Solomon Maimon, Rona Sheramy & Mark Gottlieb Go Back To School! JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 4, Number 3 Fall 2013 $7.95 Upcoming Programs at the YIVO Institute Editor Abraham Socher

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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? Reviews 12 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 Magid 26 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.

Controversy 40 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 FootBefore 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

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

Superpowered Thinking of Kant’s mature and well-known opinion about in the Seder scene, the text paraphrases “Shefoch lying. When I referred to Kant’s difficult view that chamatcha el ha-goyim” (Pour out Your wrath upon As always, Mr. Laqueur’s considerable erudition is lying is under all circumstances impermissible I had the nations . . . who have devoured Jacob,” from the very welcome. (“From Russia with Complications,” in mind his article “On the Supposed Right to Lie haggadah), while seated next to his daughter is a Summer 2013) I fear that the phenomenon he from Benevolent Motives.” Kant argues there for an Christian suitor pretending to be a Jew who later points to—of Russian immigrants’ bringing a “su- extremely rigorous, exceptionless duty of truth tell- becomes justification for a horrible death sentence perpower” mentality to bear on the small country ing. He does not base his argument on another per- for his Jewish hosts. where they now live—might mesh all too well with son’s right to the truth but rather on an uncondi- For Jews who left the ghetto to enjoy the bour- a parallel Israeli tendency on both the Right and the tional duty as an end in itself. (He does, somewhat geois world outside, opera was a place of fantasy (increasingly eclipsed) Left. I speak of the mindset inconsistently however, invoke the consequences realized. It gave voice to rebellion against oppres- that Israeli actions alone can determine the future of lying, however well intended or exigent under sion. As it happens, in his classic “Culture and Edu- of the country. On the Right, this means the idea the circumstances. For him, the consequences are a cation in the Diaspora,” reprinted in the same issue, that the settlers can behave however they want, in weakening of what we would today call social trust. Hayim Greenberg writes of the Jew who “cannot complete defiance of U.S. and world opinion; on the He foresees the destruction of the whole moral and carry a part in that choir that gives voice, conscious- Left, this means a belief that a “land for peace” deal judicial underpinning of society.) Kant suggests ly or not, to what I have called the Jewish melody.” is the only thing holding back a utopian peace. That, I submit, is what the grandfather in Swann’s Martin Berman-Gorvine Way is trying to discover: a response to a melody via jewishreviewofbooks.com not “drained of those powers that build a Jewish personality.” Larry W. Josefovitz Kant’s Dignity Beachwood, OH

Alan Mittleman’s review of the books by Michael Rosen and George Kateb on the topic of dignity Hayim Greenberg’s Legacy (“Two or Three Concepts of Dignity,” Summer 2013) effectively distills the historical and specula- Back in the late 1970s I spent a year and a half tive aspects of their respective approaches to the studying at Machon Greenberg, which was then topic in ways that make clear the limits of each located in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem work, not only individually and in comparison with (“Culture and Education in the Diaspora,” Summer, each other, but also vis-à-vis the interests of the 2013). The school was as a training center for North philosophically attuned Jewish thinker. and South Americans to learn about Jewish history Mittleman’s attempt, however, to suggest some- and study Hebrew in order to become teachers thing of the Kantian character of Rosen’s “argument either in Israel or in other countries. A fitting salute for respecting the dignity of the remains of deceased to the man, I think. persons” badly misfires. He points out that accord- Andrew Tallis ing to Rosen “one would injure one’s own dignity via jewishreviewofbooks.com by acting in ways that fail to express respect” for another reason for the ban on lying, however. He the dead. This is “reminiscent,” opines Mittleman, says that while no one has a right to the truth— “of Kant’s infamous view that it is impermissible to he thinks that is a meaningless claim—each of us tell a lie, even if it would save someone’s life.” True has a “right to his own truthfulness (veracitas).” I enough, when it comes to human dignity Kant holds took that to imply that we disfigure ourselves when no brief for mendacity: “By a lie,” declares Kant in we lie; being untrue to others means being untrue JEWISH REVIEW “The Doctrine of Virtue” (1797), “a human being to ourselves. We diminish ourselves thereby. That OF BOOKS throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity seemed to me close to Rosen’s view that we would as a human being.” However, about the time of the impair our own dignity by the malign treatment of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), a corpse, even if the cadaver’s “rights” (or the ca- Georg Ludwig Collins, an auditor in Kant’s course daver) suffer no harm. on moral philosophy, recorded the following: “If Web Exclusive! everyone were well disposed, it would not only be a duty not to lie, but nobody would need to do Proust’s Jewish Melodies it . . . however, since men are malicious, it is true that “What Jesus Wasn’t: we often court danger by punctilious observance of I was enriched by Adam Kirsch’s “Proust Between the truth, and hence has arisen the concept of the Halakha and Aggada” (Summer 2013). In the course Reza Aslan’s Zealot” necessary lie . . . So far as I am constrained, by force of his essay, Kirsch quotes a particularly resonant used against me, . . . and I am unable to save myself passage of Swann’s Way: “[W]henever I formed by Allan Nadler by silence, the lie is a weapon of defense.” Relative a strong attachment to any one of my friends and to Mittleman’s remark that a “corpse as such no lon- brought him home . . . my grandfather seldom ger has dignity,” a properly Kantian gloss would be failed to start humming the ‘O, God of our fathers’ that treating human remains with respect is a duty from La Juive, or else ‘Israel, break thy chains,’ . . . I not to the dead, but with regard to the dead. Kant used to be afraid that my friend would recognise it.” would classify this as an “indirect” duty to oneself, In trying to understand the world of 19th-century the fulfillment of which contributes to preserving Jewry, a great deal is lost in not knowing how mu- the dignity of humanity in one’s person. sic expressed the interior being of both Jews faith- Read only at Phillip Stambovsky ful to tradition and those who wished to distance New Haven, CT themselves from it. Halévy’s opera La Juive (The www.jewishreviewofbooks.com Jewess), for instance, was part of the standard reper- Alan Mittleman Responds: toire from its inception in the 1830s until the 1930s, I thank Phillip Stambovsky for his comment on my when its subject matter became too uncomfortably review. I was not aware of the reminiscence of Col- relevant. When the central character, Eleazar, sings Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. lins that he cites. I find it rather shocking in light “O Dieu, Dieu de nos peres” (O, God of our fathers)

