeback and con-dominiums became more common. The result? “The percentage of tene-ments as part of the total housing stock increased by 40 percent from 1960 to 1970 and by another 23 percent from 1970 and 1980. Surprise! It’s the precise timeframe during which America’s fer-tility numbers went into steep decline,” Last explains.

Last doesn’t focus solely on the United States, however. He chronicles the trouble caused when countries that had enacted lower fertility pub-lic policies then try to change course to get people back to having more

babies. “In 2000,” Last chronicles, “[Singapore] an-nounced . . . the ‘Baby Bonus’ program, which paid families—straight cash—for having children: $9,000 for the second child and $18,000 for the third.” The result of these and other family formation efforts has been unmitigated failure. “In 2001, Singapore’s

The number of children one views as “ideal” depends very much on one’s level of religious observance.

On Not Bringing Up Baby BY ABBY W. SCHACHTER

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan v. Last Encounter Books, 248 pp., $23.99

Theater marquee featuring No More Children in which Dr. Lee Krauss explains birth control, ca. late 1920s. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)


fertility rate was 1.41. By 2004 it was 1.24. Today it is 1.11,” Last observes.

The United States, thankfully, isn’t in the same boat with Japan and Singapore. We got Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 blockbuster The Population Bomb, instead. Eh-rlich claimed in that book that come the 1970s there

wouldn’t be enough food to feed all the people on the planet. “[H]undreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” Ehrlich declared. As Last calmly notes however, the exact opposite happened and was happening even as Johnny Carson was devot-ing a whole program to Ehrlich’s message of doom. “[W]hat’s so wonderful about Ehrlich’s silly book,” Last wryly notes, “is that he was wrong at the exact moment when the very opposite of his prediction

was unfolding” with American and worldwide fer-tility rates sinking “like a stone.”

Wrong as Ehrlich was, though, his message is the one you find still widely claimed and circulated. Even more than forty years later and much avail-able evidence to the contrary, Ehrlich’s view is held by precisely the college-educated elites least likely to have lots of children and most likely to influence others not to do so. Even the very mildest sugges-tion that more children would be good for America leads to angry comments about the “dangers” of too many people. The result, as Last argues, is that we are facing a baby bust that no one seems to want to confront. And the results, Last is afraid, will be dire:

[S]ub-replacement fertility rates eventually lead to a shrinking of population—and throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always followed or been followed by Very Bad Things. Disease. War. Economic stagnation or collapse.

Last may well be right that economic stagnation, if not a zombie apocalypse, is headed our way, but

his policy suggestions are, he admits, rather modest and tentative. He reiterates that fertility is a prob-lem that cannot be deferred forever. Once the birth rate drops below a certain point there may be little to nothing we can do to reverse course. Looking at the modest successes with natalist policies in France and Scandinavia, Last argues that “efforts to stoke fertility must be sustained over several generational cohorts.” But given our current national habit of enacting short-term solutions for long-range and deeply complex problems, the idea of redirecting the birth rate upwards in this way seems almost a fool’s errand. Last also claims that bribery won’t work, so paying parents to have more kids is a non-starter. So what can be done?

Last cites Phillip Longman’s proposal to reform So-cial Security to encourage parents to have more kids by lowering a couple’s FICA taxes by a third “with the birth of their first child, by two-thirds with the birth of a second, and then eliminated completely with the third (until the kids turn 18).” Last also critiques col-lege as an unnecessary “credentialing badge,” which

places a heavy financial burden on middle class fami-lies. Telecommuting is another of Last’s recommenda-tions because then people could live in less expensive areas (and therefore afford to have more kids) rather than in high-cost cities. He also argues for more im-migration because immigrants tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born Americans (although he notes that within a generation immigrants tend to conform to American norms).

What of Jane Eisner’s Jewish worry? She is en-tirely correct that non-Orthodox Jews live like other secular, modern Americans, so it is no surprise that they aren’t reproducing at replacement level—which is to say that the cultural world Eisner cherishes is not being replenished. She ended her editorial with the stark admission that, within this world, there is no “vocabulary” to even discuss this problem. Mean-while, in the pages of Ha’aretz, a 91-year-old Paul Ehrlich recently advised Eisner’s Israeli counterparts that “true Zionists should have small families.”

Abby W. Schachter blogs about family life and government policy at captainmommy.com.

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We are facing a baby bust that no one seems to want to confront, Last argues.

Governments have designed policies to limit fertility, only to attempt to reverse them later. (Family-planning poster printed by the Chinese government, ca. 1970s.)


I made it through my last summer at Camp Ramah in Connecticut in 1964 without ac-quiring the ability to swim, but I did at least learn how to make a tallit. This was one of the

things that Zalman Schachter (not yet with the hy-phenate Shalomi) taught me and the other campers in a special club (or chug) that met two or three af-ternoons a week. We did some meditating and some traveling, too. I remember, most of all, a great eye-opening swing through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey to visit, among other sites, a con-vent, an ashram, the offices of the Catholic Worker, and, of course, Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn (where Zalman, a wayward Lubavitcher, was still at least somewhat welcome).

In the years that followed, Reb Zalman, as he is commonly known, became the leading figure in Jew-ish Renewal, a movement in which I never took any part as an adult, not even on its fringes. But about ten years ago, I read for the first time a number of Schachter-Shalomi’s writings, and those of some of his colleagues and acolytes, after being asked to write an essay on Jewish Renewal for a volume titled Jew-ish Polity and American Civil Society. I subsequently described them, as my sole reviewer put it (in The Weekly Standard) in a “benignly satirical” manner.

If Shaul Magid also noticed this, it did not pre-vent him, in his newly published American Post-Judaism, from identifying my essay as “a useful assessment of Jewish Renewal.” This caught me by surprise, since the movement that I gently mocked is one that represents, to his mind, a guiding light for American Jews. But the further I made it into his book, the better I understood where we were in accord. We both view Renewal as a path away from Judaism as it has hitherto existed. The difference be-tween us is that Magid, unlike me, believes that it has marked out the road that Jews ought to take.

Magid, by his own account, began life as a sec-ular Jew, but became a ba’al teshuvah at the age of twenty under the tutelage of Dovid Din, “an ob-scure and enigmatic hasidic rabbi” who had been a student of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi back in the sixties. After attending a variety of yeshivas, Magid settled for three years “in a collective community in Israel founded by students of Shlomo Carlebach,” Zalman’s erstwhile spiritual companion. Eventually Magid left for academia. Now the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indi-ana University, Magid has published numerous and valuable scholarly studies of Hasidism and modern Jewish thought. But he has not left Jewish Renewal behind. His first book was on the Hasidic thinker

Rabbi Gershon Henokh of Radzin, whose work was prized by Carlebach and Schachter-Shalomi for its antinomian daring. In the present work, he moves beyond the Radziner, Carlebach (whose conspicu-ous absence throughout the book is only underlined by the seven-page Epilogue-cum-elegy devoted to

him), and even Schachter-Shalomi. Magid argues that the Renewal movement’s “critique of Judaism and its constructive alternatives reach down to the very roots of Judaism and Jewishness, offering vari-ous ways to reconfigure Judaism for what I call a post-Judaism age, an age where Judaism remains re-lated to but is no longer identical with Jewishness.”

American Post-Judaism fleshes out this claim with an account of Renewal’s basic orientation, as well as several extended discussions of issues that Renewal can help Jews rethink, such as the relation-ship of Judaism to Jesus and the significance of the

Holocaust. Magid attempts to explain, in addition, why Renewal’s radical theology is singularly capable of“saving Judaism in America from obsolescence.” But his book leaves me no more convinced than I had been that Renewal is a genuine form of Juda-ism, one that preserves something more than some of its appearances. Nor does it lead me to believe that we are on the cusp of the “post-Judaism age” that Magid envisions.

Such words may sound unjust to someone who

has perhaps found himself or herself davening in a minyan that included “Renewed” Jews wrapped in huge, multicolored prayer shawls, swaying rhythmi-cally and chanting rapturously. What right, one could ask, do I have to impugn such people’s piety? In fact, I don’t mean to do so. I readily acknowledge the au-

thenticity of their religiosity, and I am less sure than Magid that it is as radically distinct from that of more traditional synagogue members as he suggests. I just don’t want to confuse Judaism and post-Judaism, a term that Magid has done us a service by inventing, even if he doesn’t use it consistently.

Even as he notes that Renewal’s critique of Juda-ism reaches down to its very roots, Magid re-

assures us that, “Post-Judaism is not the erasure of Judaism but a reassessment of some of the founding principles upon which Judaism was constructed.”

At the same time, however, he insists that, “Renewal’s pro-gram is a radical departure from the very foundations of Jewish tradition.” None of the religion’s truly fundamen-tal principles, it seems, sur-vive reassessment, not even the most basic. The radical theology of Renewal goes so far as to subvert “the biblical monotheistic template” and replace it with something that can be identified as “cos-motheism.” This unfamiliar term is not Magid’s coinage, but one he borrows from Jan Assmann, for whom it rep-resents, in Magid’s words, “a theological construct based on the premise that the divine world (the cosmos) and the world we live in are inextrica-bly intertwined.” Cosmothe-ism “believes in a plurality of divine life in the world—and

its accessibility to the human—focusing more on ritual, or cultus, than scripture or text.”

Nothing, it would seem, could represent a more complete departure from the very foundations of Ju-daism. True, Schachter-Shalomi “gestures,” as Magid puts it, “toward a cosmotheism that always existed in the Hebrew Bible and has survived as a repressed theology throughout most of Jewish history,” most re-cently in Hasidism. Yet Magid has his doubts about the real significance of such gestures. The “final act

All-American, Post-EverythingBY ALLAN ARKUSH

Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Berkeley, 1988. (Courtesy of the Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi Collection, The University of Colorado at Boulder, Archives.)

American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Societyby Shaul Magidindiana university Press, 408 pp., $40

Magid reassures us that, “Post-Judaism is not the erasure of Judaism but a reassessment of some of the founding principles upon which Judaism was constructed.”


of erasure of classical theism in the form of biblical monotheism is perhaps,” he tells us at one point, for the Renewal theologians, “even more a product of the American religious context in which they live and think (theologically and politically) than the hasidic

tradition that serves as the source of their inspiration.” Magid’s uncertainty on this score practically vanishes a few pages later, following his account of Schachter-Shalomi and Renewal theologian Arthur Green’s “rev-olutionary, metaphysical revision that serves as the basis for undoing much of what has been accomplished in historical Judaism.” Their work, Magid concludes, is “a serious revision—even a subversion—of classical Jewish metaphysics founded on American religious principles.”

But even if Schachter-Shalomi’s “post-monotheistic theology and Gaia- consciousness Judaism” are essentially re-flections of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and New Age religious figures such as Ken Wilber, this clearly does not detract in any way, as far as Magid is concerned, from their legiti-macy. Pouring new wine into old bottles is precisely what modern Jewish thinkers do. Canonical modern Jewish thinkers from Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen to Mordecai Kaplan have unabash-edly upheld versions of Judaism that take their bearings largely from one or anoth-er or a medley of Gentile philosophers. Most of them, I would say, have done so with far more justification than the advo-cates of Jewish Renewal—but I’m not go-ing to make that argument. What I think is worth asking in Magid’s case is why does he bother? Why isn’t it enough for Jews just to drink the new wine straight out of the American vat from which it comes?

The advocates of Renewal have to do a lot of work, after all, before they can refash-ion Judaism into a suitable receptacle for a postmodern American return to a pre-Mosaic cosmotheism. It’s not only the old metaphysics that has to be discarded, but “much of what has been accomplished in historical Judaism.” Magid doesn’t supply us with a comprehensive list of the things that have to be thrown out, but what he clearly regards as most objectionable are the laws that have kept the Jews in their “exclusivist cocoon.”

The Jews today constitute, in his opinion, “a peo-ple with no relevant halakhic anchor yet a commu-nity in need of a nomos with little precedent to guide her.” They are thus in need, according to Magid, of

a new Judaism responding to a new era in human history (and not just Jewish history) that demands it to move toward the world rather than use halakha to protect itself from the world. By adopting a New Age post-millennial perspective, Renewal presents a Jewish vision founded on the very “un-halakhic” idea that Jewish nomos should

be a way of breaking down barriers separating spiritual, ethnic, and national identities in order to foster a global consciousness that is founded on diversity with permeable boundaries. This includes, among other things, the creation of new

rituals, conscious syncretism by utilizing practices of other faiths adapted to Jewish sensibilities and symbols, and the notion of inclusivity as a post-halakhic ideal.

This new and wide-open antinomian nomos, Magid believes, will not only revitalize the Jewish people but will be something of a magnet to outsid-ers as well. He is not looking for converts, but rec-ommends that the people who come to it “because there is something about it, or about Jews, that is compelling” but who do not wish to convert “should be allowed to choose to take on aspects of Judaism and be considered part of the Jewish community.”

Magid is thus fully in accord with Schachter-Shalomi’s “principle that Judaism and Jewishness need not be fused.” What he does not explain is why they need to remain joined at all or why, in the new synagogue, the distinction between Jew and Greek has to be preserved. One also wonders why anyone would feel the need to enter the realm of Judaism in order to benefit from a religious message that has only recently been imported into it from other,

more readily accessible territory. What might be the “something” in this new amalgam that such a per-son might find distinctively “compelling”? But this isn’t a very different question from the one we have left hanging: Why does Magid himself feel that the archaic and dilapidated house of Judaism should be so massively renovated instead of just being treated as a teardown?

One might not need to ask this last question if Magid followed Arthur Green in holding onto, in Magid’s words, “the mythic community of Sinai” and affirming the “mythic ethnos as having valid-ity today.” But these are notions about which he expresses nothing but skepticism. Perhaps Magid is outlining his own position as well when he de-scribes Schachter-Shalomi as believing that

The move to theological globalism is not meant to subvert particular communities from having their own distinct identities. Following Durkheim, this is a natural inclination of human civilization that cannot be usurped.

But even if one has a natural right to maintain one’s own distinct identity, one doesn’t necessarily have a duty or a reason to do so. The place of rea-son can be taken, however, by a wish. Magid is, by his own account, someone who remains “fascinated by, and deeply invested in, the complex nexus of Juda-ism and the American counterculture” in which he became enmeshed when he was young. At bottom, it appears, it is his own experience that has left him so strongly attached to what we might call cosmotheism with a post-Jewish face.

That traditional Jews will necessarily find such a blend altogether unacceptable goes without

saying. But is there any reason why non-traditional Jews, including secularists, should respond in the same fashion? Why should they find Magid’s post-Judaism any less admissible than, say, Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionism (to which Magid ac-knowledges a significant debt)?

For all his theological radicalism, Kaplan at least upheld a concept of Jewish peoplehood. His God may have been a purely notional being, but he defined the Jews as “an international nation, func-tioning as such by virtue of a common past, their aspiration toward a common future and the will-to-cooperate in the achievement of common ends.” Magid emphatically rejects any such idea. That the Jews, “whether in the Diaspora or in Israel, are one people and thus the drama of one Jewish society is the drama of another,” is, in his opinion, “a myth that is less and less convincing.” Kaplan saw the Jewish homeland as “the symbol of the Jewish renascence and the center of Jewish civilization” throughout the world. According to Magid, the Jews of Israel, the only other Jews in today’s world to whom he gives any consideration, live in a country that “is increas-ingly becoming its own Jewish civilization,” one which is of marginal concern to him in this book and to which he pays attention mostly for purposes of (generally invidious) comparison with the Unit-ed States. The eyes of the author of American Post-Judaism are focused far more on Gentiles in this country’s “postethnic society” than on Jews else-where, for in his scheme of things, they have a much more important role to play.

Magid doesn’t think that ethnicity has disappeared

Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi at a High Holidays service, Los Angeles, late 1990s. (Courtesy of the Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi Collection, The University of Colorado at Boulder, Archives.)

If intermarriage rates were in fact to decline, Magid might even consider such a development to be a regrettable sign of the Jews’ retreat back into their “exclusivist cocoon.”


or will disappear in America, but he does believe, fol-lowing the historian David Hollinger among others, that it “will become something other than purely a consequence of ascription or descent.” What we now see coming into being, largely as a result of massive intermarriage, are “new ethnicities that are created by a combination of descent and consent, ascription and affiliation.” Postethnic America therefore “pres-ents serious challenges to the continuity and survival of Jews and Judaism precisely because it undermines the very notion of ethnicity that served Jews as an an-chor for most of its history.”

