Jon D. Levenson The American Mind Closes (Again) JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 8, Number 2 Summer 2017 $10.45 Uri Bar-Joseph • Allan Arkush Itamar Rabinovich • Ruby Namdar A. E. Smith • Erica Brown . Editor Abraham Socher FASCINATING SERIES BY MAGGID BOOKS Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld MAGGID MODERN CLASSICS Managing Editor Introduces one of Israel’s most creative and influential thinkers Amy Newman Smith Editorial Assistant Kate Elinsky FAITH SHATTERED Editorial Board AND RESTORED Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Judaism in the Postmodern Age Rabbi Shagar Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson The starkly innovative spiritual and educational Anita Shapira Michael Walzer approach of Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier (known as Rabbi Shagar) has shaped a generation of Israelis who yearn to encounter the Divine in a world Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. 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A Division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Available online and at MAGGID www.korenpub.com local Jewish bookstores JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS JEWISH REVIEW Volume 8, Number 2 Summer 2017 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Ben-Gurion's Yiddish, Foucault on Yom Kippur, Rabin's Solution?, The Lamp and the Flame FEATURE 5 Uri Bar-Joseph A "New History" and Old Facts Fifty years later, Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East attempts to upend our understanding of the 1967 hostilities. REVIEWS 8 Allan Arkush East Meets West Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967–1989 by Jeffrey Herf 10 Walter Laqueur A Dashing Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life by Robert E. Lerner 13 Ruby Namdar On Agnonizing in English A City in Its Fullness by S. Y. Agnon, edited by Alan Mintz and Jeffrey Saks Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon by Alan Mintz 16 Erica Brown Why the Long Face? A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen 18 Hindy Najman Inside or Outside? Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture edited by Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman 22 Shai Secunda Purity and Obscurity Taharah u-kehilla ba-eit ha-atikah: mesorot ha-halakhah ben Yahadut Bayit sheni la-Mishnah (Purity and Community in Antiquity: Traditions of the Law from Second Temple Judaism to the Mishnah) by Yair Furstenberg • Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg • At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity Among the Jews of Roman Galilee by Stuart S. Miller 24 Diane Cole The Wandering Reporter The Wandering Jew Has Arrived by Albert Londres, translated by Helga Abraham 26 Samuel Goldman Great Jews in Robes Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court: From Brandeis to Kagan by David G. Dalin 28 Michel Gurfinkiel The End of Europe as We Know It? The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick READINGS 32 Jon D. Levenson The Closing of the American Mind Now Thirty years ago, a book was published that hit, in the words of its New York Times review, “with the approximate force and effect of what electric shock-therapy must be like.” How has it held up? And what does that have to do with the Bible? THE ARTS 36 Itamar Rabinovich Theater and Politics in Oslo Oslo written by J. T. Rogers, directed by Bartlett Sher 38 A. E. Smith Fauda: The Wages of Chaos Fauda created by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff 40 Sarah Rindner Crazy-Beautiful Startup The Wedding Plan directed by Rama Burshtein LOST & FOUND 42 Jerry Z. Muller "I Am Impossible": An Exchange Between Jacob Taubes and Arthur A. Cohen In the summer of 1977, two old friends ran into each other in front of a Paris bookstore and found themselves arguing about Simone Weil, Judaism, and their lives. 45 Marc B. Shapiro The Rogochover Speaks His Mind After he visited the odd talmudic genius, Bialik said that “two Einsteins can be carved out of one Rogochover.” LAST WORD 47 Amy Newman Smith Hashtag Holocaust On the cover: 50 Years by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Ben-Gurion's Yiddish Imagine my surprise, therefore, on learning, Jewish books is silly—even if one ignores the canoni- In his fine review of The Story of Hebrew (“Adventure from Francoise Mirguet’s review of How Repentance cal Jewish commentators on those books. Story,” Spring 2017), Alan Mintz related Lewis Glin- Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the In- The evolution of these concepts, in the Jewish ert’s assertion that David Ben-Gurion “insisted on the terpretation of Scripture (“Repent, Repent,” Spring canon and beyond, is a serious question. It deserves suppression of Yiddish in official life in the country 2017), that neither the Torah nor any other part a serious answer. A review, and a book, that ignore and refused to allocate resources to the preservation of the Jewish Bible knows anything of repentance. the basics is not serious. of its culture.” I think it is important to note, how- Even Jonah—who we read, of course, on Yom Kip- Jerome M. Marcus ever, that Bundist and other Yiddishist propaganda pur, the day mandated by the same book of Leviti- Narberth, PA has tended to exaggerate the extent of the persecution cus as a day for, well, I had thought it was the day of Yiddish in Israel. Avrom Sutzkever’s great Yiddish of atonement, but apparently that was made up lat- Francoise Mirguet Responds: journal, Di goldene keyt, was, after all, published in Thank you to Jerome M. Marcus for actively engag- Israel from 1949 to 1995 with the financial support ing David A. Lambert’s book and my review. To re- of the Histadrut, the Israeli Labor Federation, which pent is “to review one’s actions and feel contrition or was in control of Mapai, Ben-Gurion’s party. Yiddish regret for something one has done or omitted to do.” culture continued to flourish in Israel in libraries, David A. Lambert’s thesis is that the notion of self newspapers, the performances of the comedy team of presupposed in the Hebrew Bible does not allow for Dzigan and Shumacher, and in other forms as well. In such a capacity of introspection and inner transfor- fact, the decline of Yiddish in Israel was parallel to its mation. This does not mean that the Tanakh is not decline in the United States and for the same reasons. preoccupied with sins and other actions judged inap- To the extent that there was a campaign against propriate; the way to deal with them, however, does the use of Yiddish in the public sphere in Israel in not quite correspond to an inner process prompted the 1950s, Ben-Gurion was not its instigator. He by regret. Let us look at the texts mentioned by Mar- spoke Yiddish, wrote long articles in the Forverts, cus. Leviticus 16:29–30 prescribes that, on yom ha- and gave interviews in Yiddish. Indeed, he opposed kippurim, “You shall afflict yourself [nafshoteichem] the members of his government, from his own par- and shall do no work.” I translate the term nefesh as ty, who wished to prevent the appearance of a daily “self” and not as “ soul” as some translations do.