4 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 FEATUREs Fathers & Sons

BY Yehudah Mirsky

n Wednesday, July 24, Israel’s new chief Shas Party was concerned, the only question was mained in the ring, the other Sephardi candidates rabbis were chosen. It’s a curious process, which one of Rav Ovadia Yosef’s sons would inherit didn’t stand a chance. held every ten years, in which a board the seat their father had vacated nearly thirty years One caused a stir, though. Shmuel Eliyahu, rabbi of 150 electors composed of Orthodox ago. One after another, however, they fell out of the of Safed, son of another former Sephardi chief rabbi, Orabbis and lay people (mainly elected officials and running. Yaacov, the eldest, who was the most po- Mordechai Eliyahu (1983-1993) and, like his father, functionaries), including a few (very few) women, litically right-wing and the most remote from his a hard-right nationalist, was the candidate of Reli- horse-trade their way to the election of two men who father, passed away earlier this year. David, a close gious Zionism’s new Jewish Home Party (Bayit Ye- are, at least in theory, the spiritual leaders of the na- friend of Aryeh Deri, the chairman and chief demi- hudi), headed by Naftali Bennett. Eliyahu is a con- tion. In practice, the office of chief rabbi has become urge of the Shas Party, blotted his copybook when, troversial figure. In 2005 he suggested that the ap- 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 So many candidates went up and down, came and went, that Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was already under house at times this summer it seemed like anything could happen— arrest on charges of bribery and corruption. The competition this time was more bitter than it until it finally became clear that nothing, or rather the same had been in years, and the scandals, unlikely allianc- es, and backroom deals made for great, if unedifying, thing, is exactly what would, in fact, happen. political theater. When it was all over, the winners were both very familiar and fairly unknown: Rabbi a year and a half ago, he penned an anonymous propriate way to punish secular Israelis for the Gaza Yitzhak Yosef is the son of former Chief Rabbi Ova- letter to a leading member of the Knesset decrying disengagement of 2005 was “to make their children dia Yosef, a towering figure in Israeli religious life who borderline-illegal attempts by the Shas Party to religious… [and] drive them crazy.” More recently, held the office from 1973 until 1983 and, as founder seize control of the country’s rabbinical adminis- he has said that Jewish landlords ought not rent and leader of the powerful Shas Party, has been the tration city by city. This was done not out of civic to Arabs, leading the attorney general to consider de facto Sephardi chief rabbi ever since; Rabbi David duty, but apparently in order to keep his brother invalidating his candidacy on the grounds that he Lau is the son of former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Yitzhak from becoming chief rabbi of Jerusalem, had violated the country’s incitement laws. Eliyahu’s a decidedly lesser but nonetheless distinguished fig- a job he himself coveted. Avraham Yosef, rabbi of near disqualification was far from the most sur- ure who held the office from 1993 until 2003. Both Holon, emerged as a candidate, until journalists prising thing about his candidacy: that would have sons are men of some accomplishment, respected in brought to light his questionable use of his office to been his being on the same Religious Zionist slate as their own political and religious circles, but neither promote a kashrut supervision organization head- the Ashkenazi David Stav, chairman of a moderate one has been a key player in Israeli religious life, and, ed by his brother Moshe. It was only a few days rabbinic organization called Tzohar (literally, as I write, new revelations, allegations, and miscues before the election that the family turned, reluc- skylight), whose platform was as conciliatory as (to which I shall return) are being reported about the tantly, to Yitzhak, who, as editor of his father’s vo- Eliyahu’s was divisive. younger Lau every day. luminous halakhic writings, actually has the schol- This was actually just the beginning of the di- The biggest winners were the ultra-Orthodox arly credentials that entitle him to claim the office. visiveness within the Religious Zionist camp. The haredim, who solidified their hold on an institution Against the last scion of the Yosef family who re- “chardal” wing of the party, which combines fervent 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).

o many candidates went up and down, came Sand 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- Newly elected chief rabbis, David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef, with Rabbi Israel Meir Lau and Benjamin toral machinations, it became clear that as far as the Netanyahu. (Photo by Amos Ben Gershom, courtesy of the Government Press Office, Israel.)