Magid mentions people such as Alan Dershow-itz and Elliott Abrams who are deeply dismayed by this state of affairs and seeking to alter it by vari-

ous means, but gives them very short shrift. Their proposals are futile, he writes. They ought to realize that “postethnicity is with us for the foreseeable fu-ture.” The Jews must therefore “learn how to think within its boundaries and not simply deny its ex-istence or remain wed to old-paradigm ‘oughts’ in order to create models for survival, continuity, and renewal.” It is easier, no doubt, for Magid to adapt to this new situation than it is for the other writ-ers he mentions, for he doesn’t find it unwelcome in the way that they do. Given his overall theo-political outlook, he has good reason to consider it desir-able. If intermarriage rates were in fact to decline, he might even consider such a development to be a regrettable sign of the Jews’ retreat back into their “exclusivist cocoon.” It will surely be easier to foster the kind of new rituals and conscious (yet somehow controlled) syncretism that Magid recommends in communities devoted to post-Judaism that include many non-Jewish members.

Like Schachter-Shalomi, Magid wants a re-newed Judaism “to participate fully in the global concern for the well being of the planet and all its inhabitants.” He wants its “resources, insights, and teachings” to “contribute to the larger humanis-tic concerns of the day.” Today, Magid acknowl-edges, Renewal is still mostly confined to a “fairly small group of alternative communities scattered throughout the landscape of North America.” But

he is very hopeful about the future. He believes that “American Jewry and Judaism are in the midst of a systemic shift in identity, belief, and practice, the effects of which will be felt for the next few genera-tions” and that things may be moving in the direc-tion that he desires.

Things look different to me. My guess is that the Renewal communities will remain the marginal phenomenon that they have been for decades, as of-ten as not an entry point to more mainstream forms of Judaism. But even if they grow much larger, I do not believe that they will become a dominant ele-ment in the future of American Judaism, especially if they follow the path that Magid has marked out. If that is where they choose to go, I believe, they

will stray further and further from other Jews, and eventually merge with cosmotheists of other stripes, their real spiritual kindred.

The publication of American Post-Judaism was supported, as a stand-alone page in the front-mat-ter proudly announces, by a grant from the Jew-ish Federation of Greater Hartford. Reading this, I couldn’t help but recall the way Stephen King be-gan his commencement speech at Vassar in 2001: “You here at Vassar have invited the man most commonly seen as America’s Bogeyman” to give this address, “and I have to ask you: What were you thinking? What in God’s name were you think-ing?” What, indeed, were the people at the Jewish Federation thinking when they proffered this sub-vention? Did they have any idea how radically sub-versive of both monotheism and worldwide Jewish solidarity its recipient would aim to be? My guess is that they did but they weren’t too troubled by such matters. I can readily imagine that they see Magid’s ideas as a relatively harmless means of res-cuing a few stray young souls from whatever other postethnic, New Age alternative might otherwise be in store for them.

Allan Arkush is Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghamton University and the Senior Contributing Editor of the Jewish Review of Books.

Early morning prayer gathering at an ALEPH-sponsored retreat. (© 2013 Janice Rubin.)

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Unlikely CollaborationGertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma

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Exogamy ExploredBY SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

In recent years boundaries between American ethnic and religious groups have shifted and blurred. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have officially slipped into minority status. While

economic stratification remains quite real, religion and, to a large extent, ethnicity have declined as the bases for social division. Friendships and marriages across religious lines have multiplied, and culture-wide norms of endogamous marriage have passed a tipping point: Pew research data show that one-third of new marriages in the United States bring together spouses from two different religious groups. Two National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS 1990 and NJPS 2000-01) underlined this trend for the Jewish community: Jewish intermarriage rates were some-where between forty-three percent and fifty percent. (In the 1950s, about only seven percent of American Jewish households had included one Jewish and one non-Jewish spouse.) As The New York Times colum-nist David Brooks recently commented, America has become “a nation of mutts, a nation with hun-dreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, in-termarrying and intermingling.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley grew up in a moderately affiliated Jewish household and is married to an Af-rican American man from a Jehovah’s Witness back-ground who has not converted to Judaism. They are happy in their marriage and in agreement on raising their children as Jews (an agreement, she reports, that she stipulated on the first date), but Schaefer Ri-ley has not written an “I’m OK, you’re OK” celebra-tion of interfaith marriage. In ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America, Schaefer Riley surveys Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others married to spouses from divergent cultural backgrounds. She finds that cou-ples sharing specific values—including religious values—report higher levels of happiness and mari-tal satisfaction, as well as more resilient marital re-lationships. Intermarriages “bring less satisfaction to spouses” and “result in a higher likelihood of divorce.” Working from an Interfaith Marriage Sur-vey that she commissioned and also from interviews “with close to two hundred members of the clergy, marriage counselors, and interfaith couples,” as well as a review of recent research on marriage across re-ligious and cultural lines, Schaefer Riley details the manifold ways in which religious difference stimu-lates conflict in interfaith families. Throughout the book, she criticizes efforts to resolve such conflict through religious homogenization or syncretism, favoring instead the meaningful practice and dy-namic transmission of distinctive religious tradi-

tions, and her analysis and policy recommendations are keyed to that preference.

In an effort to account for the rising number of “interfaith couples headed to the altar” these days,

Schaefer Riley cites the words of David Slagle, an evangelical pastor in Atlanta: “Young people today are intentional about their education, their career, thinking through the possibilities for an occupation and where they want to live and buying a home.” However, when it comes to profoundly important

personal choices—mindfully choosing one’s life partner, spouse, and parent of one’s children—“our romantic view of marriage precludes intentionality.” Fuzzy romantic ideas that obscure the very real ten-sions of interfaith marriage, she charges, are also at fault in the lack of realism that many couples bring to their relationships.

Life cycle changes bring with them new sensi-tivities to religious differences. Using a variety

of suggestive interviews along with some statistical data, Schaefer Riley reveals how differences in reli-gious training often trigger unexpected but power-ful resistance to the presence of different religious narratives and rituals in the home, especially but not only where children are involved. Spouses are

often surprised to discover that they care more about the rites for newborn naming ceremonies and the religious upbringing of their children than they might have imagined. Religious coming-of-

age celebrations loom as children approach middle school. The death of a parent arouses not only grief but also guilt and the desire to seek out familiar religious consolations.

Money, Schaefer Riley observes, also “can be a source of great conflict in any marriage,” but it can be an especially touchy subject in intermarriages, particularly those between Jews and Christians. Non-Jewish spouses who have grown up without the custom of church membership dues—and cer-tainly without the custom of paying for tickets in order to worship in church on the holiest days of the year—are “taken aback by the idea” that Jewish synagogues usually demand that congregants pay to pray. Some Jewish religious institutions have reacted to such objections to the high cost of being Jewish by trying to lower the financial boundaries of group membership in order to attract new adherents. However, since contemporary American Judaism does not require tithing and has no central religious financial holdings to create cushions for congrega-tions, the elimination of paid dues or High Holiday tickets is difficult.

In some intermarried households husbands and wives find themselves engaged in a power struggle, in which each is “allowed” by the other to attend re-ligious services in his or her own religious tradition, with one caveat: Neither should “dig their heels in” and become too much attached to a particular reli-gious tradition. Schaefer Riley’s interviews indicated that some husbands and wives seem motivated not only by a kind of rooting for one’s home team, but also by jealousy. Maintaining a balanced but limited devotion to one’s religion is a sign that the marriage is important—more important than religion.

This deep awareness of real religious contradic-tions tends to make interfaith couples especially un-easy about the resonances of rituals and ceremonies. Schaefer Riley repeatedly describes spouses defin-ing and redefining “uncrossable lines.” Many Jewish spouses report, for instance, that they can tolerate Christmas flowers, stockings, or small trees within the home, but resist, even deeply resent, outdoor Christmas lights or wreaths, which seem to adver-tise a Christian home to the world. Schaefer Riley is disdainful of those who obliterate or ignore the distinctiveness of religious traditions: “The notion that Hanukkah and Christmas are both ultimately celebrations of light is now common in certain set-tings, but it requires an extraordinary dilution of

'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming Americaby naomi Schaefer Rileyoxford university Press, 256 pp., $24.95

Naomi Schaefer Riley. (Courtesy of James Allen Walker.)

Fuzzy romantic ideas that obscure the very real tensions of interfaith marriage, the author charges, are also at fault in the lack of realism that many couples bring to their relationships.


both religious occasions—the birth of the savior and a Jewish military victory over religious perse-cution—in order to arrive at this point.”

Intermarriage may not be good for religious par-ticularism, and it may be associated with high

rates of divorce, Schaefer Riley asserts, but it has an upside. It clearly enhances religious tolerance. In-terweaving discussions of diverse religious groups and individual experiences with the findings of large national statistical studies, she cites the “Aunt Susan principle” demonstrated in Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace: How Reli-gion Divides and Unites Us, namely that the pres-ence of family members of different faiths liberal-izes Americans. Contemporary American society has been profoundly influenced by the fact that it is harder to believe that infidels are going to hell when Aunt Susan is an infidel. Today’s demo-graphics have created a religious ecology in which Americans are more tolerant because they inter-marry more, and they intermarry more because they are more tolerant. Is this dilution of religious cultures, both a cause and an effect of increased in-termarriage, a virtuous circle?

Turning to a group often perceived as being lo-cated somewhat earlier in the process of accultura-tion, Schaefer Riley asks whether American “Mus-

lims will in fact go through the same process that Catholics and Jews” have experienced and “be sub-sumed by the melting pot” while retaining particu-laristic pride. Comparing the trajectory of Muslim acculturation to that of Jews, she suggests that re-laxed Muslims who marry out of the faith will grow

more assimilated and less attached with every suc-cessive generation, while a fervent Muslim minority will “grow in prominence” within the highly identi-fied community, determining “the future of Muslim institutions from mosques to religious schools.” This analysis will no doubt remind many readers of the 2011 study of the Jewish population of New York, which reflected a similar polarization.

’Til Faith Do Us Part also includes illuminating discussions of individuals and couples who don’t match stereotypical perceptions of interfaith cou-ples, including Druze, Mennonite, and Roma indi-viduals. Schaefer Riley’s interviews bring the ritual non-exclusivity of Eastern religions into vivid light:

Daha, a Sikh, and his wife, Haimi, a Hindu, also believe strongly that their children should be exposed not only to each other’s holidays but also to those of other faiths. Haimi recalls that when she was growing up, her parents would put up a Christmas tree. “We do that for our children. We don’t ever want our children to feel isolated. Those are great holidays. Why wouldn’t we want to celebrate them? We have no problem. If it’s a holiday, we’ll celebrate it.” Daha and Haimi also typically celebrate their respective holidays with their families. Indeed, they have asked both sets of grandparents

to take an active role in raising kids religiously. The religious leaders in their faiths do not generally see any incompatibility between celebrating both Sikh and Hindu traditions.

Schaefer Riley compares this pan- cultural approach with the typical exclu-sivity of the three Western monotheistic religions, “For the Abrahamic faiths, bring-ing up children in more than one tradition means you must get beyond the traditional meaning of the holidays or at least gloss over how the meanings of the holidays may contradict each other.”

Individuals who marry outside of their own ethnic and religious groups tend to

marry substantially later than those who marry endogamously, a subject that Schae-fer Riley—never shy about uncomfortable subject matter—enthusiastically takes on. In her penultimate chapter, “Jews, Mor-mons, and the Future of Interfaith Mar-riage,” Schaefer Riley asserts that Jews are the American ethno-religious group most likely to marry across religious cultural lines and Mormons the least likely. One Mormon habit Schaefer Riley urges Jews to adopt is earlier marriage and childbearing, which would raise Jewish fertility levels from their current low point, well under replacement level.

Schaefer Riley cherishes the Ameri-can freedoms and social openness that al-low Jews and others to make free personal

choices, but she warns readers about potential prob-lems that are implicit in those free choices, imply-ing that if Jews want less intermarriage—or if they want more successful marriages no matter who the spouses are—they should support conditions that foster earlier marriage and Jewish in-marriage. She

Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah.

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suggests that Jews can learn from the Mormons how to keep their commitment to their own particular-istic values and behaviors strong, while at the same time minimizing entry obstacles. Mormon practice illustrates that “it is actually possible to advocate in-marriage—even denying the possibility of living eternally with one’s family—while at the same time welcoming intermarried couples in the community” and actively encouraging conversion, she says.

This comparison is intriguing but naive. Schae-fer Riley pays insufficient attention to the important organizational, structural, and ideological differ-ences between Mormons and Jews. For example, the hierarchical Church of Latter-Day Saints is far more centralized economically and as a polity than the highly decentralized Jewish religious groups. In contrast to the liberal and permissive upbringing of the majority of young American Jews, which ex-presses itself powerfully in romantic choices, young Mormons are strongly disciplined by communal ex-pectations and are urged to give a number of years to missionary activities around the world.

Schaefer Riley makes imaginative use of a broad range of examples, but despite her eclectic incorpo-ration of data on diverse ethnic groups, she seems

to have a rather spotty grasp of the important cor-pus of American local, national, and international Jewish demographic research—even when those data might support, contradict, or shed interesting additional light on her major points. Her neglect of this body of writing leads to some serious misstate-ments with regard to her Jewish subjects. She asserts, for example, that “almost no demographic factor or

childhood practice seems to change the likelihood that a marriage will be an interfaith one.” Numerous studies (most of which she does not cite) however, unequivocally demonstrate that having a Jewish edu-cation greatly enhances the probability that one will make Jewish choices. Over and over again, national and local studies have revealed the demographic fac-tors that affect the likelihood of intermarriage: Jewish population density, Jewishness of friendship circles during high school and college, continuation of for-

mal and informal Jewish education from childhood through the teen and college years, familial Jewish ethno-religious activities, and youth groups, camps, and Israel trips. Independently, each of these factors is highly predictive of the likelihood of in-marriage. Together they have an impact that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Schaefer Riley might have focused more on the

dramatic differences between men and women in patterns of intermarried Jewish family life. Inter-married Jewish women—like the author herself—most often aim to raise Jewish children. Intermar-ried Jewish men, in contrast, frequently articulate ambivalent feelings about religion in general and Judaism specifically—and not coincidentally about Jewish women. These men are less likely to transmit Jewish religious culture to the next generation, and their children are much less likely to receive Jew-ish education or identify as Jews when they reach adulthood. The greater religious identification of American Jewish women and the lesser identifica-tion of Jewish men—a gender imbalance that turns historical Jewish patriarchy on its head—is yet an-other aspect of American acculturation.

In America today, the norm of endogamy has been reversed. Intermarriages may not be “for the faint-hearted,” as Schaefer Riley wryly comments, but they are an irrefutable aspect of American life. Schae-fer Riley’s explorations of her complex subjects are framed by two conflicting goals: “fostering a toler-ant society,” while at the same time “keeping religion strong” by advocating “the importance of forging marriages around common beliefs and behaviors.” Schaefer Riley values religious distinctiveness and believes that America will be impoverished if it de-clines. At the same time she celebrates the increase in tolerance that accompanies sectarian dilution. Her arguments often shift back and forth, and she appears to be ambivalent about which of these considerations should take priority. This ambivalence reflects the ultimately irresolvable tension between the goal of perpetuating substantive religious and cultural com-munities and the American credos of egalitarianism, self-fulfillment, and individual autonomy that Jews and others have gratefully embraced.

Some readers have attacked Schaefer Riley for her politically incorrect emphasis on the funda-mental problems that emerge within many inter-faith marriages. Other readers—including this one—resonate with her conviction that the indi-vidual, family, and community each represent valid concerns. Despite its shortcomings, ’Til Faith Do Us Part is fresh and even-handed, and Schaefer Riley’s countercultural willingness to challenge American Jewish liberal pieties is a decided strength of her important book.

Sylvia Barack Fishman chairs the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University, where she is the Joseph and Esther Foster Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and is co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Today’s demographics have created a religious ecology in which Americans are more tolerant because they intermarry more, and they intermarry more because they are more tolerant.


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Watching on the Web as crowds spilled into the streets of Cairo by the millions lent an unexpected ur-gency to the experience of reading

Dara Horn’s new novel. Whether they were protest-ing the evisceration of Egypt’s few democratic in-stitutions, defending the theocratic visions of the Muslim Brotherhood, denouncing Zionist plots, or simply giving voice to their tottering nation’s starva-tion and rage, the waves of humanity crashing each day into Tahrir Square underscored the timeliness of Horn’s A Guide for the Perplexed, which is mostly set in present-day Egypt and contains, along with a great deal else, grim if occasionally hopeful com-mentary about that country’s weighty history and current crises.

