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Jewishreviewofbooks.Com Or Send $19.95 ($29.95 Outside of the US) To: Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 New Summer Fiction! JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 3, Number 2 Summer 2012 $6.95 Daniel C. Matt Before the Big Bang Shlomo Avineri Herzl's Great Bad Novel Allan Arkush Jeremy Rabkin Peace & War Catherine Michah Gottlieb C. Bock-Weiss Are We All Matisse's Protestants Jewish Patrons Now? Ilan Stavans Borges' Jewish Writing Editor Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Associate Editor Philip Getz Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Assistant Editor Amy Newman Smith Intern Baruch Blum Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein Publisher Eric Cohen Director of Marketing David Fishman Business Manager Lori Dorr 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., 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1400, New York, NY 10151. For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or send $19.95 ($29.95 outside of the US) to: Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Please send notifi- cations of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. BY 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 letters@ jewishreviewofbooks.com or to oureditorial office, 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, The Book OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited reviews of Job and manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected], or to our SCHOCKEN When Bad editorial office.Advertising inquiries should be sent Things to [email protected] or call (212) 796- Happened 1669. Review copies should be sent to the attention of To A Good the Associate Editor at our editorial office. Person Harold S. Kushner JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS JEWISH REVIEW Volume 3, Number 2 Summer 2012 OF BOOKS LETTERS 4 Too Much Chometz? FEATURES 5 Daniel C. Matt Before the Big Bang Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss thinks he knows how the universe began. Novelist Alan Lightman takes a wild narrative guess. 7 Allan Arkush War & Peace & Judaism Robert Eisen was walking to campus on 9/11 when he saw a dark cloud above the Pentagon. Alick Isaacs was in Lebanon with the IDF when he began to think about peace and Judaism. reviEwS 11 Adam Kirsch The Mighty Jacobson Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It: The Best Of Howard Jacobson by Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson • Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson • The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson • No More Mr. Nice Guy by Howard Jacobson 14 Norman A. Stillman Reorientation Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities by Jacob Lassner 15 Michah Gottlieb Are We All Protestants Now? How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought by Leora Batnitzky 19 Jonathan L. Silver Where Wisdom Begins Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton 20 Gary A. Anderson Who Is Man? Demonic Desires: “Yetzer Hara” and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity by Ishay Rosen-Zvi Sin: The Early History Of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen 23 Paul Reitter Dust-to-Dust Song Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography by Aris Fioretos, translated by Tomas Tranæus 24 Alan Mintz Israel's Arab Sholem Aleichem Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua, translated by Mitch Ginsburg 26 Nadia Kalman A Neoplatonic Affair Melisande! What Are Dreams? by Hillel Halkin 28 Anne Trubek Muddling Through The World Without You by Joshua Henkin 29 Jeremy Rabkin Lawfare Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War by Peter Berkowitz ReadingS 33 Ilan Stavans Borges, the Jew 35 Shlomo Avineri Rereading Herzl's Old-New Land ThE Arts 39 Catherine C. Bock- Matisse and His Jewish Patrons Weiss 42 Amy Newman Smith Homage to Mahj Lost & FoUnd 45 Yechiel Yaakov Berdyczewski, Blasphemy, and Belief Weinberg Last woRd 47 Abraham Socher Something Antigonus Said On the cover: “Matisse and the Big Bang” by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Too Much Chometz? only, it becomes a slam, and a particularly cheap am one of the many American Jews who has no one at that, in which the “reviewer” avails himself Iknowledge of Hebrew and can only sound out n Chronicles II 25:12, there is a horrifying image of every opportunity to establish his nobility even the words without understanding the meaning of Iof the sons of Judah throwing their captives off at the far edges of relevance. And yet, despite his more than a dozen of them. Of course, as a woman, a cliff, dashing them to pieces on the rocks below. erudition, I believe that Mr. Wieseltier has