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 5 Zionism with something like the anti-modernist annulled thousands of conversions. They had been But after the Israeli general elections of 2013, the worldview of the haredim, put forward yet another presided over by Religious Zionist rabbis as part of political covenant between Bayit Yehudi’s Naftali son of a former chief rabbi. In this case, it was Yaa- an effort to integrate Russian immigrants into Israeli Bennett and the secular centrist Yair Lapid effec- kov Shapira, the son of former Chief Rabbi Avra- society. (Israel’s High Court of Justice affirmed the tively excluded the haredi parties from power. It also ham Shapira (1983-1993) and the head of Mercaz validity of the conversions in 2012.) In the face of put their young men in the sights of the army and Ha-Rav, the flagship yeshiva of Religious Zionism such socially destructive, halakhically infamous, and their budgets on the chopping block. If they had lost founded in the 1920s by Rav Avraham Yitzchak the chief rabbinate too, it would have spelled big, Kook. On election day, Rabbis Shapira, Stav, and big trouble. Luckily for them, the Religious Zionists Eliyahu split the Religious Zionist vote and were were their own worst enemies. trounced by their haredi rivals. Rabbi Stav and his colleagues in Tzohar see them- selves as continuing Rav Kook’s teachings on toler- t wasn’t supposed to be like this. The chief rab- ance and cooperation with secularists in their push Ibinate was established in 1921, in the early days for a more responsive and supple (if still firmly Ortho- of the British Mandate. For the British, it was a dox) rabbinate. Stav and his cohort are by no means continuation of the Ottomans’ practice of appoint- religious liberals, but they do understand the popular ing local clerics to keep religion friendly and man- alienation from the rabbinate and seek to ameliorate ageable and to run things like marriage, divorce, it as best they can. But they are not the only ones who and inheritance. For the Zionists, it would be yet claim Kook’s mantle. Rabbi Zvi Tau, the éminence another new institution of the nascent state. For grise of the chardalim whose disdain for Stav goes Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi, whose back decades, has argued that while responsiveness spirit still hovers over today’s debates, it was to be and flexibility may be good for camp counselors or a means of modernizing Jewish law and leading neighborhood rabbis, the chief rabbinate must hold the spiritual revolution that would be the ultimate the line against the encroachments of Western cul- fruit of the Jews’ secular nationalist revival. Rav ture. In Tau’s dark and unsubtle interpretation of Rav Kook was a deep but ethereal thinker and lacked Kook’s acutely dialectical worldview, religionists can the political smarts and administrative acumen to work with secular Zionists because the latter do not enliven the institution. But after his death in 1935, Rabbi David Stav. (Courtesy of Tzohar.) understand their own place in the unfolding messi- a number of distinguished successors put the chief anic drama. “Secularists,” Tau rabbinate on its feet. has said, “have no future. All For decades, the rabbinate served as the religious of their future reality will ex- arm of the state, supervising kashrut, marriage, and plode when the kingdom of divorce, and running a system of rabbinical courts, Israel will arise.” Tau and oth- parallel to the state judicial system, which ruled ac- ers went to work, badmouth- cording to Jewish law. It worked alongside other ing Stav to anyone who would arms of the state charged with maintaining religious listen, above all Rabbi Ovadia identity and practice—the Ministry of Religion, Yosef and his retinue in the the Interior Ministry, and the local religious coun- Shas Party. cils—through which state funds are distributed for Rabbi Yosef, in turn, issued synagogues, ritual baths, and the like. The haredim, scathing attacks on Stav, at one who did not recognize the ultimate legitimacy of point calling him “wicked.” the state and regarded its rabbinate as a theological This was the latest in a series of monstrosity, had parallel institutions of their own. sad moments in the career of Yet, in recent decades a curious dynamic took Rav Ovadia (as he is known), hold. The rabbinate steadily passed into the hands who is now ninety-two. Had of the haredim, who, while formally disdaining Zi- he never entered politics he onism, came to relish the rabbinate’s opportunities would have gone down in his- for patronage, profits, and power. Meanwhile, the tory as a staggeringly erudite, Religious Zionists focused their energies on the Shas party election poster, 2009. (Photo by Amos Ben Gershom, courtesy of intellectually nimble, and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. By the mid- the Government Press Office, Israel.) compassionate halakhist. His 1990s it had become clear that the rabbinate had refusal to ascribe redemptive lost much of whatever touch it had ever had with significance to the State of the Israeli public. deliberately provocative acts, Tzohar has continued Israel while at the same time declining to join his In response, in 1995, a group of Religious Zion- to argue for moderate, piecemeal reform. Ashkenazi haredi counterparts in condemning it as ist rabbis created Tzohar. Their first major innovation the devil’s handiwork also seemed to hold out the was simply to insist upon meeting with and actually or decades the haredim have benefited from the possibility of societal compromise. But this is not becoming acquainted with couples before marrying Ffact that their singular priority—funding for how things turned out. them (while refusing the customary bribes). In the the network of institutions that enable their self- In founding Shas, which is a Sephardi social ensuing years, Tzohar has continued to stake out the enclosed lifestyle—was so narrow that they could movement and network of institutions as well as a po- classic territory of Religious Zionism, promoting a negotiate their way into almost any government litical party, Rav Ovadia may have become the most moderate, modern traditionalism. They have urged coalition. The installation of Yona Metzger as Ash- powerful rabbi in Jewish history. He has also become the rabbinate to serve its constituency and represent kenazi chief rabbi in 2003 was a perfect expression the leader of a party with a well-deserved reputation the state rather than seeking to undermine it or sim- of their cynicism and contempt for the institutions for corruption. The emblematic figure here is Aryeh ply milk it. In response, the rabbinate effectively shut of the state: He was a rabbinic nonentity with ques- Deri, who recently returned to politics after serving down the marriage program, which was deemed tionable ethics, but he was an entirely reliable cut- twenty-two months in prison on bribery charges a ideologically deviant (and bad for business). out. (Earlier in his career, Metzger had agreed to be decade ago. When asked about Rav Ovadia’s descrip- Beyond weddings, Tzohar has run user-friendly disqualified from serving as a municipal rabbi in tion of Stav, Deri helpfully explained that it wasn’t de- prayer services and sponsored public education pro- order to forestall disciplinary charges; when he was famatory, it was just that Stav’s actions fit the halakhic grams. It has also urged openness to converts. In put up for chief rabbi, he argued that he’d never criteria of “wickedness.” He should know. Machiavel- 2008, in a decision that still resonates, a State rabbinic been disqualified from serving the whole country, lian though he may be, nobody ever said Deri was court led by haredi Judge Rabbi Avraham Sherman which showed chutzpah even by Israeli standards.) dumb. And on election day, he proved his skill.