The thirty-six-year-old Horn is one of the most Jewishly ambitious novelists working in America today. In her debut novel, In the Image, she explored issues of faith and theodicy, bridging contemporary American literature, classic modern Yiddish fiction, and the Book of Job. Restless in this world, she at-tempted in her next novel, The World to Come, to imagine her way into the afterlife via a plot involv-ing Marc Chagall and the Yiddish writer known as Der Nister. Her third novel, All Other Nights, was set during the Civil War and dramatizes the distinctive American Jewish tension between universalism and particularism through the prism of the Passover story.

Horn’s literary energies are generated cumula-tively through plot, moral weight, and elegant the-matic architectures built from the storehouses of Jewish culture, rather than through the indrawn breath prompted by lapidary individual sentences. (There are exceptions, such as her description of “a summer mountain twilight, thick with the smell of wet wood and encroaching darkness, the twilight fragrance that children imagine to be possibil-ity and adults know to be regret.”) She is first, and foremost, a storyteller, yet these stories carry Horn’s readers higher and further than many of her con-temporaries do with dazzling prose.

As its Maimonidean title would indicate, A Guide for the Perplexed offers the same lofty level of Jewish substance and theme as her previous nov-els. In addition to wrestling with the conundrum of divine providence as presented in Maimonides’ philosophical magnum opus, Horn’s novel also acts as an extended midrash on the biblical Joseph sto-ry, telescopes back in time from the 21st century to the 19th and 12th centuries, and explores the themes of memory and forgiveness in the Bible and in our

contemporary culture. At the same time, A Guide for the Perplexed feels

somewhat different from Horn’s previous novels. The geographical focus is not the American-Eastern European Jewish axis but the Islamic world, both in

medieval times and today. An even more palpable difference is that, despite its heavy freight of cul-tural allusion, this novel is Horn’s speediest read yet. Maimonidean argument and biblical narrative

are central to the book, but its structure is that of a popular thriller, and its three hundred pages fly by even more effortlessly than her previous novels. (This may also be because it is not part of her larger project of trying to solder American Jewish memo-ry more deeply to its Ashkenazi antecedents.)

At the center of the novel’s plot is Josephine Ashkenazi, a computer genius with a touch of As-perger’s Syndrome (never mentioned but perfectly described: “The wave of accuracy surged within her, unstoppable, like nausea”) whose ultimate software design achievement would seem the stuff of science fiction were it not so close to what is happening around us each day. She has created a computer ap-plication that so thoroughly records the minutiae of

an individual’s existence that no part his or her life need any longer be lost or forgotten, at least from the perspective of a search engine. It is Facebook on steroids, a Google Glass watching the totality of our lives from birth to death.

Marinating hellishly in envy of Josie’s success is her older sister Judith. So eager is Judith to ex-perience a bit of freedom from her brilliant sister’s long shadow, which extends back into a childhood in which Josie was always the family’s favorite, that when the government of Egypt extends Josie a somewhat dodgy invitation to spend several weeks working as a data management consultant for its new, modern library in Alexandria, Judith presses the buttons of Josie’s ego as only a sibling knows how to do.

Josie heads off to Egypt. This is a land whose maladies are depicted in the novel in spiritual as much as historical terms: Egypt as Jewish tradition’s Mitzrayim, the place of human narrowness and con-striction of hope (which might, one muses, watch-ing CNN, be as accurate as any geopolitical analysis at this point). There she is kidnapped. Imprisoned, brutalized, and cut off from contact with the outside world, she is soon given up for dead by her family. Judith increasingly insinuates herself into the void left by her accomplished sister, until the novel’s outcome hangs on what sacrifices one sister might make for the sake of the other.

That this is a retelling of the biblical Joseph story is no secret, and Horn’s novel movingly

exposes the horror inhabiting that biblical text, the blinding hatred that can exist between siblings. Af-ter reading the account of Josie’s imprisonment in Egypt and her abandonment by her family, it will be impossible for me this fall, when I again hear the Torah readings recounting Joseph in the pit and in jail, not to feel more freshly and painfully the trauma Jacob’s son underwent and the act of will and self-mutilation required to endure it. The term “midrash” is thrown around too casually these days, applied to any mediocre poem or novel that happens to have a biblical figure in it. In draw-ing new depths of meaning and experience from the biblical story, Horn earns the term.

However, with characteristic narrative ambition, Horn also weaves into the novel two other stories, similarly set in Egypt and dealing with relations be-tween siblings. The first is Solomon Schechter’s re-covery of the Cairo Geniza in 1896-1897. A geniza is any synagogue storeroom in which worn-out

Fiction and Forgiveness BY MICHAEL WEINGRAD

A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novelby dara Hornw.w. norton, 352 pp., $25.95

That this is a retelling of the biblical Joseph story is no secret, and Horn’s novel movingly exposes the horror inhabiting that biblical text, the blinding hatred that can exist between siblings.

Dara Horn. (Courtesy of Michael B. Priest.)


Jewish texts are deposited, but ever since the Cam-bridge scholar (later head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York) carted off to England the contents of the one in the synagogue in old Cairo, it has become the geniza. What Schechter, following clues given him by the Cambridge scholar-travelers and identical twins Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis, found was a cultural treasure trove like noth-ing else in Jewish history.

Miraculously, the Cairo Geniza preserved centu-ries of texts and documents and letters and poems, including vanished Hebrew originals of ancient apocryphal texts, lost collected works of the literary titans of medieval Spain, and, through financial and legal records, first brilliantly analyzed by historian S.D. Goitein, a socio-economic record of medieval Jewish life in the Mediterranean unparalleled in its richness and detail. Over a century after Schechter’s visionary rescue of the material, historians are still profitably sifting through it.

The second story Horn weaves into the novel is that of the preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), some of whose own letters and manuscripts were discovered by Schechter in the Cairo Geniza. Horn imagines the relationship between Moses, a Cairo resident seven hundred years before Schechter’s sojourn, and his

brother David, who, we learn from a poignant letter, perished at sea in a shipwreck while on a business venture.

Horn deftly weaves together her three nar-ratives—Josie’s, Schechter’s, and Maimonides’—through a series of common motifs and themes: sibling rivalry (and Schechter, like his Cambridge friends Gibson and Lewis, had an identical twin, Israel, who helped found the, for Horn’s purposes,

perfectly named Israeli town of Zikhron Yaakov, or “memory of Jacob”); the precarious existence throughout history of Jews in the Muslim world; the destructive lure of fame; the mysteries of provi-dence; even asthma.

The most important of these thematic strands is memory, our relationship to the past, as it is embodied in the Cairo Geniza as well as its astro-nomically larger, present-day avatar in the inter-net. Josie’s computer application is in fact named Geniza, and part of her hubris is to believe that the total recall it allows can enable her to capture the essence of a person. Yet the centuries-old chaos of papers, scrolls, and fragments liberated by Schech-ter directly challenges our confidence that what we now call data, no matter how rich, big, or perfectly recorded, will bring us into the soul of another person. Horn’s novel may also reflect a parent’s

awareness that our now endless video records of our children, our social media walls and tumblr chronicles, only asymptotically approach the real-ity of our children’s selves, and can sometimes even occlude it.

In A Guide for the Perplexed, Horn voices a deep skepticism that any of us, even the careful his-

torian, can be confident of our access to an objec-tive past. As the twins of Cambridge presciently remark to Schechter:

But just consider how much material there will be for historians in the future, now that we have printing presses, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and mail deliveries two or three times a day. For every book and letter we find in this genizah, the genizah of the future will surely have hundreds of thousands. It will be endless. The past will become a bottomless pit.

This does not make the Cambridge ladies de-spondent. Rather, they cheerfully accept that all reconstructions of the past are creative, as much like the work of Horn the novelist imagining Mai-monides’ guilt over his brother’s death as they are like that of Schechter the scholar archiving papyrus fragments. Moreover, they calmly deny that any of these reconstructions can ever arrive at the truth of a life in its entirety. “[P]eople find what they wish to find, and remember what they wish to remember, regardless of the evidence presented to them,” says Margaret to the perplexed Schechter.

Where Horn’s novel shines most, and most darkly, is in its central plot. A geniza-like perfect memory, Horn teaches, has no place for forgiveness.


One of the novel’s unmentioned presiding spir-its is surely the late historian Yosef Hayim Yerush-almi, who, in his celebrated little book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, observed that history and memory, while often conflated, are two different, even opposed things. History, be-cause of its rigorous fidelity to the totality of the recorded past, cannot tell stories about or draw lessons from it. It is memory—willful, partial, and selective—that makes meaning from the past and allows us to find our way in the present. Yerush-almi found his own illustrative model in “Funes el memorioso” (“Funes the Memorious”), a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in which a man suffering a head injury is there-after endowed with the curse of perfect memory. He cannot forget anything. Without the ability to forget, Funes becomes paralyzed, swallowed in the ocean of undifferentiated existence, unable to judge or think.

Horn’s arabesque-like dips into Schechter and Maimonides are cleverly constructed. Yet, despite their thematic force, they feel ornamental (a prod-uct of geniza-like coincidence rather than Mai-monidean providence—though perhaps that is part of her point), and they are less vividly drawn than, for instance, the Schechter presented in Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s recent study Sa-cred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. “With his bushy, red-tinted beard, unruly hair, and tendency to gesticulate broadly as he spoke,” write Hoffman and Cole, “Schechter had been known to set off in the broiling heat of mid-summer wrapped up in a winter coat and several yards of scarf.”

Where Horn’s novel shines most, and most dark-ly, is in its central plot. For here we encounter the most startling aspect of her novel, her reconfigura-tion of the family reconciliation that brings the Jo-seph story to its conclusion. A geniza-like perfect memory, Horn teaches, has no place for forgiveness. It is simply impossible in our world of facts, in a perfectly whole historical record, to forgive another human being, let alone repent one’s own past ac-tions. As Horn’s Maimonides says: “We choose what is worthy of our memory. We should probably be grateful that we can’t remember everything as God does, because if we did, we would find it impossible to forgive anyone.”

Forgiveness, Horn proposes, requires a denial of the past. But she goes a step further, implying that forgiveness may even require the invention of a dif-ferent past, a rewriting of history. Horn’s Cambridge twins have no problem with this wisdom as applied to the historical record. “We treasure that tiny dis-covery of a world that was,” they tell Schechter, who worries that his scholarly researches may inadver-tently misread or even falsify the past, “Even if it was a world that wasn’t.”

Horn’s tale of Josie and Judith pushes this atti-tude into the realm of human relations, suggesting a conclusion that is unsettling and perhaps less than consoling. Each act of forgiveness is a fiction.

Michael Weingrad is academic director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States (Syracuse University Press).

1. of or pertaining to Moses or the laws, faith, institutions, and writings attributed to him.

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3. a new web magazine advancing ideas, argument, and reasoned

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To read our most recent edition, featuring a powerful essay on the end of European Jewry by Michel Gurfinkiel, visit us at:

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MOSAIC ADVANCING JEWISH THOUGHT


Who Owns Margot?BY NADIA KALMAN

These are exciting times for those of us who grew up reading comics and Asimov before “graduating” to literature. Some of the most interesting fiction now be-

ing written includes elements from popular genres: Jonathan Lethem’s sad superheroes, Lev Gross-man’s elitist magicians, and Gary Shteyngart’s future world, in which jeans have become transparent, but Jewish parents are the same as ever. At their best, these works bring complex characterization and multilayered imagery into the imaginative realms of genre and other “low” forms.

The possibilities offered by speculative fic-tion—the fiction of what might have been—often lead Jewish writers to a rewriting of the events of the Holocaust. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, millions are fictionally saved, given temporary refuge in Alaska. More often, though, authors pull single victims safely out of history. In The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth specu-lated upon what kind of adulthood Anne Frank might have had (as has Shalom Auslander more recently). Ellen Feldman’s incandescent novel The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank does the same for Pe-ter van Pels. And now Jillian Cantor has written Margot, imagining the life of Margot Frank had she survived Bergen-Belsen.

It is not surprising that we return so often to Anne Frank and those close to her. In Cantor’s less than felicitous but certainly memorable phrase, Frank is a “Holocaust icon.” Why Anne Frank? In the brilliant essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cyn-thia Ozick argued that the answer lies in both the power of her writing and the malleability of her im-age. The Diary of a Young Girl is keenly observant, darkly humorous—and deceptively accessible. The shallow analogies we can draw between our lives and Anne’s have allowed “a world that made of [the Diary] all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhab-ited evil.” It is easy to misread Anne’s diary, to think that because we know what it is to be young and misunderstood, we understand the Holocaust and its victims. It is easy to identify with the smiling girl in the photograph and to drape her in comforting sentiments that are easily disproven by the facts of her life and death.

We cast Anne Frank in our own image. In The Ghost Writer, an august judge sees Anne Frank as a beacon of Jewish community-minded probity, whereas the young protagonist Zuckerman sees her as the ultimate assimilationist. Some of that

can’t be helped—it is human nature to see our-selves in others. Some of it, however, relies on a willful blindness.

Unfortunately, now Anne’s sister, Margot, has been subjected to the same kind of treatment.

As I read Jillian Cantor’s new novel, I encountered a very different Margot than the one who appeared in the Diary and her friends’ recollections. The historical Margot had many interests and studied widely, including five different languages and liter-atures, advanced mathematics and science, ancient

and modern history, as well as practical subjects, such as shorthand and bookkeeping. According to the Diary, in her spare time, Margot read “about everything, in particular about religion and medi-cine.” Margot planned, after the war, to become a midwife in Palestine. She probably would have done well; her friends and the Diary describe a kind, levelheaded young woman.

Of that Margot Frank, Cantor has retained lit-tle, mainly just her knowledge of shorthand and Anne’s teasing description of her as a “paragon of virtue” (two facts that appear early, on consecu-

tive pages, in the Diary). The fictional Margot al-ludes to her former scholarship and religiosity, but seems to have retained little of either. There are few references to any books besides her sister’s diary, few references to Judaism besides candle-lighting, and no mention of Israel at all.

Margot’s current interests include eye color. If she isn’t remembering that Peter van Pels’ eyes were “blue, like the sea,” she is noticing (or re- noticing, many, many times) that the eyes of her American love interest are “gray-green.” This thirty-three-year-old woman experiences what appear to

be novel and intriguing sensations of “warmth” in the presence of these men and their eyes. Another of her interests is romantic rivals, both real and imagined. Watching the film version of the Diary, she is most upset not by its lack of real-ism, nor by painful memories it has trig-gered, but because it is Peter and Anne kissing in the final scene: “And Margot, she is nowhere to be found.”

In Cantor’s reimagining, Margot’s past includes a secret romance with Peter van Pels. Far from midwifery in Palestine, this novel’s Margot dreamt of wifery in Philadelphia, where she and Peter had planned to reunite. The book is set in the Philadelphia of 1959, where Margot has taken on the non-Jewish name “Margie Franklin,” concealed her roots, and found work as a legal secre-tary in a Jewish practice.

As I read on, I realized that Mar-got’s closest literary cousins were to be found not in speculative fiction, but in romance novels, where the focus is on love and the endings are happy. Several tropes of the romance genre come into play in the novel: a romantic rivalry with a scheming sister (in this case, with Anne, which gave me pause, as the fic-tionally scheming rival was not yet six-teen); a mousy secretary in love with her boss; and a hidden identity that, once revealed, makes the love interest all the more enamored.

Although Margot/Margie is studying to be a paralegal (a slight anachronism in 1959, if I am not mistaken), she doesn’t seem to have much interest in her work outside of the opportunity it provides to see her boss and crush, Joshua Rosen-stein. A workplace discrimination suit brought by an Auschwitz survivor inspires excitement and am-bivalence, but not for the reasons you might expect:

As I wait for Joshua to come out of his office, just before noon, my cheeks grow warm at the notion of our upcoming lunch, just the two of us. Then I find myself thinking, That was

Margot: A Novelby Jillian Cantor Riverhead Books, 352 pp., $16

Anne Frank, left, and her sister, Margot, at the beach, ca. 1935. (Courtesy of Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank House via Getty Images.)


how it began with Peter and me, lunch. And it is confusing how my mind wanders to Peter, when I am so eagerly awaiting the time with Joshua.

The men in her life are little more than points in a romantic triangle. Peter is a lover from her past; Joshua represents her potential romantic future; otherwise, they are very similar. They both com-plain about their parents in rather adolescent terms (granted, Peter is an actual adolescent at the time).