failed to it would have been rare at any time in Jewish history This image came to mind as I was reading Leon grasp some important distinctions, and in doing so for me to have known much more than I do now. Wieseltier’s savaging of the New American Hagga- missed the larger picture entirely. And I question how many men whose religious dah (“Comes the Comer,” Spring 2012). In an age To his first complaint: The language of benedic- education began in the cheder (religious primary when all sorts of abuse are being called out, this re- tion is not prose, and it’s laden with meaning that is school) and ended when they turned 13 would have view suggests a new species—the “abuse of scholar- not ordinary. (Is there anything ordinary about this been much more fluent. There is a reason that the ship,” assuming one believes scholarship is meant to story?) It’s a formulation—a mantra, repeated again Jews of Eastern Europe communicated in Yiddish, enlighten, not to pummel an opponent who is un- and again throughout the service. So, to say “God- not Hebrew. able to respond. of-Us” once may fall strangely on the ear, but repeat- My father, who had an Orthodox upbringing I write this letter not out of loyalty to the ed, as it is throughout the Seder, it becomes some- and a good enough command of Hebrew to get by author/translator. (I am a moderate fan of England- thing else, and I, for one, feel we can only benefit in an Israeli kibbutz after World War II, never at- er’s fiction and have never met him.) But, as a reader from the particularity of treatment given to eloheinu tempted to interpret the text of the Haggadah to us. of Jewish text, literature, and the Jewish Review of We either read the Maxwell House translation or lis- Books, I feel ill served and even offended by Wiesel- tened to my father race through the Seder without tier’s intemperate, condescending review. any comprehension. In my brief time as a supple- After the first half-dozen times that Wieseltier mental school student, I learned to chant the four challenges Englander’s translation/interpretation questions without being able to understand them, of a word or phrase, I realized that he believes the their function in the Seder, or their history. translation winnows out the intent and “mystery” Given that background, I am very grateful for Mr. of the Haggadah and is not always mellifluous. Wi- Englander’s new translation. I find the “God-of-Us” eseltier bundles his criticisms in allusions to a suf- and other stretches of English usage refreshing and ficient number and diversity of sources to suggest thought-provoking. Even among those of us who do his own mastery of Jewish texts. But after twenty- not understand the Hebrew, the new translation has five to thirty such critical blows, prompting him inspired questions about what the text really means to characterize Englander’s work as “foolish,” “lu- and why. Even though I cannot really imagine that dicrous,” “clumsy,” and “ridiculous”—perhaps ar- I myself was a slave in Egypt or that God liberated rogant charges leveled against a writer of serious me personally, this translation and the commentar- purpose—Wieseltier seems more like a man de- ies that accompany it encourage me to think about termined to overwhelm us with his own scholar- the Seder as an expression of my cultural heritage ship rather than to discredit the translator’s. After or Jewish identity and about how to present it to my a good 1,500 words of vitriol, Wieseltier seems to friends and family as something more than a shared realize his excess and offers us a witty one-word meal. Admittedly Judaism lite, but mine, such as it is. paragraph as a salve. The word isdayenu . Unfortu- Gilah Goldsmith nately, he is already many outstretched arms past via jewishreviewofbooks.com dayenu. The problem that inspires this letter is that aside from shamelessly dashing the defenseless reat review. In the Haggadah itself, I was im- Englander to pieces on the rocks below, Wieseltier by Mr. Englander. “God-of-Us” implies a mutually Gpressed by the carelessness regarding histori- demeans the reader of this journal as well. (I wish enveloping relationship, not a single-sided one. It’s cal details and interpretations—also, the typos. Two the editorial wisdom of the Jewish Review of Books a stretch, perhaps, but one to which many of us as- examples: had saved him from his relentlessness.) Even if the pire—it has kavana. I mention this because a Hag- a) Mount Gezerim (for Gerizim). That might be re- New American Haggadah fails to meet Wieseltier’s gadah, commentaries aside, is not a book to be read venge by Englander’s subconscious for his joke in requirements for a “faithful” translation of the as prose, and shouldn’t be criticized as such.
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