6 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 On the Ashkenazi side, the haredim were uni- Both will continue to oppose liberal religion in Is- fied behind Rabbi David Lau. He had been success- rael, as well as the introduction of civil marriage and ful as the rabbi of the mixed secular-religious town divorce, though they may try to make the religious new from the jewish of Modi’in; he had the blessing of Rabbi Aharon Ye- court system more humane when it comes to agu- publication society huda Leib Shteinman, a venerable rosh yeshiva (he is not, wives whose husbands have abandoned them somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred without giving them a get (halakhic divorce), which and one years old) who, since the passing last year would allow them to remarry. Indeed, Rav Ovadia, of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, has emerged as the in a reminder of his past glories, spoke movingly “The New Reform Judaism [is] a valuable contribution to Israeli society has only barely begun to have a serious [the] evolving discourse.” —Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president, conversation over what, if anything, the contemporary Union for Reform Judaism rabbinate is for. leader of the relatively moderate haredim (Lau also about the plight of agunot at the first gathering cel- took care to solicit the blessing of even more hard- ebrating his son’s election. line haredi rabbinic figures such as Rav Chaim Some are urging Rabbi Stav, Tzohar, and allied re- Kanievsky); and his father had been almost as reliable ligious bodies to create their own alternative institu- a proxy as Metzger while maintaining his dignity and tions. Other rabbinic moderates have urged friendly the stature of the office. cooperation with the new chief rabbis, though that As the election drew near, Prime Minister Ne- may be less likely now that Lau’s secret deal on con- tanyahu had close associates make calls to electors version has been revealed. In truth, it’s a hard call. conveying the PM’s wishes to them: elect Yosef and Stav’s very public campaign, while electorally unsuc- Lau. Netanyahu favors the pliant, reliable haredim cessful, may have succeeded in getting many Israelis (whom he’d be glad to see back in the government) to consider the possibility that the rabbinate could be and seems to despise his former aide Bennett for something other than the ecclesiastical version of the empowering Lapid and outflanking him on the DMV (or Tammany Hall). On the other hand, more right. When the votes were in, the two haredi can- people than ever before, including figures in the didates had each received an identical number of Religious Zionist camp, are publicly musing about votes, sixty-eight. whether the country needs a chief rabbinate at all. Some have suggested the tactic of letting things go hat happens next? The Religion Ministry re- from bad to worse until the system implodes. Yet, as Wmains a part of Naftali Bennett’s portfolio, much as one might want to abolish the rabbinate out- and how a right-wing Religious Zionist (who backed right—and then take a good shower—the institution the reform-minded Stav) and the haredim will man- still wields real power over people’s lives, and many age to work together is anyone’s guess. Bennett and of them, women and converts above all, are terribly Tzipi Livni have together put forward new legislation vulnerable in the meantime. that would restructure the rabbinate, with one chief Israeli society has only barely begun to have a se- “These remarkable postcards will rabbi instead of two, and separate the post of chief rious conversation over what, if anything, the con- make you laugh, cry, and clench rabbi from chief rabbinical judge. This streamlining temporary rabbinate is for. The rich church-state your fist in anger.” would probably eliminate some of the institution’s discourse with which Americans are familiar has no —Alan Dershowitz, author of corruption, but the odds of its passing are slim. analog here. Roger Williams’ classic theological ar- Meanwhile, Rabbi David Lau has called, with a gument that the establishment of religion inevitably The Trials of Zion gingerly diffidence reminiscent of his father, for the damages religion itself has, for all of Israel’s vaunted integration of haredim into the army and the work attachments to America, little purchase in Israel. force, while cautioning that “a coercive process is And the American trade-off, by which religious in- not the way.” But this was quickly overshadowed by tensity is lowered for the sake of civic peace, doesn’t a one-week trifecta of scandals following his election. sit well with Israeli intensities and primal identities. First he was caught using the Israeli equivalent of the There is, as of yet, simply no civic language for argu- “N-word” while admonishing the young men of ing about the rabbinate, let alone a menu of policy Modi’in to study Torah rather than watch basketball options. What’s more, the country’s secular elites on television. Next, it was revealed that he had brought are still happy to consign the country’s religious in illegal crib sheets the first time he tried to pass the life to the rabbinate, which conveniently excuses State Rabbinic exam in 1993. (He was disqualified and them from reckoning with the inescapably religious passed the next year.) And then the real scandal hit. freight of Zionism. The newspaper Ma’ariv has reported that in se- Championed by one of the greatest Jewish think- cret meetings with haredi decision-makers before ers of all times, the chief rabbinate began as a noble the vote, Rabbi Lau agreed to submit all of his de- dream. In the end, Rav Kook and his intellectual heirs cisions regarding conversion to Rabbi Avraham were tragically naïve about Judaism’s susceptibility to For complete descriptions Sherman, the same haredi rabbinic judge who had the corruptions of power. And that is a reality that and to order, visit jps.org annulled thousands of conversions in 2008. Wheth- only courage and a different kind of faith can undo. 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 Yehudah Mirsky, a former State Department official, is least some of the reforms proposed by Stav and Tzo- associate professor of the Practice of Near Eastern and har are now dead. Judaic Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef will likely try to maintain Studies at Brandeis University. His new book, Rav Kook: The Jewish Publication Society jps.org • 800-848-6224 the status quo on most issues, while being willing Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), to explore limited forms of haredi national service. is forthcoming in early 2014.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 7 The Hunter