They both woo Margot with clichés (“You’re really beautiful, even if you don’t know it,” says Peter, an-ticipating a One Direction song of two years ago). And, of course, they both have nice, albeit differ-ently colored, eyes.

Other characters function mainly as catalysts to Margot’s love life. Even Peter’s cat, Mouschi, best known in the Diary for his urinary antics, gets dragged in to do his bit, plopped in Margot’s lap so that Peter can say, “He knows that you are special,” and Margot can experience exciting sensations of warmth. Bryda, the Holocaust survivor who’s bring-ing the discrimination case, and who presumably might have more on her mind than her lawyer’s love life, re-enters the novel at the end to say in her bro-ken English, “I see way he look at you . . . You more than secretary.”

My favorite parts of Margot were those not tethered to the marriage plot. Some of

Margot’s early reactions to American acquaintanc-es and popular culture, including the film Some Like It Hot, are well-rendered. Bryda, the bitter, canny plaintiff of the discrimination case, seemed like an interesting character when she was first introduced. Some descriptions of the camps are haunting, although the impact of several startling phrases diminishes with their repetition. Edith Frank, in Margot’s memory, says some sensible and character-appropriate words.

Ultimately, though, the drive toward a happy ending takes priority, and the book begins knock-ing off obstacles. One such obstacle is Ezra Rosen-stein, Joshua’s father and boss, whose focus on earnings prevents Joshua from pursuing cases that “help people.” So, Ezra sickens and dies. Joshua and Margot open a practice that matches Joshua’s ideals, where he wears shirts that match his eyes. Joshua also breaks off his engagement to the brassy, snobby Penny, a romantic rival out of a Taylor Swift video. (Apparently, the wedding was all Ezra’s idea.) The queasy-making historical irony—that their happi-ness results from the death of a purportedly money-obsessed Jew—eludes the blithe pair. The trauma of Holocaust survival poses another obstacle and is dispensed with equal efficiency.

United lovers, a happy ending: Margot certainly meets the basic genre requirements for a romance

novel. The trouble is, it is not being presented to readers as a romance, but as serious literary fiction. Advance blurbs mention its truthfulness and psy-chological subtlety. Yet, this novel houses its roman-tic hero on Knight Street, repeatedly, and nonsensi-cally, uses skipping to denote childhood innocence (Cantor imagines that Anne and Margot, at ages twelve and fifteen, are often skipping home from school), and gives everyone the same stilted and melodramatic speaking style. As for psychological insight: Of her father’s decision to publish the diary, Margot says:

If nothing else, Father is a good businessman, and when he realized he could get the diaries published, make money, profit from the books, I am sure he thought, Why shouldn’t I?

(In reality, of course, sixteen English-language pub-lishers rejected the Diary before it finally sold. Sell-ing a victim’s story to a determinedly postwar world was not the quickest way to make a buck.)

In ordinary life, someone who places romance above all else may seem merely neurotic. In times of war, that person seems deranged, and this novel’s “ro-mantic” approach to the achterhuis residents distorts their characters. When the Green Police come to the door, the narrative focus is on a fictional plot twist that could have been lifted from a soap opera: Anne discovers Peter and Margot in bed together. (In Can-tor’s invented version of events, Peter was two-timing the sisters.) Anne then becomes hysterical, screaming at the police and refusing to leave. In reality, need-

less to say, Anne never came close to jeopardizing her family’s safety like that. There are more important things than romance, as she well knew.

To some, including perhaps Cantor herself, the inclusion of terrible historical events makes Mar-got more than a romance novel: It’s the Holocaust as ballast, with romance as bait. In this view, the sugary love story is there to help the lessons of the Holocaust go down easily. But there is very little to be learned about human suffering from a book in which no one is fully human. There is a reason why most genre fiction is so stylized, its characters subservient to plots. To put it starkly, conventional genre fiction tries to offer readers an escape from unwieldy and unhappy human realities, whereas literature mostly tries to do the opposite. An au-thor does, ultimately, have to choose between the two.

As lines between genre and literary fiction blur, some writers seek the gravitas conveyed by serious subjects without being willing to grapple with the messiness of actual events and humans. Unfortu-nately, for every genre-bending Art Spiegelman, there is someone who learned precisely the wrong lesson from Maus: that it is possible to depict those who suffered and died in the Holocaust as cartoon characters.

Nadia Kalman is the author of The Cosmopolitans (Livingston Press). An NEA recipient, she is presently working on a novel of speculative fiction set in revolutionary Russia.

There is very little to be learned about human suffering from a book in which no one is fully human.

800-842-6796iupress.indiana.edu

“This is a very important study. It does not follow the well-trodden paths, and does not employ the phraseology frequently found in books on Soviet Jewry. This study opens up vistas for additional work that will be written in its spirit. It successfully analyzes the deep social and cultural processes that took place in Soviet Jewry.” —Mordechai altshuler, hebrew university

“Elissa Bemporad has deepened and enriched our understanding of the social transformations Soviet Jews experienced in the two decades after the revolution. Mining hitherto inaccessible archives, she deftly links larger historical processes to the changes in the lives of ordinary—and some extraordinary—Jews in one of the great centers of Yiddish culture and Judaism. Judiciously using photographs and the prose and poetry of the time, Bemporad vividly shows that tradition exerted a powerful influence even in Soviet times but was eventually defeated by the combination of attractive new opportunities, in intensive resocialization, and terror.” —Zvi GitelMan, author of A Century of AmbivAlenCe: the Jews of russiA And the soviet union, 1881 to the Present

BECOMING SOVIET JEWS

ELISSA BEMPORAD

THE BOLSHEVIK EXPERIMENT IN MINSK


Superman was born on a hot, restless night in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s 1933 and Jerry Siegel, barely out of high school, has already been trying for years to make it as a science fiction

writer, or a comic strip writer, or a writer of crime fiction, or a pulp publisher, or anything creative that could take him away from small-time retail. Dazed, he wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea. He goes to his desk and starts writing. But he’s too tired, and it’s too hot, and he goes back to bed . . . only to be compelled back to the desk! In two-hour cycles he wakes, writes, and goes back to his fitful sleep. There’s something about this idea that won’t let him go. There’s also something about the night itself that clarifies the jumble of images in his mind.

Clouds drifted past the moon. Up there was wind. If only I could fly. If only . . . and SUPERMAN was conceived, not in his entirety, but little by little . . .

The next morning he runs to the home of Joe Shuster, his best friend and frequent collaborator. Siegel knows that the idea should be a comic, be-cause seeing the Superman would be essential to the experience. Despite their many previous fail-ures, Shuster believes in his friend. They start work-ing immediately.

It’s a good story, though it is almost certainly made up. In another version, it’s 1934. Siegel had diligently worked on his Superman idea all day and awoke only to fill in the gaps. Then there is the nature of the story itself, the too-perfect elements. True, Saul Bellow once claimed that “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write,” but few writers and artists actually compose this way, least of all Jerry Siegel. In Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators of Super-man, Brad Ricca nicely describes Siegel’s story as “a magical tale about the creative process . . . After all of the failures, the one idea comes, as if from heaven, and saves him.” The truth of Siegel’s cre-ative process is the failures, the false starts and mis-steps that nevertheless contained something worth-while, interesting, maybe even new.

The actual creative breakthrough may have hap-pened the year before, when Siegel and Shuster col-laborated on an illustrated short story called “The Reign of the Super-Man.” On the surface, there’s little resemblance between “Reign” and the later Superman. The Super-Man of the early story was

Bill Dunn, a Depression-era tramp who gained the ability to telepathically control others after a mad scientist secretly fed him an experimental serum. This Super-Man is a super villain! He’s used his mental powers to bring the world to the brink of war. But suddenly he gets a glimpse of a future when he won’t be able to replicate the serum and is once again destitute. The Super-Man repents in

somewhat Jewish tones: “I see, now, how wrong I was. If I had worked for the good of humanity, my name would have gone down in history with a blessing—instead of a curse.”

Ricca remarks that the story contains “every sin-gle element of the superhero character that was be-ginning to wake,” but this understates what “Reign” actually captures. The abrupt shift in the character-ization of the Super-Man marks Siegel’s real creative insight: Depression America needed a hero. Over

the years, Superman has transformed into a power-ful god who fights other godlike beings. In the new hit movie Man of Steel, he saves humanity from the apocalyptic Kryptonian “World Engine.” But the ear-liest Superman of Siegel and Shuster’s Action Comics was a social reformer: He used his super-strength to

strong-arm a corrupt mine owner into investing in better safeguards and to fight the scourge of reckless driving (“The auto accident death rate of this com-munity is one that should shame us all!” Superman correctly muses in Action #12). This was a Super-man working for the good of humanity.

Yet “Reign of the Super-Man” only partially ex-plains Superman’s origins. Siegel and Shuster’s bi-

ographers, Superman’s biographers, and com-ics historians are all obsessed with answering the question, “Where did the idea of a superpowered man come from?” Superman is, after all, not only the exemplary superhero, he is the first of his kind, the one whose success spawned one of the richest, most popular, most endur-ing, and most malleable genres in American cultural history. X-Men, The Avengers, Batman, the TV shows, the movies, the comics—none would have existed without Siegel and Shuster’s Superman.

So our biographers and historians frantical-ly hunt for explanations. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter was a human who gained incred-ible jumping abilities in the lower-gravity envi-ronment of Mars. Is Superman, an alien, John Carter in reverse? Did the idea for Superman’s secret identity come from Lamont Cranston/The Shadow? Did the adventure plots come from Douglas Fairbanks movies? Did the idea for a man with super strength come from Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator? From bodybuilding magazines like Physical Culture? From the Jew-ish strongman Siegmund Breitbart, who was called “Hercules” and “Superman” by the Cleve-land papers? Or was Joe Shuster inspired by a different Jewish strongman, Joseph Greenstein, The Mighty Atom? It was said that Greenstein

was shot between the eyes in Galveston, Texas in 1914, only for the bullet to flatten on his forehead and drop to the floor. Or maybe Superman is simply Jerry Siegel’s response to a childhood trauma.

Others have wondered if Superman can be ex-plained by Siegel and Shuster’s Judaism. Did the idea for super-strength come from the story of Samson? Superman did threaten to tear down the pillars sup-porting a building in order to force a peace settle-ment. “A guy named Samson once had the same

Meanwhile, on a Quiet Street in ClevelandBY EITAN KENSKY

Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators of Supermanby Brad RiccaSt. Martin’s Press, 448 pp., $27.99

Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Wayby Harry BrodFree Press, 240 pp, $25

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, seated, in their studio, ca. 1942. (Personal collection of Brad Ricca.)

The earliest Superman was a social reformer: He used his super-strength to strong-arm a corrupt mine owner into investing in better safeguards and to fight the scourge of reckless driving.


idea!” (Superman #2) Was super-strength a response to the insecurity that Siegel and Shuster felt as Jews in America? Or, as Harry Brod argues in Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way, is the combination of Superman’s super-strength and Clark’s weakness a commentary on how Jewish men were perceived? Does the way his parents saved the future savior from destruction by sending him to Earth in a small rocket make him like Moses? Others have suggested that there is something fundamental-ly Jewish about Kryptonite. Only the old-world past can haunt and wound the assimilated Jew.

The questions and answers simultaneously ele-vate and deflate Siegel and Shuster, as if the best that they could do was distill and bottle something that was already in the air. But the intensity of the ques-tioning also shows the enduring fascination of Sie-gel and Shuster’s creation. It is, apparently, almost impossible to believe that Superman came through the constant writing and rewriting, drafting and re-drafting, of two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster have typically Jewish American origin stories. Siegel was the young-

est child of immigrants from Lithuania. His fa-ther, Michel (pronounced “Mitchell,” though he also went by Michael and Mike), owned a clothing store on Central Avenue, earning enough money to move the family to a comfortable home in Glen-ville, a Jewish neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland. Siegel read the comics, crime fiction, adventure, and proto-science fiction magazines such as Astounding Stories. He sent letters to the editor and tried writing his own stories. All were terrible. Shuster’s parents were also immigrants. His father, once a tailor, worked as an eleva-tor operator at Mount Sinai Hospital. The family moved to Glenville in 1929, eventually living in a small apartment. Joe “read” the newspaper comics with his father even before he could read words. He began drawing at the age of four and began to teach himself illustration by tracing newspaper cartoons. His family encouraged his talent, and he won several contests.

Ricca’s Super Boys is at its best during Siegel and Shuster’s youth. Ricca captures the excitement of what it means for a nerdy outsider to finally meet

someone similar. Ric-ca reads Siegel and Shuster’s earliest work in their high school newspaper, The Torch, with unusual precision and care in order to show that they were al-ways autobiographical artists. Siegel unsubtly translated his unre-quited crush on a girl named Miriam into melancholy poems and crude detective stories. It was a mode of writing he contin-ued in Superman: Lois Lane was taken from Lois Amster, a girl Sie-gel admired from afar. Shuster’s sense of phys-

ical inadequacy led to an obsession with bodybuild-ing and strongmen. Moreover, his biggest handicap, poor eyesight, was the one Superman used to project weakness as Clark Kent: those nerdy glasses.

The most important biographical detail that inspired Superman was the death of Michel Siegel in 1932 after three men robbed his clothing store. There were reports that Siegel was shot, but it was later determined that he died of a heart attack caused by the shock. Ricca is not the first to connect Superman, the world’s ultimate crime-fighter and a man impervious to bullets, to this event. It was

prominently detailed in Gerard Jones’ Men of To-morrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, the best book on the creation of the comic book industry.

Ricca is unique, however, in how aggressively he seizes on this idea. Ricca finds echoes of Michel Siegel’s death throughout individual issues of Super-man. In Superman #2 (1939), Superman confronts a criminal who dies suddenly of a heart attack. Su-perman stops to think, “Dead . . . Heart-failure! The excitement was too much for him!” To Ricca, this suggests “Siegel’s possible anger at his father for not being able to handle the ‘excitement’ of the robbery that kills him.” Later, Ricca argues that Superman’s father’s decision to send Kal-El into space rather than save himself is “perhaps a carefully constructed my-thology through which the young Jerry can attempt to understand his father’s death.” While neither read-ing is entirely compelling (and the second is less so than the first), the underlying premise is sound. Sie-gel thought through comic books. Though he doesn’t quite say it, Ricca is really arguing that comic book creators draw no less from their own lives than other artists. We resist this conclusion because they write about impossibly proportioned men and women in spandex, but we shouldn’t.

Indeed, it is impossible to ignore the way that Siegel and Shuster’s frustrations with their pub-lisher increasingly found their way into the comics. It was years from the time Siegel and Shuster cre-ated Superman until Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1 (1938). They extensively revised and resubmitted their Superman proposal while also developing other characters. They created Dr.

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Superman comic book pages outside Joe Shuster's boyhood home in Cleveland celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Man of Steel. (© Tony Dejak/ /AP/Corbis.)


Occult, Radio Squad, and Federal Men for New Fun Comics, and Slam Bradley, a tough private eye from Cleveland, for Detective Comics. Eventually, Nation-al Publications decided to publish Superman on the condition that Siegel and Shuster sold the character. For $130, Superman became National’s exclusive property. Siegel and Shuster stood to earn a percent-age from later deals, such as newspaper syndication rights, but as Jones points out in Men of Tomorrow, the two never considered the creativity of modern corporate accounting.

In the lead story of Action Comics #6 (1938), “The Man Who Sold Superman,” Clark Kent meets Nick Williams, a man posing as Superman’s “per-sonal manager.” Williams has monetized Super-man: There is a Superman radio show, Superman gasoline, a Superman automobile. A nightclub siren belts the smash hit “You’re a Superman!” (“You can make my heart leap / Ten thousand feet!”) Lois sees through the scheme, and Superman stops Williams and the crook he’s hired to pretend to be Superman.

For years Siegel, Shuster, and the assistants Shus-ter hired to keep up with demand wrote and illustrat-ed Superman for National. They earned a higher page rate than other freelancers, and for a time they grew rich from the Superman newspaper strip. But they never earned as much as they felt they deserved, and they received less over time. The two eventually sued National for the rights to Superman and Superboy. A court ruled that National owned Superman but not Superboy. They settled for close to $100,000 in 1948; the money almost immediately disappeared to law-yers, back taxes, and Siegel’s divorce settlement.

The ups and downs of the rest of Siegel and Shus-ter’s careers make for a largely depressing story: their failed comics; their legal efforts to regain their copyright; the mass public relations movement that belatedly led to Siegel and Shuster’s official recog-nition as the creators of Superman and an annuity from Time Warner, the current rights holder; and the continued legal struggle on behalf of Siegel and Shuster’s heirs. But it is worth highlighting two later creative achievements.

