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Jewishreviewofbooks Elizabeth Shanks Alexander Ancient Women Wheeling and Dealing JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 8, Number 3 Fall 2017 $10.45 Noah Millman Lear & Cordelia, Abraham & Isaac Avi Shilon Micah Goodman's Catch 67 Matti Friedman American Jewish Authors Abroad Abraham Socher The Gates of Repentance and the Almost Impossibility of Self-Improvement PLUS Sarah Rindner Swims an Inky Sea Michael Weingrad Answers a Theoretical Question Stuart Schoffman Tells Robert Lowell's Jewish Story Editor Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Managing Editor Amy Newman Smith Editorial Assistant Kate Elinsky Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri THE Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson CAPTURE Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier & TRIAL Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein OF Publisher Eric Cohen ADOLF Advancement Officer Malka Groden EICHMANN Associate Publisher Dalya Mayer Discover the secret Chairman’s Council history behind the Anonymous Blavatnik Family Foundation daring abduction Publication Committee and high profile Marilyn and Michael Fedak trial of this Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Susan and Roger Hertog notorious Nazi. Roy J. Katzovicz The Lauder Foundation– Leonard and Judy Lauder Tina and Steven Price Charitable Foundation Pamela and George Rohr Daniel Senor SPECIAL Paul E. Singer EXHIBITION Doris and Stanley Tananbaum Foundation ON VIEW 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, THROUGH by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1400, New York, NY 10151. DECEMBER 22, 2017 For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks. com or send $39.95 ($49.95 outside of the U.S.; digital sub- scriptions: $19.99) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Digital subscription orders must include an email address. 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, Edmond J. Safra Plaza | 36 Battery Place | New York City 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. 646.437.4202 | mjhnyc.org Please send all unsolicited manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected] or to our edi- torial office. Review copies should be sent to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be sent to ads@ jewishreviewofbooks.com or call Dalya Mayer at 917-947-0947. A co-production of the Mossad–Israeli Secret Intelligence Service; Beit Hatfutsot–The Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Israel; and Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Cleveland, Ohio JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS JEWISH REVIEW Volume 8, Number 3 Fall 2017 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Toxic Brew, Open And Shut?, Grudge Match, and Fundamental Principles FEATURE 5 Abraham Socher Is Repentance Possible? And should we add a confession on Yom Kippur “for the sin of opening browser windows of distraction”? On Aristotle’s akrasia and Maimonides’s teshuvah. REVIEWS 7 Elizabeth Shanks Businesswomen Before Bar Kokhba Babatha’s Orchard: The Yadin Papyri and an Ancient Jewish Family Alexander Tale Retold by Philip F. Esler 9 Avi Shilon What If Everyone Is Right? Milkud 67: ha-rai’onot me-acharei ha-machloket she-kora’at et Yisrael (Catch 67: The Ideas Behind the Controversy Tearing Israel Apart) by Micah Goodman 12 Allan Arkush From the Great War to the Cold War Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn by Adi Gordon 16 A. E. Smith Patriotism and Its Discontents The Patriots: A Novel by Sana Krasikov 18 Stuart Schoffman The Lowells and the Jews Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison • Loving Robert Lowell by Sandra Hochman 24 Sarah Rindner Swimming in an Inky Sea If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir by Ilana Kurshan 26 Michael Weingrad Perish the Thought Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism by Bruno Chaouat 28 Jonathan Karp Joseph the Righteous The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker 31 Michael Kimmage Journeys Without End The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling by Natalie Robins 33 Elliott Horowitz Straying from the Fold? Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History by Todd M. Endelman READINGS 37 Yoel Finkelman & Afghani Treasure Sometime in the 11th century, a distraught, young Jewish Afghani man named Yair sent a Ofir Haim painful letter to his brother-in-law. Life had dealt Yair a tough hand, or maybe it was just his own bad choices. 39 Shlomo Avineri “Where They Have Burned Books, They Will End Up Burning People” The surprising source for Heine’s prophetic remark that “where they have burned books, they will end up burning people” is a play about the fate of Muslims in Christian Spain. 