BY Rich Cohen

ems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point,” Salt- said, and what essentially distinguished me was an All That Is er wrote. “I would succeed there, it was hoped, as ingrained culture, ages deep, which in any case I by James Salter [my father] had”—as you would not be seeing that wanted to put aside.” Knopf, 304 pp., $26.95 young man again. This quote is interesting for what it says, but also He went in shaggy; he came out sheared. He went for when: It was written many years after the fact, in dreamy; he came out steely, realistic, remorseless, in a memoir published in 1997. Salter had obscured and fascinated by machines. What do they do to a his background for much of his career. So here was n my sophomore year of college, I took a class a man in his 70s grappling, not with “all that is” but called The Jewish American Novel. I was hop- He went in shaggy; with all that had been put aside. Even so, you still ing it would acquaint me with a culture I’d hear the words—the truth of the biography—catch spent much of my youth trying to deny. I grew he came out sheared. in his throat. He’s like an old le Carré spy who still upI in a town in Illinois, where, on the playground, can’t break cover even decades after the game ended. appearing exactly the same as everyone else was a plebe at the Academy? They line him up, shout him Though it was years before he took the pen name, matter of social survival. This was not Jesse Jackson’s down, run him, humiliate him, punish and break Horowitz became Salter at West Point. That’s where Hymietown; this was the United States. We studied him, burning away the eccentricities that make him he assumed a new identity, a military cast of mind, the greats in that class, Bellow and Roth, the red- unique. Horowitz resisted for a time, turning up, learned to love neat hierarchies and the importance brick Brooklyn of Delmore Schwartz, the Molochs each Friday, for a synagogue service conducted by of rank. From his first publication, he’s been ob- of Allen Ginsberg. Most of the classic types were a local rabbi. Whereas church services were part of sessed by physical trials, feats of endurance, heroic represented: the worriers and clowns, the big acts. Critics attribute it to the influence of Heming- thinkers and survivors. But left out was the way, but it really comes from the Academy: It’s the sort of Jew that mattered most to me, the Jew ideology that filled the vacuum when he switched who’s trying to pass. from Friday night to Sunday morning, because James Salter changed his name from Horow- “[t]he most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to itz for the same reason the Turks renamed become unnoticed, the same.” Constantinople: He liked it better that way. His In 1944, Horowitz was sent to Pine Bluff, Arkan- career, which began with spare war stories in sas for Army Air Corps flight training; he would the mid-1950s, has culminated, just now, with eventually become a pilot in the Air Force, then his magnum opus, All That Is, an autumnal in its golden age. By 1950, he was a flyboy out of novel that caps a stunning body of work. More Tom Wolfe, buzz cut in the cockpit, screaming over than any other artist’s, Salter’s career, intention- Europe. The military supplied him with material, ally or not, has perfectly described the situation history, and myth, a lore that predated him and of many American Jews, who feel at once free would continue long after he was gone. Salter’s work and not free, liberated from Judaism yet stub- is crowded with vainglory: immortal, imperishable, bornly defined by it. Salter speaks to all those unconquerable. who intermarried and joined the club, donned Looking back, after a distinguished lifetime of white bucks and seersucker, who, lost in Sag avoidance, he wrote: Harbor and Hilton Head, have spent years try- ing to slip the shackles as Houdini, né Weiss, We were [stationed] not far from Dachau, the slipped his shackles before the multitudes. Be- ash-pit. One of them. I had seen its flat ruins. That tween Salter’s most elegant lines, I can still hear Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, had served as Horowitz scream. Neither Bellow nor Roth, it’s James Salter in front of his F-86 Sabre jet fighter during the an officer in the German army in the First World Salter—defined by what he’s left out—whose Korean War, 1952. War, I may not have known, but I was aware that art depicts the Jew who has tried to dissolve patriotism and devotion had not saved him or the ancient in the American quotidian but still others. They might not save me, though I swore feels a pang of difference. the schedule, attending Friday night meant separat- to myself they would. I knew I was different, Life is contingent. In the summer of 1942, James ing yourself from the group, coming back alone, not if nothing else marked by my name. I acted Horowitz, having graduated from Horace Mann in wanting to explain. “After an hour of services, eter- always from two necessities; the first was to be Riverdale, where he was a third stringer on a high nal and unconnected to the harsh life we were lead- like everyone, and the second—was it foolish?— school football team that starred Jack Kerouac, was ing, we marched back to barracks where everyone was to be better than other men. If I was to be working “on a farm in Connecticut, sleeping on a was studying or preparing for the next morning’s despised I wanted it to be by inferiors. bare mattress in the stifling attic,” as Salter wrote in his inspection,” Salter wrote much later. “I felt uncom- memoir, Burning the Days, killing time until the fall, fortable about having been gone. Though no one n 1952, he volunteered for a fighter wing and when he was to enroll at Stanford. Then, a kid who’d ever said a word, I felt, in a way, untrue. In the end Iwas sent to Korea, which was then at war. For been accepted to West Point failed the physical exam, I dropped out and went to chapel with the Corps.” several months, he operated at the tip of the spear, and another kid failed the written exam, opening a In short, they broke him, then remade him in the flying jets above the frozen 38th parallel, waste spot for the second name on the waiting list: Horow- image of the rest. The Jewish thing was driven in- places and factories, the Yalu curving toward the itz. He wanted to continue on to California, but his side, where it remains in hiding, occasionally spill- Yellow Sea. It gave him a real-world credibility that father, George, had graduated first in his class from ing out between the lines. “Of course, you cannot would eventually make him an oddball in the lit- West Point in 1918, and, fathers being fathers . . . drop out—you may perhaps try—and I became part erary world, where no one does anything but go It’s instructive to look at Horowitz before he of neither one group nor the other, but it seemed to to parties, read, and write. He led squadrons, flew matriculated—“Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by po- me that God was God, as the writings themselves as a wingman, tumbling through the sky, chasing