Siegel began writing Superman again in the 1950s and 1960s. Working with a number of artists, he helped create the comic’s new light-hearted, kid-centric tone and wrote some of his best Superman stories. He was even given the chance to kill Super-man in 1961’s Superman #149. In the “imaginary” story (meaning, it never “happened”), Lex Luthor reforms and creates a cure for cancer. Superman tes-tifies that Luthor should be released from prison for his work on behalf of man (shades of “Reign of the Super-Man”), and the two become friends. But it is all a charade, an elaborate scheme to catch Superman off guard! Luther traps Superman and bombards him with Kryptonite until he dies. Though it was an imag-inary story, Siegel got the rare opportunity to bring a serial character full circle. He was given the right to choose what character trait would lead to Super-man’s demise: his kindness or his belief in the good of humanity. (By contrast, when DC Comics decided to kill Superman in 1992 they had him lose a fight—the villain Doomsday was stronger than he was.)

Shuster’s late-aesthetic triumph is more dubious. Broke in the mid-1950s, he ended up illustrating fe-tish comics, drawing pictures of men and women in elaborate bondage poses, in various stages of un-dress. The subject may be coarse, but the art is re-markable. There is a care and surety to the line. It is

unquestionably his best work in at least a decade. Even more remarkable is who he chose to draw. His men look like Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen; his women like Lois Lane and Lana Lang. Other than the need for money, we may never know why Shus-ter illustrated fetish magazines. But the explanation, offered by Craig Yoe in the sumptuously produced Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster, that this was his retribution for mistreatment by National Publications has a certain poetic justice that makes me hope it’s true.

But, to return to Harry Brod’s question by way of Ricca, if Siegel and Shuster were au-

tobiographical writers, does that make Superman Jewish? Arguments for a Semitic Superman are increasingly widespread. You can find them in magazine articles, in coffee table books, in Super-man biographies, and in scholarly discussions of American popular culture. Yet while Superman unquestionably has Jewish elements, to argue that Superman is essentially Jewish is to misunderstand the nature of comic book narrative.

Comics are exciting, in part, because they are al-ways moving. Comics embrace reinvention. They even birthed the beautiful term “retroactive continu-ity” (or “retcon”) to describe and excuse creators’ ten-dencies to freely change aspects of a character’s past. We can read a truly Jewish take on Superman and a completely Christological one and an atheistic sci-fi one—and sometimes find them all in the same story.

The arguments for Superman’s Jewish identity start with his Kryptonian name, Kal-El. Brod trans-lates this as “all is God” or “all for God,” while oth-ers more convincingly read it as “voice of God.” The destruction of Krypton is sometimes alleged to have something to do with the kabbalistic creation myth of the breaking of the cosmic vessels, and Superman’s periodic homesickness a kind of survivor’s guilt. Others emphasize Superman as an Americanization narrative: The immigrant comes to America and is accepted, even becomes the symbol for America. Others see Superman’s progressive, New Deal poli-tics as distinctively Jewish. He was a paragon of so-

cial justice, of tzedek. To others, the clearest sign that Superman is Jewish is his secret identity, Clark Kent, the weakling, the nebbish (or the man with a secret identity trying to pass as a mild-mannered WASP). Harry Brod, who once edited an anthology subtitled Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, embellishes this idea. The genius of Superman is the embodiment of the weak Jew and strong Gentile in one character:

Clark’s Jewish-seeming nerdiness and Superman’s non-Jewish-seeming hypermasculinity are two sides of the same coin, the accentuated Jewish male stereotype and its exaggerated stereotypical counterpart.

Many of these data points are compelling in iso-lation but less so in context. Clark Kent’s weakness is only “Jewish” when read a certain way. Jules Fei-ffer famously described Clark Kent as “Superman’s opinion of the rest of us.” He’s not a commentary on strength and weakness or Jew versus Gentile; he’s a hook for powerless Clark Kentish readers who wish they could reveal superpowers of their own. Like-wise, few of the Jewish elements occur simultane-ously. Superman was a New Deal Democrat in the late thirties, a time when Krypton was little more than a name. Kryptonite, the old world as weapon, didn’t appear in the comics until 1949.

Krypton, however, was a major part of Siegel’s sec-ond run on Superman. In Siegel’s “Superman’s Return to Krypton” in Superman #141 (1960), Superman is catapulted back in time to before Krypton exploded. He lives a life there, falling in love with a beautiful actress and growing close to his birth parents. He is ultimately forced to watch the destruction of his home world, incapable of doing anything to solve the crisis. It’s a poignant story, one that nicely illustrates that great Superman stories are about human weak-ness and failings as well as strength and possibilities. It can also reasonably be interpreted as a Jewish, post-Holocaust story: The old world is suddenly more meaningful to the American Jew now that it has been destroyed. But it can also be interpreted as an alle-gory for Siegel’s return to National and Superman. It’s

Superman exhibit at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.


exciting, but he also has no control over the character he created. He is a bystander to its fate.

Then there are the “other” Supermen. Bryan Singer’s 2006 reboot of the movie franchise,

Superman Returns, gave us a second-coming story. It had a superhero who suffered for the world, and it depicted his flight as a kind of sacred weightless-ness, almost an emanation of grace. By contrast, this summer’s Man of Steel crudely inserted explicit Christian references into the story: Superman is thirty-three years old, he seeks advice from a priest in front of a stained-glass window, and later falls through the heavens towards Earth in a crucifix-ion pose. Yet the movie also emphasized the space saga elements of the narrative. Superman is strong because he is an alien, and his flight is filmed as an explosion of kinetic energy, of the possibili-ties of the body. We are back to the guy who leaps tall buildings in a single bound. The movie gives us countercurrents of the sci-fi Superman and the Christian Superman. This nuance, however, was unfortunately blunted by the way the marketing emphasized Christian overtones. The studio went so far as to create a website where pastors could find sermon notes connecting Superman to Jesus.

Brod likely sees Man of Steel as an example of the continued “de-Jewification” of Superman, of the erasure of Superman’s “mischievous streak” and his transformation into a very strong saint. It’s an argu-ment to which I’m sympathetic, but only a little. Just two years ago, writer Grant Morrison brought back Superman’s mischievousness and social conscious-ness in the relaunched Action Comics. Superman went after corrupt businessmen with a fervor not seen since the earliest issues of Siegel’s Action Com-ics version. If anything, Morrison’s secular take re-minds us what a mistake it is to call Superman’s so-cial consciousness “Jewish.” Perhaps the best way to think about the Superman story, whatever the me-dium, is as an unending symphony. Character traits are like musical themes waiting for variations. They are amplified or muted depending on the needs of a specific time signature.

In 1998, in a three-part story, two children of the Warsaw ghetto (who strongly resemble Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) create stories of an “angel” in a cape and a costume with a triangular shield who comes to save them. Superman arrives, provoking the Nazi soldiers to complain to their superiors about the “Golem” they have to fight. In a sense, this is just an incorporation of the “Superman is Jewish” inter-pretation written into the comic itself. On the other hand, it’s completely natural. Superman is always waiting to be transformed. He is never essentially anything.

But in the beginning, it was simple. As Brad Ricca’s Super Boys reminds us, Superman was cre-ated by two Jewish teenagers who dreamed of an artistic life and who had the rare ability to continue working on an idea until it was developed, then to continue working on it until it became something larger, more poignant, more resonant, more every-thing. That was their superpower.

Eitan Kensky is the preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University. He is working on a book about literary criticism written by Jewish American novelists and fiction written by Jewish American critics.

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The Day School Tuition Crisis: A Short HistoryBY RONA SHERAMY

When New York’s police commission-er complained in 1908 about young Jewish immigrants’ disproportion-ately high rate of street crime and

truancy, he wasn’t demanding that they spend more time in Hebrew school. But his comments unwit-tingly spurred the most massive effort to improve Jewish education that American Jews had ever seen. A cadre of Jewish philanthropists and educators, stung by the commissioner’s accusations and con-tending with hundreds of thousands of immigrant children whose parents had little time or money to invest in Jewish schooling, set out to professional-ize Jewish education in New York and situate it as a communal—rather than family or congregational—responsibility.

A century later, in the midst of the biggest finan-cial meltdown most American Jews had ever seen, the question of communal responsibility for Jewish edu-cation was at the forefront again. The problem to ad-dress was no longer kids pickpocketing and skipping school, but rather unsustainable school budgets and Jewish families hit hard by the financial crisis. Many feared that, as during the Great Depression, Jewish education would fall low on the Jewish community’s overburdened agenda. Of particular concern was the day school system, one of the biggest success stories of post-World War II Jewish education, but also the most expensive. Funding this system, which by 2008 stretched over more than eight hundred schools and more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand youth, had always been a problem. Now the unre-solved questions of how much parents could bear in tuition payments, schools could bear in enrollment and revenue shortfalls, and communal organizations could bear in subsidizing this system assumed new urgency.

At the time of the police commissioner’s infa-mous report, the majority of the three hundred and sixty thousand elementary-aged Jewish children in the United States were receiving no formal Jewish education at all, and the schools that did exist were mostly inadequate. Institutions such as the Bureau of Jewish Education of New York and the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary sought to rectify the situation by creating standards for the vast network of schools and those who taught in them. In 1937, following the twenty-fifth anniver-saries of these institutions, Israel Chipkin, head of the Jewish Education Association of New York City, published an assessment of the progress of Ameri-can Jewish education.

Much had changed. The number of American Jewish children of elementary school age had in-creased to eight hundred thousand, due in large part to mass migration from Europe (which had, however, virtually ceased after the immigration leg-islation of 1921 and 1924). Only about a quarter of these children were receiving any Jewish education. Nonetheless Chipkin could write an extensive re-port on a broad array of positive developments, in-

cluding a few pages devoted to the “all-day school,” which occupied a relatively small but growing part of the Jewish educational network. In 1901, there were only two day schools in North America; by 1935, that number had grown to eighteen, from the “Old-type Yeshibah,” to the “Modern-type Yeshibah,” to the “Private Progressive-type.”

Despite his general optimism about the future of Jewish education, Chipkin was skeptical about the “all-day” format:

All these all-day schools are essentially institutions for the few and the select. They are financially prohibitive to the masses and cannot readily become the typical community school.

Although he believed that there would continue to be “a sufficiently interested minority within the community who will make every sacrifice to main-

tain them” and expected these schools to “supply that contingent of intensively trained Jewish youth who enter our higher schools of Jewish learning,” he concluded that they “must always remain the op-portunity of the exclusive few.”

As a disciple of the great Jewish educator Samson Benderly, it is not surprising that Chipkin concen-trated most of his attention on the Talmud Torahs, intensive afternoon supplementary schools, which would provide a substantive Jewish education with-

out precluding the Americanizing experience of the public schools. Yet, Chipkin’s assessment of the day schools’ prospects cannot be dismissed as merely the biased reflections of a supplementary school ad-vocate. As historian Jonathan Krasner notes, even Chipkin sent his children to day school.

If Chipkin had revisited the scene a quarter of a

century later, he would have had some real chang-es to report. By the mid-1960s, the growth of the Orthodox community, revived interest in things Jewish sparked by the Holocaust and Israel, dis-enchantment with public schools, and a postwar ethnic revival led to very significant growth in the day school movement. In 1940, there were thirty-five day schools enrolling 7,700 students in seven states and Canadian provinces; by 1964, these fig-ures had grown to 306 schools in thirty-four states and provinces, enrolling 65,400 students. Roughly nine percent of those children receiving some form of Jewish education in the United States attended a day school; in New York City, that figure was closer to twenty-nine percent. Most of these schools were under Orthodox auspices, launched by the Torah Umesorah movement and other organizations that sought to promote Torah education in America.

While it was common for non-Orthodox fami-lies to send their children to Orthodox institutions, day school advocates within other movements be-gan laying the groundwork for their own schools. These proponents argued that only a truly inten-sive Jewish education could prepare future leaders of their movements, especially in a post-Holocaust world that no longer had the reservoir of European Jewry to provide an intellectual and cultural elite. The Reform community did not establish its first day school until 1970 and supporters were in the minority until then, but Emanuel Gamoran, one of the pioneers of Reform education, made a sympa-thetic case for such schools in 1950: “We must ad-mit that there is a great need for the training of Jew-ish leadership of which Hebraic education is a basis. We have no such basis now in the ranks of Reform Judaism. Without it we shall be largely dependent on Orthodox and Conservative Jews to supply us with children who have a sufficient Hebraic back-ground to go into Jewish work, into Jewish educa-tion, or into the rabbinate.” Day school advocates among Conservative Jews, who began setting up day schools in the 1950s, made a similar argument. “The growth of the day school will help the Conser-vative movement to create a reservoir of intensely educated and deeply dedicated men and women,” declared the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education in 1958.

While the postwar economic boom emboldened American Jews to set up hundreds of day schools, the great cost of sustaining these schools always hovered over their efforts.

Israel Chipkin. (Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.)


Nonetheless, outside of ultra-Orthodox circles, most mid-century Jewish parents simply did not regard day schools as necessary or an option. Day schools were not on the radar of the vast majority of American Jews, who were more accustomed to send-ing their children to an afternoon school or Sunday school at their local congregation. Moreover, state-ments like those of Gamoran and the United Syna-gogue Commission on Jewish Education notwith-standing, many, perhaps most, postwar Reform and Conservative Jews had profound misgivings about a day school system that threatened to undermine both congregational schools and the hard-sought integra-tion of Jews into the wider American society.

One of the factors that impeded enrollment in day schools, even within the Orthodox community, was the very same prob-lem of tuition that Chipkin had described. While the postwar economic boom emboldened American Jews to set up hundreds of day schools, the great cost of sustaining these schools always hovered over their efforts. Writing in 1955, the principal of a Brooklyn yeshiva complained about the difficulties involved in providing financial aid:

I know of no central educational agency that has attempted to bring to the lime-light the question of tuition. And yet, the very problem has been annoying and embarrassing to parents, [and] vexing to the school . . . What policy, if any, may a Yeshiva pursue in the admission of children? Shall all applicants be admitted regardless of the parents’ ability to pay? Or shall certain “quotas” . . . be established to regulate admission? If the first be adopted, such a liberal policy might soon deplete the school’s funds and deprive all children, paying or non-paying, of a Yeshiva education. On the other hand, the second course might exclude too many children clamoring for admission.

An attorney active in the day school world be-moaned that growing enthusiasm for day schools did not resolve the question of how to support them: “In the past few decades, the Yeshiva move-ment has made tremendous progress in the United States and Yeshivos have not only become accepted but have become increasingly popular…The most important problem that is facing the normal prog-ress of the Yeshiva movement today—as always in the past—is the lack of funds.” A half-century later that complaint still resonates.

While the burden of tuition and balancing the budget always caused much worry among

day school families and administrators, it was not until the 1980s and 90s, when many people began to see an all-day program as the sine qua non of “serious Jewish child-rearing,” that these financial

problems became an issue on which much of the Jewish future seemed to ride. A “continuity crisis” had engulfed the Jewish community, with reports of waning Jewish affiliation, especially among the young. The National Jewish Population Survey, is-sued in 1990, shocked the Jewish community with its claim that roughly fifty percent of American Jews intermarried. “The Jewish community of North America is facing a crisis of major proportions,” declared A Time to Act, the landmark call-to-arms report issued that same year. “Large numbers of Jews have lost interest in Jewish values, ideals, and behavior, and there are many who no longer believe

that Judaism has a role to play in their search for personal fulfillment and communality.”

The organized Jewish community mobilized on several fronts, but no arena received more attention than Jewish education. Jewish learning—formal and informal, in schools, in camps, for youth, for adults—moved to the forefront of the communal agenda. As A Time to Act put it, “the responsibility for developing Jewish identity and instilling a com-mitment to Judaism for this [disaffected] popula-tion now rests primarily with education.” More so than any point in the history of the modern day school movement, educational, communal, and philanthropic leaders viewed day schools as the best hope for saving American Jewry. Day schools are “arguably the most impactful single weapon in our arsenal for educating Jewish children and youth,” asserted the 1995 Report of the North American Commission on Jewish Identity and Continuity. Day schools were no longer solely the province of Or-thodox families or those who sought an alternative to the public school system; they were for any fam-ily who cared deeply about raising Jewish children. This message resonated particularly with parents who had attended the supplementary schools in the 1960s and 1970s and who lacked the Judaic skills they sought so eagerly for their daughters and sons.