42 Noah Millman Upon Such Sacrifices: King Lear and the Binding of Isaac How Shakespeare helps us think about the akedah, and vice versa. LOST& FOUND 46 Michael L. Morgan Power and the Voice of Conscience: A Lost Radio Talk On January 19, 1947 a young rabbi named Emil Fackenheim got behind a microphone to give a searing radio address about the Jewish refugees from Europe. He himself had been one only four years earlier. THE ARTS 49 Shoshana Olidort Like an Echo of Silence On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg translated by Rachel Tzvia Back LAST WORD 51 Matti Friedman Distant Cousins On the cover: The Gates of Repentance by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Toxic Brew mon—get left out. Are there models or exemplars of prophet nor a member of a prophetic guild, I remain Allan Arkush’s review of Jeffrey Herf’sUndeclared a kind of theologically informed Great Books educa- doubtful that a viable institution affirming such a vi- Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West Ger- tion that we Jews might turn to for inspiration and sion will come into existence in the foreseeable future. man Far Left 1967–1989 (Summer 2017) astonished guidance? Could this be at least one “way forward,” me. It wasn’t the picture of a soft Richard Dreyfuss to use Levenson’s suggestive expression, beyond the Grudge Match playing the Israeli special ops hero Lieutenant Colo- impasse Bloom seems to leave us with? In the 1933 newspaper interview with Rabbi nel Yonatan Netanyahu (let alone Burt Lancaster In Christopher Derrick’s little gem of a book Es- Joseph Rozin, rediscovered by Marc Shapiro (“The as Shimon Peres!). It was the fact that the vile and cape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Rogochover Speaks His Mind,” Summer 2017), the ridiculous trope equating Israelis with Nazis was in- Mattered, he described a visit to Thomas Aquinas famous Rogochover Gaon is quoted as dismissing vented by . the children of Nazis in the 1960s and College in Santa Paula, California, some 40 years ago: the Vilna Gaon as “having all-encompassing knowl- 1970s. This is, as Arkush quotes Herf, “a toxic ideo- “I stayed up late last night, discussing all things with edge” of Talmud but not knowing how to learn as logical brew” that is still very much with us. half-a-dozen of the students . [and] the later it gets, well as a modest schoolteacher, “small rebbele,” w h o Danielle Kahn the more profound and universal the subject under used to be his neighbor in a Russian shtetl. Denver, CO discussion becomes. At nine, perhaps, you are dis- In all likelihood, the Rogochover’s dismissal cussing politics, in the form of some currently news- of the Vilna Gaon was motivated by traditional Open and Shut? worthy piece of public villainy: by ten, you have got Chabadsker antipathy to the Gaon as leader of the Reading Jon Levenson’s thoughtful retrospective on to the principles of political action; by eleven, to the misnagdim (the Hasidic movement’s opponents). the 30th anniversary of The Closing of the American general principles of all human action, and by twelve, In general Chabad retained its pugnacious attitude Mind’s publication in the Summer 2017 issue of JRB to the nature of the good and the beautiful and the towards misnagdim far longer than other strands (“The Closing of the American Mind Now”), I was true. Before the party breaks up in the small hours, of Chassidus. Indeed, the polemic with misnagdim back in the University of Chicago’s Harper Memo- God himself will have been given the full treatment.” exists up until the present day in Chabad. When rial Library, looking at those ceilings and thinking Could such a conversation take place among Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, “the Alter Rebbe,” about what a liberal arts education really is and— young Jewish Americans now, in the 21st century? Is was released from prison, he was released into the bleak thought—whether it’s still possible to get one. it time for we Jews to take up the educational chal- custody of a sort of court Jew, Nota Notkin from Alasdair MacIntyre has lamented the slow dis- lenge of developing what Levenson calls a “well- Shklov, who was permitted to have a residence in solution of the idea of the university (especially the articulated, comprehensive vision of the liberal arts” St. Petersburg. He was there for a few hours before Catholic university), where the theological narra- along Jewish—theological or cultural—lines? I’m his Hasidim could arrange to pick him up and take tive that once held together disparate disciplines pretty sure I know what Bloom would think about him back to Liozna.
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