8 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 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 New from Stanford University Press old poem-saturated Horowitz, dreaming of the perfect phrase. His first novel,The Hunters, was a story of Amer- The Parable and Its Nineteenth-Century ican pilots in Korea. He’d written it at night, in a Lesson Jewish Literature notebook (stashed, one is tempted to say, beside his A Novella A Reader Judaism). Fly all day; report all night. The book ap- S. Y. Agnon, edited by Translated and Annotated by JonAThAn m. heSS, peared under the name James Salter in 1956. He later JAmeS S. DiAmonD, mAuriCe SAmuelS, and described the pseudonym as a necessary precaution. with an introduction and nADiA VAlmAn “It was essential not to be identified and jeopardize a Critical essay by AlAn minTz Stanford Studies in Jewish History Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture career—I had heard the sarcastic references to ‘God and Culture $29.95 paper $95.00 cloth Is My Copilot’ Scott. I wanted to be admired but not $19.95 paper $60.00 cloth 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 ne W in PAPerbACk ne W in PAPerbACk name, a Christian name first used to identify musi- A Jewish Voice from Henry Ford’s War on cians who played the psaltery, a medieval harp. He’s Ottoman Salonica Jews and the Legal always had a taste for pedigree. “A name is a destiny,” The Ladino Memoir of Battle Against Hate Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi he wrote. “It is the first of all poems. Even after death Speech it keeps its power; even half-buried in newsprint or edited and with an introduction by Aron roDrigue and ViCToriA SAker WoeSTe dirt, something catches the eye.” SArAh AbreVAYA STein; $24.95 paper Salter suffered from a disease diagnosed by the Translation, Transliteration, and early Zionists, for whom a Jewish nation—what if glossary by iSAAC JeruSAlmi Stanford Studies in Jewish History Horowitz had been flying a Mirage over Sinai instead and Culture of an F-86 over the Yalu?—was the cure. Simply put, $27.95 paper Salter believed what they told him at West Point— about the world and about himself. He internalized Rhinestones, The Business of it, then shaped himself around this conception. If he Religion, and the Identity wanted to be a great pilot and a great American writer, Republic Jews, Muslims, and he could not do it named Horowitz. It’s the same men- Fashioning Jewishness Economic Life in tality that turned Bernard Schwartz into Tony Curtis. in France Medieval Egypt And it’s the reason why, for many of us, the famous kimberlY A. Arkin PhilliP i. ACkermAn-liebermAn first line of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie Stanford Studies in Jewish History Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture and Culture March—“I am an American, Chicago born . . . ”—is $65.00 cloth $60.00 cloth so liberating.