But these schools were also “seriously under-funded,” according to the first comprehensive study of day school finances commissioned by the AVI CHAI Foundation in the school year 1995-1996. And if proper investments were not made in im-

proving school facilities, faculty salaries, Judaic and secular programming options, and the like, “most American Jews may never consider this form of edu-cation, and even when they do, will not elect it.” A flurry of activity on the part of philanthropists, foun-dations, federations, and organizations to improve and build day schools, in addition to high fertility rates among Orthodox Jews, resulted in significant growth in enrollment, as noted by a series of stud-ies conducted by Marvin Schick for AVI CHAI over the following decades. In 1998-1999, there were one hundred eighty-five thousand students attending 670 day schools, which represented an increase of twen-ty thousand to twenty-five thousand students since the early 1990s and twenty percent growth in non-Orthodox schools; by 2008-2009, there were more than eight hundred Jewish day schools in the United States, matriculating 228,174 students, which rep-resented an enrollment increase of twenty-five per-cent over 1998-1999, including five percent growth in non-Orthodox schools (the greatest increase be-ing in community day schools, which accounted for roughly nine percent of day school students, followed by almost six percent in Solomon Schechter schools, and two percent in Reform schools).

Despite these successes, a sense of foreboding about day school finances persisted into the early 2000s, spurred by underlying weaknesses across numerous institutions: low enrollments, a paucity of endowments, budget deficits, and this all in the context of what the historian Jack Wertheimer has described as “the high cost of Jewish living.” While the devastating economic events of 2008 exacerbat-ed these problems and catapulted them into a crisis, it was a crisis that had been brewing for years and one that several observers saw on the horizon.

The most recent statistics suggest Orthodox and community day school enrollments had small to non-existent growth 2012-2013 relative to the previous year. But, declines continue to be seen in Reform and Conservative institutions, and there is concern about the financial impact on families who remain in the system and the viability of smaller schools. The oft-repeated joke, already circulat-ing in the 1990s, that day school tuition was one of the most effective forms of contraception in Jewish families, is met today with more of a wince than a chuckle in some Jewish circles. Rabbis Aryeh Klap-per and Yitzchok Adlerstein have recently made the argument quite seriously for different parts of the Orthodox community.

The NYU economist Paul Romer, among others, has observed “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” and the organized Jewish community has taken note. With the very real threat looming overhead that day schools could become “financially prohibitive to the masses,” foundations, federations, research institutes, and day schools have mobilized in unprecedented fashion. They are focusing not simply on promot-ing day schools and offering short-term solutions to tuition shortfalls, but on creating structural changes that will sustain these institutions in the long run. Many of their ideas will bear fruit—if at all—several years from now; the question remains how lower- and middle-income families and schools on the edge will fare in the interim.

Rona Sheramy is the Executive Director of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS).

Hebrew school, Colchester, Connecticut, ca 1940. (Photograph by Jack Delano, Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.)


Athens or Sparta? A ResponseBY PATRICK TYLER

As the most prolific of the new historians of Israel, Benny Morris has made a sig-nificant contribution to the historiog-raphy of the Jewish state. His trenchant

and unvarnished reconstructions of war and strat-egy, including Israeli expulsions and “brutal” [his word] assaults on Palestinians and on neighboring Arab populations, have helped to document the so-bering cost of war and conflict in the Holy Land. Yet his unsentimental prose and dispassionate scholar-ship led to vicious and unprovoked assaults on his professionalism and his character. Some Israelis ac-cused him of betraying the cause of Zionism and undermining the legitimacy of Israel.

Thus it is disheartening and ironic that Mr. Morris would turn the same ideological invec-tive, of which he was a victim and about which he so passionately complained, toward my book Fortress Israel, and toward me personally, a journal-ist and historian with no ideological profile or agen-da and certainly no animus toward the State of Is-rael. No longer a detached scholar, Mr. Morris now aligns himself with the ideological right, enabling its hopes for Arab expulsion by justifying ethnic cleansing as a necessary instrument of history and by demonizing the Muslim world as a monolithic enemy out to annihilate the Jewish state. And in his lengthy review of my book, he has employed many of the propagandistic traits of distortion and un-truth common to some of the movements in history that he professes to abhor.

Fortress Israel is a political biography of Israel’s ruling class from David Ben-Gurion’s time to the present era of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is buttressed by nearly 1,000 notes to the text citing archival ma-terial in Israel and the United States, but also inter-views with dozens of Israeli generals, intelligence officials, political figures, and analysts; it is drawn from first-person accounts, memoirs, and contem-poraneous press accounts. I employed two Israeli research assistants, both of whom served in the Is-raeli Defense Forces, to translate material from He-brew where it was not available in English; I asked prominent Israelis, including a former Mossad chief and the head of the Moshe Sharett archive, to read my manuscript, and they contributed useful criti-cism. No less an Israeli historian than Martin van Creveld praised the work in advance.

I state these facts because Mr. Morris does not. He seeks at the outset of his review to portray me as a rube from Texas, untutored in Hebrew or Ara-bic, who never ventured beyond the LBJ Library in Austin to research this book. How appalling it must seem to the readers of the Jewish Review of Books to see such a prominent attack on a book dismissed by Mr. Morris as a frivolous scribble from the chatter-ing class.

In point of fact, I have lived and traveled more extensively in the Middle East than Mr. Morris has, but would be the first to admit that this has little to

do with good scholarship. Mr. Morris distorts the scope of archival material available to researchers on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He points with pride to the fact that Israel has declassified a great deal of mate-rial and that the Arabs have opened almost noth-ing. But surely he is aware that the archives of Brit-ain and the United States are probably the greatest sources of information on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Mr. Morris presumably knows, these archives are rendered in English. Most egregiously, Mr. Mor-ris maligns me personally by comparing my work to “the spate of books and articles that appeared in Western Europe in 1936 through 1938 repudiating the legitimacy of the newly formed Czechoslovakia

before its sacrifice to the Nazi wolves.” He has never met me, yet he concludes that my personal motive was to blacken the image of Israel. It is one thing to offer a critical review of another’s work of history, but to resort to such calumny simply undermines the integrity of the reviewer.

Mr. Morris begins his review with a personal anecdote about his refusal to report for duty

in the Israeli army in 1988, an act of conscience against what he considered an “oppressive” occupa-tion of Palestinian lands that cost him a three-week stay in jail. He uses this anecdote to contest the metaphor that I employ in Fortress Israel to explain that in the mid-1950s, when David Ben-Gurion was redesigning the nation for a long struggle with the Arabs, he chose Sparta rather than Athens as the model for his nation-building efforts. The Israeli army would become the paramount institution of Israeli society. Citizens would be required to serve in uniform for three years at the conclusion of high

school, but then remain tethered to the military in active reserve forces until the age of forty-nine. The civilian population became the army to a great extent. Mr. Morris’s point is that because he got off with a light jail term, my Sparta metaphor is defective. Sparta, he insists, would have treated his defiance more brutally. I say: Who knows? That is hardly the point.

This strained logic allows Mr. Morris to avoid addressing the reality of the open-ing chapters of my book, focused as they are on Ben-Gurion’s monumental struggle with colleagues in 1954-1955 over the tra-jectory of the nation. Indeed, nowhere in his review does Mr. Morris engage the cen-tral theme of Fortress Israel: that the domi-nance of the military and the weakness of competing civil institutions dedicated to diplomacy and negotiation arise from the seminal clashes of the first decade, when Ben-Gurion set out to destroy his chief in-tellectual rival, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s for-eign minister and second prime minister, over the crucial questions of war and peace. Indeed, as I point out, it is impossible to understand the modern debate in Israel over whether to engage the Arabs without going back to the first decade, when Ben-Gurion’s militancy toward the Arabs was rampant even as Sharett was pushing for peace and opening secret channels to the same Arabs. As Ben-Gurion incited his military commanders to exploit the chaos in the Arab world to dismember Leba-non, seize the West Bank from Jordan, and seek a pretext for war with Egypt, Sharett struggled to keep Ben-Gurion’s war im-pulse in check by successfully wielding a majority of the ruling political party’s stal-

warts, including Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol against his militant plans. These are incontestable facts that have emerged with the opening of archives, but Mr. Morris does not approve of a hard, realist look at the internal Israeli power struggle, which is the subject of my book.

ConTRovERSy

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, with Uzi Narkis, left, and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, right, enter Jerusalem, June 1967. (Photo by Ilan Bruner, courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)


So much of my book tracks the remarkable po-litical alignment that Ben-Gurion achieved and en-forced after it had seemed his political career had come to an end in late 1953 and how the story of modern Israel is the delamination of that align-ment through the next five decades. But Mr. Mor-ris is not interested in this evolutionary theme. His review sets up an army of straw men so he can knock them down; he seems to think that if he can find any military man who joined the peace camp, this repudiates my book. No, the fracturing of the

political consensus—of Ben-Gurionism—is the subject of my book; it is the story of how military men like Yitzhak Rabin migrated from a strongly militaristic outlook to an understanding that there is no military solution to the Palestinian problem; it is the story of the arrogation of power on the politi-cal right and the collapse of the Rabin consensus for peace, which still plagues Israel, the Arabs, Ameri-ca, and the international community.

There is almost a comic quality to how Mr. Morris attacks my theme of the paramount im-portance of the military and security establish-ment. He asserts that out of Israel’s twelve prime ministers, only three—Rabin, Ehud Barak, and

Ariel Sharon—were generals. The he immediately retreats by saying that you could also count Men-achem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, since they both ran underground military organizations. (Shamir also ran Mossad operations across Europe.) He ne-glects to point out that Benjamin Netanyahu was an officer in the country’s most elite commando unit and that he owed his political career to the fame of his brother, Jonathan, who commanded and died a hero’s death during the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue; he fails to mention that Ehud Ol-

mert twice served in the military, washing out of one elite unit as a teenager and joining again in the early 1970s when he needed military creden-tials for his political career. Mr. Morris might have added that Ben-Gurion was the ultimate military leader; he founded the mainstream Jewish un-derground, transformed it into the IDF, an army that he insisted must be loyal to the Labor political federation he headed; he fired generals, planned battles in 1948, and ordered the expulsion of Pal-estinians by military means. Ben-Gurion’s young protégé, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, did not serve in uniform, but he became Ben-Gurion’s deputy minister of defense, chief arms merchant,

and chief military liaison for the secret atomic bomb project, the most profound military under-taking of the state. Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir may have been civilians, but both surrounded themselves with generals and intelligence chiefs, as if to reassure the country that the prime minister had the confidence of the military establishment. Mr. Morris neglects to provide any of this context.

Another comical straw man is Morris’s asser-tion that I know nothing of the Israeli military because, it seems, that I have written “that Israel’s paratroops wear black berets,” not red ones. I have written no such thing, and in my struggle to deter-mine what Morris was referring to, all I can find is an introduction to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, in which I said, “In what seemed to be a stab at burnishing a military profile, he absurdly wore a black beret, a symbol of Israel’s elite commando and paratrooper forces.” It was the symbolism of the beret, not the color, but I am sure Mr. Morris got that.

Morris is revisionist in trying to show I mis-placed facts about the run-up to the 1967 war. First of all, he is incorrect in stating that the slide to war began with Syria’s sponsorship of Palestinian op-erations across Israel’s border and Syria’s water di-version efforts. The slide toward war began with the hostile Arab League declarations of January 1964, declarations that convinced General Rabin, the chief of staff, that another round of war with the Arabs was inevitable. This came at a time when it was becoming clear to the world that Israel was secretly building an atomic bomb with the help of

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Fortress Israel is a political biography of Israel’s ruling class from David Ben-Gurion’s time to the present era of Benjamin Netanyahu.


France, while also expanding its conventional mil-itary and working assiduously in Washington to convince President Johnson to provide tanks and modern American fighters to its military, some-thing no American president had done. Morris fails to state that when the Arab League failed to stand behind Syria when its bulldozers attempted to block Israel’s expansion of water resources, Syr-ia pulled in its horns and stepped up support for Palestinian militants. He fails to take note of the aggressive steps Israel took in sending its troops, along with bulldozers and patrol boats, up against Syrian positions in the demilitarized zones of the northern front to provoke Syrian fire so the IDF could then attack and seize territory. Moshe Dayan, as Mr. Morris knows very well, spoke candidly of this tactic late in his life. In the midst of the clashes of May 1967, the Soviets floated false reports of an Israeli military buildup on the northern border. In

my book, I stated forthrightly that the Soviet re-ports were “mostly” disinformation; the qualifying adverb “mostly” only added the nuance that the IDF was on a high state of alert and that both Es-hkol and his director of military intelligence had been making bellicose and escalatory threats, so much so that President Johnson admonished them to tone it down.

Mr. Morris says, inaccurately, that because I pro-vided this nuanced account of the run-up to the war, that I have “by implication’’ asserted that Israel was planning an attack. This is nonsense. Nowhere in Fortress Israel do I blame any side for the onset of war. As political biography, my book explains and examines the motivations of leaders and the context of political forces in which they were operating. Mr. Morris knows from the work of Ami Gluska and others that Prime Minister Eshkol faced a revolt of his generals in delaying an attack, but at the request of President Johnson, his friend, he was trying to hold back the rush to war on the hope that John-son might succeed in organizing an international maritime force to back Nasser down. Again, at this crucial moment, Mr. Morris fails to point out that the main theme of my book was Eshkol’s attempt to lead the country through these perilous times as Ben-Gurion and Peres were attacking him from the sidelines for taking unacceptable risks with the se-curity of the nation and while Dayan, Begin, and the Mossad chief, Meir Amit, worked behind the scenes to force Eshkol into the war camp.

It is interesting that Morris does not review my nar-rative of Eshkol’s dilemma and the political realism of the war’s onset. In this and other instances, he avoids substance and lapses into ideological or ad hominem attack. Is this the modus operandi of a historian?

As the master of quibble, Mr. Morris takes aim at my observation that the stunning military victory of 1967 transformed national politics with dreams of a much expanded Jewish state. “It seemed that with few exceptions, everyone in Israel had em-braced a creed that envisioned a Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan,” I wrote, and then went on to explain how broad divisions

still existed in Israeli society. Mr. Morris says that what I wrote was “blatantly untrue,” but when he explains what he means by this accusation, he ad-mits that, “It is true that a semi-messianic euphoria took hold, but post-1967 Israel was nonetheless a deeply divided society and remains so down to the present.” With these words, Mr. Morris accu-rately described my book. So what was “blatantly untrue”?

As it wears on, Mr. Morris’s review is revealed as smoke and mirrors. In describing the War of At-

trition (the interwar period between 1967 and 1973), he twists history again, falsely stating that Israel had no intention of terrorizing Egyptian civilians at a time when Golda Meir’s government was seeking to destabilize the largest Arab enemy and topple Nasser by showing that he could not defend his people. Mr. Morris talks about the death of “thousands of Egyp-

tian soldiers and military construction workers” and claims, falsely, that I wrote that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. This is what I wrote: “For the first time, American bombers played the most prominent role—U.S.-made F4 Phantoms terrorized Egyptian cities. Hundreds of Egyptians died in the raids, in-cluding 47 children in one mistaken [my emphasis] attack on an elementary school. Seventy civilian workers were killed in one factory. Nasser told an American diplomat visiting Cairo, ‘For the first time I feel bitterness. There was no bitterness in the time of Dulles . . . but now, with the killing of children and workers and civilians, there is.’”

One need only read the words of Yitzhak Rabin, who at the time was ambassador to Washington, to see how the military establishment was bent on taking the war to Egypt’s cities in a campaign of terror that might topple Nasser. Mr. Morris claims that, during the bombing, life in Egypt went on as normal. This is absurd, as anyone who visited Cairo at the time and saw Israeli Phantoms flying down the Nile to frighten and intimidate the population would testify. In one raid on an Egyptian army train-ing camp, the detonations blew out the windows of the Cairo American School. Hardly business as usu-al. Most of the bombing raids were within twenty-five miles of Cairo.

During the War of Attrition, the Israeli Air Force lost a number of aircraft and some of its pilots were captured due to the arrival of highly competent So-viet air defense forces, including both MiG-21 pi-lots and sophisticated SAM3 missile batteries. This confrontation with the arriving Soviet military force ultimately led to Israel’s decision to suspend its air war. I point out in Fortress Israel that Soviet forces shot down a half-dozen Israeli Phantoms. Mr. Mor-ris responds, “This never happened.” Notwithstand-ing that my information came from declassified U.S. intelligence reports, today you can find confirmation of downed Israeli Phantoms and captured pilots on Wikipedia. Abba Eban writes of his concerns about Israeli air losses in 1970, and the senior American diplomat in Cairo has written that he was apprised by the State Department that Henry Kissinger, then

secretary of state, had reassured Israel that despite the suspension of Phantom sales, Washington would quietly replace the mounting Israeli losses with up to eight Phantoms and twenty Skyhawks.

I can only assume that Mr. Morris is confused. It is true that on the last day of the air war, Israeli planes staged an ambush on Soviet fighters, but it was only after Israel had lost a number of its own planes. This is an established fact. A careful reviewer would have checked.

Mr. Morris claims I engaged in hyperbole in stating that Ariel Sharon ordered the “saturation” bombing of Beirut during the ill-advised and ill- fated Lebanon invasion of 1982. Mr. Morris says that because only six hundred people died that day (in a city from which many had fled), and because not all neighborhoods were targeted, the term “sat-uration” amounts to “agitprop, not history.” He ar-gues that the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II was “real” saturation bombing because more than twenty thousand people died. Yet in Dresden on Feb. 13-15, 1945, the Allies dropped thirty-nine hundred tons of bombs, less than the typical ton-nages that Israel was employing a half-century later. The IAF dropped eight thousand tons of bombs in its campaign against Egyptian cities. And though the IAF has not published tonnages (of iron bombs and artillery) thrown against Beirut in August 1982, Mr. Morris would be loathe to place a wager on which total was greater. The word “saturation” seems more than valid when one views the impact of the hundreds of sorties the IAF flew against the Lebanese capital, synchronized with artillery bar-rages and shelling from ships offshore. Mr. Morris himself, in his own history, describes the air cam-paign as “brutal.” He added, “Begin, with his view of [Yasser] Arafat as a resurrected Hitler and Beirut as Nazi Berlin in 1945, seemed to feel that the city deserved its fate.” No less an Israeli historian as Avi Shlaim of Oxford University has written that Sharon ordered a “saturation” bombing of Beirut on August 10. Hardly “agitprop,” and certainly a valid descrip-tion of historical fact.

Most of the rest of Mr. Morris’s review is in a similar vein of slapdash assertions and straw men erected dishonestly so they can be slapped down. He takes my political biography and argues that because I didn’t include this or that bit of history, the book is anti-Zionist in the zero-sum world Mr. Morris now inhabits. And yet my book was never meant as an overarching history of Israel, but rather a portrait of the leadership class. He suggests that the missing bits add up to a conspiracy to slant his-tory in favor of the Arabs. This is false, and there are a hundreds of examples to prove otherwise. There is no sympathetic Arab history lurking in my book; there is only a search for understanding about the character and nature of the Israeli leadership class, its development, evolution, and its difficulty in en-gaging in the processes of diplomacy due to the outsized influence of the military, a theme that has been extensively identified as relevant and legiti-mate in the historiography of Israel.

Patrick Tyler served as chief correspondent for The New York Times and was the Middle East bureau chief for The Washington Post. His books include Running Critical, A Great Wall, and A World of Trouble.

My book was never meant as an overarching history of Israel, but rather a portrait of the leadership class.


Athens or Sparta? A RejoinderBY BENNY MORRIS

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Reviews byAbrahms, Al-Tamimi, Gelbard,Khashan, Lebl, Lula, Phelps,Saraswati, and Schwartz

David BukayIslam’s Hatred ofNon-Muslims

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How Human Rights Watch Protects Arab Tyrants Paul Carnegie An Indonesian Model for the Middle East?Hilal Khashan Lebanon’s Sunnis Sidelined

A.J. Caschetta Bin Laden as Family Man and Quarry

There is ill will and there are mistakes, and both are legion in Mr. Tyler’s Fortress Israel and, perhaps more surprisingly, in his response to my review of that book.

One might have expected Mr. Tyler to exercise a bit of caution. But, apparently, he is constitution-ally incapable of shaking off the old, mendacious ways. He tells us that he “certainly [has] no animus toward the State of Israel,” but Fortress Israel drips with animus. Simply open to almost any page in the book, page 391, for example. Tyler writes: “On April 18 [1996], Israeli artillery gunners targeted—mistakenly, they said—a UN refugee center at Kana [in southern Lebanon] and slaughtered a hundred civilians—women, children, and the elderly—in an inferno of shrapnel and explosion.” One wonders, were there really no army-age males present, but the “mistakenly, they said” tells it all. This is typical Tyler, Fortress Israel epitomized. In fact, Israel sub-sequently admitted the mistake and, if I am not mis-taken, apologized, but this is what happens in wars in which terrorists/guerrillas operate from within and next to inhabited areas, however much their opponents try to take care.

Or take the following passage in his response:

Mr. Morris distorts the scope of archival material available to researchers on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He points with pride to the fact that Israel has declassified a great deal of material and that the Arabs have opened almost nothing. But surely he is aware that the archives of Britain and the United States are probably the greatest sources of information on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Mr. Morris presumably knows, these archives are rendered in English.

Here is Mr. Tyler at his best, doubling down on the innuendo. He implies that in my works I haven’t used British and American archives and would do well to consult them, though a mere glance would prove otherwise. And he implies that, by contrast, he has used them, thoroughly. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Almost all of the “nearly 1,000 notes” (his phrase) in Fortress Israel refer the reader to secondary sources, newspaper articles, and interviews. Tyler’s book has 846 footnotes—of which less than fifty refer to archival documents (not a proportion characterizing serious works of history). And his footnotes reveal that he has made no use of any British archives, virtually none of any Israeli archives, and such limited and eccentric use of American documents as to render their usage meaningless and misleading. Tyler’s occasional toe-dip into an American archive appears to be geared only to rebuffing the possible charge that he failed to use archives. Nothing more.

Tyler goes into risible contortions to explain away his basic ignorance of the realities of Israel and its his-

tory. In my review, I pointed to Tyler’s assertion that Israeli paratroops wore black berets as symptomatic and revealing as to this deep ignorance. (In fact, they wear red berets.) In his rebuttal, he writes: “I have written no such thing . . . [I wrote] ‘In what seemed to be a stab at burnishing a military profile, he [Prime Minister Levi Eshkol] absurdly wore a black beret, a

symbol of Israel’s elite commando and paratrooper forces.’ It was the symbolism of the beret, not the col-or [that I was referring to] . . .”

Let me reiterate: My reading of this passage (it’s simple English) is that Tyler is saying that Israel’s “elite commando and paratrooper forces” wear black berets and that’s why Eshkol donned one. In fact, Is-rael’s commandos wear red or blue berets. (Sayeret Matkal and Sayeret Tzanhanim wear red berets,

while Shaldag, 669, and Shayetet 13 wear blue ones.) Actually, Tyler digs himself even deeper into the pit when he adds a second, more general error in saying that he meant that only commandos and paratroops wear berets. Actually, almost all Israeli soldiers, infan-try, armor, artillery, air force, etc., wear berets. Tyler might dismiss all of this as “quibbling.” I would say

that his mistakes are symptomatic of his basic lack of knowledge of what he is writing about.

Perhaps more troubling is his continuing ten-dency to play fast and loose with the truth. In Fortress Israel, on page 212, Tyler wrote: “[In 1970] the Soviet air force sent its own pilots with mod-ern jet fighters and shot down a half dozen Israeli Phantoms . . .” In my review, I said that this was untrue. So now, without admitting error, Tyler

The fact that the Israeli Air Force used American-built jets is neither here nor there, except as it relates to Tyler’s clear disapproval of American arms sales to Israel.


tries obfuscation: “During the War of Attrition, the Israeli Air Force lost a number of aircraft . . . due to the arrival of highly competent Soviet air de-fense forces, including both MiG-21 pilots and so-phisticated SAM3 missile batteries . . .I point out in Fortress Israel that Soviet forces shot down a half-dozen Israel Phantoms.” This is (probably) true: Soviet surface-to-air missile crews shot down Israeli Phantom jets. But what he wrote in Fortress Israel, that Soviet MiG-21s piloted by Soviet pilots shot down Israeli Phantoms, remains untrue. The op-posite actually happened: Israeli pilots shot down five Soviet-piloted MiGs. Why not simply admit to having made an error?

Tyler does not always operate by way of innuen-do, misleading implication, and obfuscation;

often enough he indulges in the big lie. In his book, and in his response, he writes that in the Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition (1969-1970) Israel delib-erately bombed “military and civilian targets” and “U.S.-made F4 Phantoms terrorized Egyptian cit-ies,” and that, a decade later, in 1982, it indulged in “saturation” bombing of Beirut. In both cases, he makes it sound like the Luftwaffe’s assault on Lon-don and the Allied counter-bombing (and far more devastating) offensives against Germany’s cities in World War II.

These, simply, are lies. In the yearlong bomb-ing of Egypt’s military bases, Israel twice—and mistakenly—hit civilian sites: a school that was

located inside an army base and a factory. Other-wise, Egypt’s cities suffered no attacks and life in them went on as usual, though once or twice Israe-li jets unleashed sonic booms over Cairo to bring home to Egyptians Nasser’s inability to deal with the Israel Air Force, perhaps to engender public pressure to end the War of Attrition against Israel’s positions along the Suez Canal. The fact that the

Israeli Air Force used American-built jets is nei-ther here nor there, except as it relates to Tyler’s clear disapproval of American arms sales to Israel.

In Beirut, when the IDF was besieging the PLO, there was targeting of PLO headquarters and posi-tions, and probably an effort to kill PLO chairman Yasser Arafat—but there was no deliberate targeting of civilians, and no “saturation” bombing, which ex-plains the relative paucity of civilian Lebanese casual-ties. In his “rebuttal,” Tyler mendaciously cites bomb tonnage as proof of “saturation” or carpet-bombing. The question isn’t one of tonnage but of intent and against whom the bombs were directed and, most importantly, of actual casualty figures. Had Israel engaged in saturation bombing, there would have

been many thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian deaths. But over the two months of bomb-ings in summer 1982, civilian deaths were in the hundreds.

Not everything that Tyler writes is wrong. He is certainly right about Ben-Gurion’s sidelining of Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister (1948-1956) and second prime minister (1954-1955), in

effect giving the defense establishment primacy, as I detailed twenty years ago in Israel’s Border Wars 1949-1956. Sharett tried to reach out to Arab leaders and talk peace. And (as Tyler fails to tell his readers) Ben-Gurion allowed him to pursue the diplomatic ave-nues, especially between 1949 and 1950 with Jordan’s King Abdullah. But Ben-Gurion simply didn’t believe that the Arab world—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—was ready at the time for peace or even wanted it. And Ben-Gurion was right. In 1951 a Palestinian gunman assassinated Abdullah because of his secret nego-tiations with Israel. Other Israel-Arab peace contacts (with Zaim’s Syria and Nasser’s Egypt) led nowhere. Only in the 1970s did there emerge an Arab leader, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who was ready to make peace (for which trouble he was soon shot dead by Islamists, who also hated him for his “foreign” wife and suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood). Throughout his self-described “biography” of Israel’s political leaders, Tyler resolutely ignores the reality of Arab rejectionism as a crucial factor in their actions and decisions.

One last point: Tyler says that in “redesigning the nation,” Ben-Gurion in the 1950s “chose Spar-ta rather than Athens as the model for his nation building efforts.” Were Tyler a serious historian, he would have sought some proof, say a passage or two from Ben-Gurion’s diaries, speeches, or inter-views. Something. He doesn’t. In fact, you will find in Ben-Gurion’s writings, indeed almost ad nau-seam, the biblical aspiration to fashion Israel as “a light unto the Gentiles.” And in some ways he, and Israel, delivered: a working democracy in a region where there are no others; good universal medical care and a social welfare net; world-class literature and other arts; high-tech innovation; good univer-sities (and, yes, alas, also advanced weapons tech-nologies).

My advice to Mr. Tyler is simple. If you don’t like Israel, go ahead and say so. You think Zion-ism was and is immoral? Say so. You believe that modern-day Arabs have created just states and open societies? Say so. Or simply write about something in which you are less emotionally involved, say the Peloponnesian War. At least then you might learn something about Sparta and Athens.

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press).

Throughout his self-described “biography” of Israel’s political leaders, Tyler resolutely ignores the reality of Arab rejectionism as a crucial factor in their actions and decisions.


With extraordinary chutzpah and deep philosophical seriousness Solomon ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed himself after his medieval philosoph-

ical hero Moses Maimonides and became Solomon Maimon (1753−1800). Maimon was arguably the most brilliant and certainly the most controversial, even disreputable, Jewish philosopher of the late 18th century. He embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn (who asked him to leave Berlin), provoked Kant, and in-spired Fichte, among others.

In his autobiography, Salomon Maimons Leb-ensgeschichte, published in two volumes in 1792 and 1793, Maimon told the picaresque story of his life with candor, humor, and occasional exaggeration. His lit-erary exuberance notwithstanding, Maimon’s autobi-ography is a key source for understanding traditional Jewish life in Lithuania, the early Hasidic court of the Maggid of Mezheritch (of which he drew a somewhat acidic portrait), and the Jewish Enlightenment (Haska-lah) circles of Berlin, through which Maimon passed, as he himself characteristically remarked, “like a comet.” Maimon’s account here of his education as a boy is an early, influential, and characteristically funny version of the Haskalah critique of the brutality and irrational-ity of traditional Jewish education.

Despite its influence, popularity, and frequent an-thologization, Maimon’s autobiography has not been translated into English since the 19th century and has never been translated into English in full. The present text is taken from the forthcoming translation by Pro-fessor Paul Reitter, professor of German literature at The Ohio State University and a frequent contributor to these pages.

My brother Joseph and I were sent to school in Mirz. My brother, who was about twelve at

the time, lodged with a famous schoolmaster named Jossel. This man was every young person’s night-mare, the scourge of God. He handled his charges with an unheard of brutality, whipping them for the slightest offense until the blood flowed, and not infrequently tearing off ears and gouging out eyes. And when the parents of his unfortunate victims came to complain, he would hurl at them rocks or whatever was at hand; who the parents were didn’t matter. With his walking stick, he would then pro-ceed to chase them out of his rooms—all the way back to where they lived. His students became ei-ther dunces or great scholars. Only seven at the time, I was sent to a different schoolmaster.

There is one anecdote that I must tell here. In part an illustration of deep brotherly love, it should also be seen as expressing the mentality of a child hover-ing between the hope that he will find relief from a misfortune and the fear that the misfortune will become worse. One day, I came home from school with eyes that were red from crying (I certainly had

had good reason to cry). My brother noticed my eyes and asked what had happened. At first, I didn’t want to answer him, but, finally, I confided: I had been crying because we aren’t allowed to gossip. My brother understood me quite well. He was so out-raged that he wanted to set my teacher straight. I asked him not to do that, however, since the teacher presumably would have punished me for gossiping.

Now I must relate something about the general condition of Jewish schools. The school is commonly a smoky shack in which students are scattered around; some on benches, others on the dirt floor. With a filthy shirt on his back, the teacher sits on his desk commanding his regiment. All the while, he holds between his legs a bowl of tobacco, which he works over into snuff with a pestle as massive as the club of Hercules. His assistant teachers conduct drill sessions in their own corners of the room, each one ruling over those in his charge just as the teacher himself does: despotically. Of the breakfasts, snacks, etc. that the children bring with them to school, the teachers keep the lion’s share for themselves. Indeed, sometimes the poor boys get nothing at all. And if the boys want to avoid facing the wrath of these tyrants, they won’t complain. Here children are locked up from morning until evening. They have free time only on Fridays and on the afternoon of new moon days.

As to the actual curriculum, at least the Hebrew alphabet is studied quite properly. By contrast, the method for acquiring the Hebrew language is very odd. Teachers don’t go over the principles of gram-mar, which, instead, students learn ex usu—that is, by translating the Holy Scripture, much like the common man who through normal use learns the grammar of his mother tongue in only an incom-plete way. Nor is there a Hebrew dictionary. Stu-dents begin right away to interpret the Bible. Since the Bible is divided into as many sections as there are weeks in the year (so that students can read through the Books of Moses, as they are read every Saturday in synagogue, in a year), each week students inter-pret several verses from the beginning of the section for that week, making every possible grammatical mistake as they proceed. But there is no good alter-native here. For the students’ Yiddish-Polish native language is full of grammatical deficiencies, and so when Hebrew readings are glossed in the students’ native language, the Hebrew they learn through it will naturally be of the same poor quality. Thus, students gain just as little knowledge of the Hebrew language as of the Bible’s content.