erhaps surprisingly, this internal conflict does Pnot weaken Salter as a writer but deepens and complicates him. In this, he is akin to Isaac Babel, Mixing Musics The Modernity of the great writer of the Russian revolution, a Jew who Turkish Jewry and the Others rode with the Cossacks in the war between the Reds Urban Landscape of a Jewish Anti-Catholicism and the Whites. It’s the telegraphic prose style as well Sacred Song in Germany and France mAureen JACkSon as the dilemmas buried deep but still visible. Here’s Ari JoSkoWiCz Stanford Studies in Jewish History Stanford Studies in Jewish History another Jew riding through the goyishe countryside, and Culture and Culture dressed like a soldier. In one of Babel’s famous sto- $65.00 cloth $65.00 cloth 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, Nathan Birnbaum and A Jewish Life on Three cracked and overflowed. The white neck was Jewish Modernity Continents Architect of Zionism, The Memoir of Menachem spread out in the dung, and the wings began to Yiddishism, and Mendel Frieden move above the slaughtered bird . . . ‘The lad will Orthodoxy Translated, edited, and do all right with us,’ one of [the Cossacks] said, JeSS olSon Annotated, and with referring to me, winking and scooping up some Stanford Studies in Jewish History introductions and an Afterword by lee ShAi WeiSSbACh cabbage soup in his spoon. and Culture $65.00 cloth Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture For Salter, initiation came in the air, riding the $60.00 cloth 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 Stanford of dark forest that swept beneath us, hills and Most Stanford titles are University Press frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to available as e-books: belong. It was a baptism. This silent angel was to www.sup.org/ebooks 800.621.2736 www.sup.org bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 9 would be made one with the rest . . . Afterwards The rain pours down like gravel. In the green he said not a word to me. The emissary does not light of the instrument panel he feels as stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers homeless, as desolate as a criminal. Gently she his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields wipes his wet cheeks with her fingers. They pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling have nowhere to go. They are strangers here, the of being for a moment a true pilot—these things doors of the town are closed to them. Suddenly remained. he is filled with intimations of being found somehow, of being seized and taken away. He One should note the term baptism: a new name, a doesn’t even have a chance to talk to her. They new faith. And you sit and eat the goose with the are separated. They are lost to each other. He Cossacks. tries to cry out in this coalescing dream, to tell Then there’s the point of view: For Babel, it was her where she should go, what she should do, from horseback, an unusual position for a Jew. It’s but it’s too complicated. He cannot. She is gone. about freedom and movement as much as perspec- tive. “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a The manuscript was rejected by his publisher. It severed head,” writes Babel. “[A] gentle radiance was such a departure. And it was boring. And it was glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the about nothing. And it was pornographic. It was then standards of the sunset float above our heads. The turned down by just about every other publishing odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips house in New York, until it was finally put out by into the evening coolness.” For Salter, writing only a George Plimpton and The Paris Review. The ensuing few years later, it’s not horseback but the cockpit of a trajectory of the novel describes the arc dreamed of jet fighter at thirty thousand feet, a point of view once by every author whose book has tanked: Three hun- reserved for God: “We crossed Gibraltar, like a pebble dred copies sold the first year, three thousand sold far below, and then brown, hard Spain. We were go- the second, ten thousand the third, and so on. In ing home with new airplanes, the first of those that 1995, it was republished by the Modern Library, a could routinely fly faster than the speed of sound.” rare honor. It’s now rightly considered a classic. Original poster for The Hunters, a 1958 feature film Salter is often said to be a writer’s writer. He’s more he Hunters was a hit. It sold and sold. It was adapted from the James Salter novel. like a writer’s writer’s writer, unread by the public. Yet Tpurchased by Hollywood, where it was turned he goes on, page by page, into a film starring Robert Mitchum. Just like that, a man with a message a new road opened before Salter. He had been career he knows will prevail military, on the Pentagon path. He would forsake in the end. He followed all that, go the Hemingway, which was Paris and A Sport and A Pastime publication parties and off-season resorts. He made with Light Years, which the decision at thirty-two. No matter what else you many consider his great- might think of Salter, you have to acknowledge his est novel. He was living bravery: To give up a career of rank and insignia for in New City, a suburb on literature takes guts. He later wrote about wander- the Hudson a few dozen ing the Pentagon, in uniform, looking for someone miles above Manhattan. who would accept his resignation. Then he went The novel tells the story home and cried. When he told a friend what he had of a seemingly perfect done, the friend said, “You idiot!” marriage as it comes In the mid-1960s, he began working on the book apart. It’s about meals, cit- that would become his artistic breakthrough. It was ies, people, habits, world- like nothing he’d ever done: a chronicle of an affair, views, but its real subject a young American and a French girl, their story is time, which does not narrated by a third-party voyeur. Everything is in exist and is also the only retrospect, years later, a strange run of towns and thing that matters. People restaurants, escapades in bed. age before your eyes, col- lapse like old houses, give Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath up the ghost before they a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with die. The book is a perfect sunlight and began the descent to town . . . James Salter in Paris, October 1999. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.) example of the Salter aes- And then those great, lineal runs through thetic: The taut sentences neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making and icy scenes are orga- straight for the perfect square which marked fantasizing about a world he can never truly pos- nized to spotlight Salter’s brilliant prose and, perhaps the city like a signet. sess, not the Paris of hotel lobbies but the impen- also, to disguise Horowitz. I wouldn’t keep harping etrable towns of bourgeois France. It’s a fever dream, on this if he didn’t try so hard to disguise it. Of all the His writing had matured, clipped and beautiful a poem of unrequited love. Critics heard an echo of Jewish writers of his generation, Salter might be most but also a threat. It gets in your head and comes out Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller. Americans influenced by his Jewishness. your mouth. The odd comma, the odd beat: “Sep- abroad, enraptured by foreign places. To me, it’s Somewhere, in just about every Salter book, tember. It seems these luminous days will never less Hemingway than Herzl—with his Christmas you’ll find a seemingly anti-Semitic passage. It’s not end. The city, which was almost empty during Au- tree and fantasy of seamless assimilation. Salter is just what he says, but the way his narrators seem to gust, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. Herzl before Dreyfus, or whatever made him a Zi- regard Jews: less as individuals than as instances of a The restaurants are all reopening, the shops.” onist, grasping at a mirage, always going but never type. In Light Years, it comes at the beginning, when Salter is obsessed with light—it pours down, fills arriving, always outside, humping through the exile. introducing a main character, who was based on a up, lingers. After light, darkness. After life, death. If you wear just the right coat, strike just the right friend and neighbor of Salter: In this way, his books are about nothing and about pose, assume just the right name . . . everything. A Sport and a Pastime can be read al- “They drive through the streets of an unknown He was a Jew, the most elegant Jew, the most legorically. It’s boy meets girl, but it’s also the writer town,” he writes in A Sport and a Pastime. romantic, a hint of weariness in his features, the