In addition to that, talmudists have buried the Bible under all manner of strange ideas. The ignorant teacher confidently believes that the Bible can have no meaning other than the ones these explicators give it, and his students are compelled to share this belief, with the result that the correct interpretation of words necessarily gets lost. For example, where the

first Book of Moses reads, “Jacob sent messengers to his brother Esau,” talmudists like to claim that the messengers were angels. Now while the Hebrew word “malachim” can mean, to be sure, both messengers and angels, these miracle-chasers opted for the sec-ond meaning simply because the first doesn’t suggest anything miraculous. Students, in turn, come to be-lieve firmly and rigidly that malachim means nothing other than angels, and thus the primary meaning of messenger gets completely lost for them. It is only by studying on one’s own, and by reading Hebrew prim-ers and philological commentaries on the Bible, e.g., David Kimchi’s and Ibn Ezra’s (which just a few rab-bis use), that bit by bit one will be able to achieve a correct understanding of the Hebrew language and work toward sound exegetical practices.

Children are condemned to such a hell at pre-cisely the time when their youth is in full bloom. So one can easily imagine the excitement with which they look forward to getting out of school. On high holidays, we (my brother and I) were picked up and brought home. During one of those trips, the follow-ing event—which would prove to be of crucial sig-nificance for me—took place. My mother had come before Pfingstfest [Whitsuntide, the week leading up to the celebrations held on the Sunday following Easter Sunday] to the town where we were going to school, because she needed to buy various things for her household. Afterward, she took us home. Be-ing freed from school, coupled with the sight of the beauty of nature, which at this time of year wears its finest attire, made us so ecstatic that we came up with all kinds of reckless ideas. As we were approaching our hometown, my brother leapt out of the wagon and ran the rest of the way on foot. I wanted to copy his bold jump, but I wasn’t strong enough. I tumbled down and landed next to the wagon in such a way that my legs wound up between the wheels, one of which ran over my left leg, crushing it horribly. They brought me home half-dead. My foot seized up and was completely immobile.

A Jewish doctor was consulted; he hadn’t, to be sure, studied medicine at a university and earned a regular degree. Rather, he had acquired his medical knowledge by working under a doctor and by read-ing some Polish medical books. But he was neverthe-less a very good practical physician who had success-fully healed many patients. He had, he said, no supply of medicine, and the nearest pharmacy was twenty miles away. Thus he couldn’t prescribe a cure using his normal method. In the meantime, however, an easy household remedy should be employed. Some-one should kill a dog and insert the seized-up foot into it. Repeating this several times would definitely bring about some relief. His order was followed, with the success that we had hoped for: After several weeks, I could move my foot and put weight on it. Gradually, moreover, my foot healed completely.

The Joy of Being Delivered from Jewish Schools Results in a Stiff FootBY SOLOMON MAIMON

LoST & Found


Notice Posted on the Door of the Kelm Talmud Torah Before the High HolidaysBY RABBI SIMCHA ZISSEL ZIV

In the early 1850s, Simcha Zissel (Broida) Ziv (1824-1898) left his hometown of Kelm, Lithu-ania to meet Rabbi Israel Lipkin Salanter, the controversial rabbi who had recently been

hired by the Jewish community in the city of Kovno. Rabbi Salanter had been giving public sermons that called on his fellow Jews to devote time and energy to musar—to the deliberate and methodical improve-ment of one’s moral character. Salanter urged his listen-ers to fear for the punishments that would await them if they did not focus on developing virtues of reverence, humility, justice, and kindness. Many traditionalists admired Salanter’s fierce opposition to the Jewish En-lightenment movement (Haskalah), but they were dis-turbed by the prospect of a new sectarian movement that, like Hasidism, seemed to reject the central role of Talmud study and to introduce other models of piety.

As a devoted student of Talmud, Simcha Zissel seems to have initially shared the concerns of these tra-ditionalists. Having also studied some of the modern subjects favored by the Haskalah, including German, he may have also been troubled by Salanter’s fierce opposition to general studies. But he found himself en-thralled by Salanter’s spiritual vision and personality. When Salanter resigned from his communal post and established a new private study hall for young men in Kovno, Simcha Zissel followed him.

In the 1860s, Simcha Zissel returned to his hometown and founded a unique yeshiva in-spired by Salanter, the Talmud Torah of Kelm. In some respects, the Talmud Torah was fiercely traditionalist, expelling students who challenged Orthodox theol-ogy, including Isidor Elyashev, who later became a distinguished literary critic. In other respects, however, it was open to the Has-kalah’s legacy. The Talmud Torah was the first traditionalist yeshi-va in Eastern Europe to set aside time for general studies, includ-ing mathematics, geography, and Russian language, literature, and history. Simcha Zissel also insist-ed on adopting the manners and dress of European bourgeois culture, encouraged many of his students to consider careers in commerce, and made periodic references in his lectures to figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whom he regarded as great ethical teachers.

Perhaps most radically, Talmud Torah’s curricu-lum cut yet further into the time traditionally allotted for the study of Talmud by devoting an unprecedent-ed number of hours to the study of moral literature, contemplative visualization exercises, impassioned

chanting, meditative prayer, and group discussions on issues of moral development. This was met with political opposition in the Jewish community, and Simcha Zissel was eventually forced out of Kelm. He briefly reestablished the yeshiva in Grobin (in modern-day Latvia), but was forced to close it down after only a few years due to his declining health. He spent the last decade of his life back in Kelm teaching a few close disciples who would eventually spread the Musar movement throughout Europe and beyond. He came to be known as the “the Alter,” or elder, of Kelm. Among the most influential of his students were Rabbis Reuven Dov Dessler, Yerucham Halevi Levovitz of the Mir Yeshiva, and Nosson Tzvi Finkel (who was eventually known as the Alter of Slobodka).

Rabbi Simcha Zissel posted the following notice on the door of the Kelm Talmud Torah in the month of Elul, which immediately precedes the High Holidays. In its specific prescription for ethical self-development through meditation and its careful, rigorous, even philosophical, linking of devotion to God with de-votion to one’s fellow man, it is characteristic of the Musar movement. It is translated here by Geoffrey Claussen, who directs the Jewish Studies program at Elon University and is working on a book about Sim-cha Zissel’s ethical thought.

As is known, the sages taught [that God command-ed]: “recite verses of kingship before me . . . so that

you make me king over you” (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 34b).

When we meditate upon the power to maintain a kingdom [ruled] by [a king of] flesh and blood, [we find that] the kingdom is maintained only when the king’s subjects are all like one person in their service to him. And if . . . division were to emerge among the subjects of the king, the knot of the kingdom would

be untied, and (God forbid) the world would be de-stroyed. As our sages of blessed memory said, “were it not for the fear [of the government], a person would swallow his neighbor alive” (Mishnah Avot 3:2). Thus the unity of the subjects maintains the kingdom.

Rabbenu Tam of blessed memory wrote in his Sefer Ha-yashar that we can find the way to serve the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One based on the service given a king of flesh and blood. And so we can understand that the essence of fulfilling [the com-mandment] “that you make me king over you” is in the unity of the servants of the Blessed One. Thus it is written, “There will be a king in Jeshurun”—when?—“when the heads of the people will be gathered, when the tribes of Israel will be united” (Deut. 33:5).

Therefore there is an obligation upon us, prior to the Day of Judgment (may it come upon us for good), to occupy ourselves during the entire year with the positive commandment “You shall love your fellow as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). And through this there will be unity among the subjects of the Blessed Lord, and [God’s] Kingship will come into our hands well . . .

But if (God forbid) the sin of hating people is on our hands, how can we not be ashamed and dis-graced to be speaking lies . . . when we ask [in prayer for God to] “rule over the entire world, in Your glo-ry”? We have not prepared ourselves to do what is essential for maintaining the kingdom of heaven in power over us . . . And so we must accept upon our-selves the work of loving people and of unity. With this, one’s path will slowly, slowly improve—and, in any case, one will already have turned a little bit toward repentance. And, if we merit a community that is immersed in this work during the entire year, who can measure the greatness of the merit for us and for the entire world?

No one should say that this work is too difficult. It is not only the decree of the King, but we hope that when one works at this, with appropriate re-flection, it will slowly, slowly, become easier, and one will find great joy in it . . . This message should remain before our eyes all year long. And so may we all merit to be written and sealed for good [in the Book of Life] with the whole people of Israel. Amen—may this be God’s will.

It is good to set aside a place for thinking of this matter every day during prayer. The clear place for it in prayer is in the blessing “True and Firm” [when praising God for redeeming Israel from Egypt, with these words]: “Upon the shore of the sea, they were all together”—this is love and unity. And thus [the liturgy continues] “they all praised God and made God King.” Without such [love and unity], God for-bid, there is no full acceptance of the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to con-tinually make an effort at this, and may we merit to fully accept the kingdom of heaven with the whole people of Israel.

Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv’s Talmud Torah in Kelm. (Drawing by Loren Hodes: www.lorenhodesart.co.za)


LaST woRd

Hebrew School Days BY ABRAHAM SOCHER

When I was nineteen, I saw an ad at the UCLA Career Center for a job teaching “Jewish history through drama,” at the Sunday school of a

large nearby temple. It was only a couple of hours a week, but it paid maybe four times as much as my job at the Student Store. Needless to say, I hadn’t taught Jewish history or anything else, but I had acted in a student production of Beckett’s Endgame that summer. (I was Hamm, or maybe it was Clov.)

At the interview, it turned out that the school director, who I’ll call Lisa, had, as far as I could tell, no idea what she meant by “Jewish history through drama.” There was no particular period she wanted covered, no book she had in mind, and no theory of how to teach acting, or Jewish history for that matter, to junior high schoolers. But she was duly impressed with the Beckett, and she found the fact that I had been in a yeshiva only two years earlier fascinating. Mainly, she wanted to talk about her study of “Ha-sidic philosophy,” with a local Chabad rabbi. I nod-ded politely and didn’t try to disabuse her of the idea that studying the Tanya in Bel Air was very much like studying Talmud in Jerusalem, even if hats played a role in both experiences. I also learned that the tem-ple’s school had won awards for innovation and ex-cellence, and that I would be required to accompany my students on a weekend Shabbaton in the spring.

Those first Sunday mornings were terrifying. My half-baked idea had been to introduce them to some obscure and exciting episode of Jewish history and then find some way to dramatize it. Having read a little (very little) of Gershom Scholem, I thought that maybe the false messiah Shabbtai Zevi would be a good idea—it wasn’t. Given that the kids were iffy on King David (or Jesus for that matter) and had never really thought about the idea of a messiah, personal or otherwise, the 17th-century adventures of a melancholic mystic in the Mediterranean was a tough sell. I remember once looking wildly out of my classroom window as Lisa approached while fourteen-year-old boys and girls slammed into each other in an exuberant interpretation of a Turkish Sabbatean mob. She returned my look blandly and marched right past the classroom door.

Of course, I had myself gone to Hebrew school—that’s what we always called it though very little

Hebrew was ever learned—through most of elemen-tary school. I’d walk the five blocks down Bancroft from Berkeley’s Washington Elementary School to Congregation Beth Israel (fading orange-red bricks, worn-wood floor, and Israeli and American flags flanking the aron kodesh), where a part of the sanc-tuary was partitioned off to make a classroom from four to six on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

Even at nineteen, not much of that experience had stuck with me, certainly not enough to be of help with lesson plans. I remembered a glamorous Israeli teacher named Varda teaching us that the word for chalk was gir, with an exciting back-of-the-throat trill

for the “r” sound, and that the word for chalkboard was the same as the one used to describe the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. And I remembered Rabbi Leibowitz coming into class to show us the way the strings and knots of the tzitzis on a tallis could be added up to 613, the number of com-mandments in the Torah. And I remembered impu-dently climbing out the window with a friend when another teacher turned to the blackboard.

But mostly I remembered playing touch football before and between classes out in the street with Jake and Steve—one-on-one (it was a small class) with Jake as all-time quarterback. We’d diagram the plays on our palms, and then Jake would run around Kenny Sta-bler-like, joyfully, but pointlessly (no one was rushing him), while Steve or I tried to get open for the down-

and-out bullet or the long bomb. More than anything else, Hebrew school for me was running down Jef-ferson Avenue with Jake’s rainbow pass soaring above me and little Stevie Klein showing me his heels as the afternoon light faded and the sweet, earnest Rabbi Lifsics calling us to come back inside.

Actually, touch football turned out be more use-ful for my teaching than my distinguished ca-

reer on the stage. I settled into a pattern of turning some passage from the weekly Torah portion into a kind of playlet and playing sports with the kids dur-ing the break between classes.

As the year wore on, Lisa occasionally spoke with me about her idea of bringing all the kids to Chabad for the Spring Shabbaton to observe “a different

form of spirituality.” But when the announcement of our destination came, it turned out that, some-where along the line, plans had changed radically. We were going to St. Andrew’s, a Benedictine retreat in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Ange-les, to celebrate the Sabbath with the monks. After the announcement, Lisa took me aside to warn me that the change in plans meant that I would need to bring my own food if I wanted to keep kosher.

On Friday night we met some of the monks (they were nice), lit candles, and had a Shabbat dinner. It turned out that one of my students, Maurice P.—a speedy wide receiver—also kept kosher, or at least thought he did, or perhaps he just thought he would keep me company. We split my take-out order from the Kosher Kolonel.

The next morning, the rabbi came to spend the day with the kids. We met him in the parking lot as he drove up. He took a Torah out of his hatchback and led us all to a little clearing in the woods, where he laid it gently on the ground as he told us that two hundred years ago the holy Ba’al Shem Tov had prayed in the woods. Then he unscrolled the Torah to that week’s portion and, using a twig as a pointer, read a few verses. When he finished, he said (per-haps thinking of the Lubavitchers we weren’t visiting or even the Benedictines we were), “You know kids, some people think that every word of the Torah is

priceless, like a diamond, but we don’t think that. We believe,” he said, ges-turing at the California scrub around him, “that the Torah is like a diamond mine, and you’ve got to clear away all the rubble to get at the diamonds.” It’s actually not a bad description of clas-sic 19th-century liberal religion in the light of biblical criticism with a twist of Buber, but I’ve often wondered what, if anything, he was trying to teach those particular L.A. kids with their little fund of Jewish knowledge.

At lunch, sloppy joes were served. The rabbi and one of the monks led a somewhat desultory theological con-

versation about images of God to which the students paid less than full attention. Afterward we had a rous-ing game of touch football. The following morning, we observed—but did not partake in—Communion, and took the bus back to West Los Angeles.

Not long after Shabbat at the monastery, Lisa told me that it was time to provide written assessments of each of my students for the year. This baffled me. I was certain that she couldn’t possibly want academic grades. (Had I received grades in Hebrew school? I couldn’t remember.) Eventually I decided that what she must be requesting were assessments of the students them-selves. I picked up a grade card, looked at the name, and wrote, “Maurice P. is a very fine football player.”

Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of Books. He teaches at Oberlin College.

“Long Bomb” by Mark Anderson.

Educating in the Divine ImageGender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day SchoolsChaya Rosenfeld Gorsetman and Elana Maryles Sztokman

Holocaust Mothers and DaughtersFamily, History, and TraumaFederica K. Clementi

The Best School in JerusalemAnnie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900 – 1960Laura S. Schor

A Jewish Ceremonyfor Newborn GirlsThe Torah’s Covenant AffirmedSharon R. Siegel

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of the history, philosophy, customs, and sources that underpin modern welcoming ceremonies for newborn girls in the Jewish community. Bridging traditional Jewish beliefs and modern feminist ideals, the author focuses on the Covenant, a cornerstone of the Jewish tradition.

“Jewish day schools communicate values both explicitly and implicitly. It is sometimes those values that are not stated openly, that are actually the most important. This book makes an important contribution to the field of Modern Orthodox day school education in particular, as well as creating a model for future research.”

—Rabbi Jeffrey S. Fox,Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshivat Maharat

A biography of both an extraordinary woman and a thriving institution, this book offers a lens through which to view the struggles of the nascent Zionist movement, World War I, poverty and unemployment in the Yishuv, the relationships between the religious and secular sectors and between Arabs and Jews, as well as Landau’s own dual loyalties to the British and to the evolving Jewish community.

“In this study of six autobiographical works by Jewish Holocaust victims or survivors, Clementi shows that their mother/daughter plots follow some of the same complex, contradictory and ultimately devastating trajectories characterizing ordinary times. Yet in giving space and close attention to the intimate stories of women, this book discovers unexpected aspects of creativity and survival in times of catastrophe.”

—Marianne Hirsch,Columbia University

Available December 2013

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