10 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 intelligent features everyone envied, his hair dry, books were riddled with the kind, country club anti- alter’s new novel, All That Is, published when he his clothes oddly threadbare—that is it say, not Semitism that went out of fashion after World War Swas eighty-seven, is a masterpiece, a singular overly cared for, a button missing, the edge of a II. In emulating the old models, he’s taken the bad work that restates his entire oeuvre. He’s been work- cuff stained, his breath faintly bad like the breath with the good, the movable feast but also the preju- ing on it forever—his first novel in thirty years. The of an uncle who is no longer well. He was small. dice that gives the whole thing its neat tone of exclu- book is about what it feels like to be alive, captured He had soft hands, and no sense of money, almost sion. It reminds me of a kid who copied a friend’s through the life of Philip Bowman, a New York none at all. He was an albino in that, a freak. A homework. In the middle of the page, without real- book editor whose story takes us from World War Jew without money is like a dog without teeth. izing what he was doing, he wrote, “continued on the II to the day before yesterday. It’s beautiful and ter- back.” But perhaps that lets him off too easy, because rifying: beautiful because Salter can write like the In the new novel, it comes near the end, when Salter really does seem to harbor a variety of the anti- wind, terrifying because it’s a life without rules or the protagonist finds himself among Jews: Semitism that suffused the army’s officer corps before a code, where the only deities are human, the only World War II. To be Jewish is to be venal, weak, and immortality by daring act. God is gone, his place As he sat there, Bowman was more and grasping, and he is the poet of a certain kind of glori- taken by roads a moment before sundown, love af- more conscious of not being one of them, of ous American masculinity. Or maybe it’s just a diver- fairs, betrayals, hotels, beach grass, and houses by being an outsider. They were a people, they sion, meant to demonstrate that he’s not really Jewish. the sea (there are no oceans in Salter; just seas). somehow recognized and understood one I mean, what Jew would write, “A Jew without money At Salter’s age, one expects an artist to reconcile his another, even as strangers. They carried it in is like a dog without teeth.” written and his actual self. With All That Is, it’s clear their blood, a thing you could not know. They Whatever its source, such artifice and obfusca- this will not happen. Salter will never make room in had written the Bible with all that had sprung tion can make Salter’s work, at its weakest, seem his work for Horowitz. It is, in fact, the distance be- from it, Christianity, the first saints, yet there phony, a fancied depiction of a world that exists only tween that gives his work its candied, marzipan power. was something about them that drew hatred in the minds of a small community of East Coast His novels capture the slipperiness of the world, where and made them reviled, their ancient rituals WASPs. In this mode, Salter most resembles Ralph there’s no telling where reality ends and artifice begins. perhaps, their knowledge of money, their Lauren, another name-changing Jew who internal- It’s the sensation you have when you see a beautiful respect for justice—they were always in need of ized the lie and the fantasy. Like Lauren, né Lif- girl vanish down a mysterious street in a foreign coun- it. The unimaginable killing in Europe had gone shitz, Salter has drawn on an invented past to place ty, where the trolley cars clatter and the muezzins call through them like a scythe—God abandoned himself at the center of an impenetrable world that the faithful as the bulls race between the high walls— them—but in America they were never harmed. is impenetrable only because it doesn’t exist. It’s a a sensation that lasts right up to the moment when snipe hunt. It’s a joke. A guy told a guy who told a you actually chase down and talk to that girl. Why does Salter do it? It’s a question I’ve often guy, and there you are, holding a burlap sack open considered—because I love his books, the best of in the forest and cooing like a dove. The result, in which cast a spell that lasts for days. I’ve come up with Salter’s case, is an art that is sometimes false. No Rich Cohen is the author of several books, including three possible reasons. The first is that Salter always one laughs in his books; no one wrestles, curses, or Tough Jews and The Fish That Ate the Whale. His wanted to write his version of the great modern novel sweats. It’s a picture window in New Canaan where newest, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the in the manner of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose everything is just a little too perfect. 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) The Sôd Hypothesis establishes a heretofore-nonexistent research area: "What a ride! This document is, in and of itself, a phenomenon. Besides being a scholarly dissertation, it Pentateuchal mysticism and ancient becomes, in a way, a manifestation of the Sôd. And the author...based on his view of the teachings of the Israelite initiation tradition. The study Sôd, evaluates the course of Jewish spirituality and, for that matter, human spirituality, in a way that posits that the First Temple priests crafted resonates with the Perennial Philosophy view that every genuine Tradition has its origin in an authentic a "disaster-proof" transmission of their encounter with Divinity....The [book] as written is brilliant....[Kohav] writes with immense energy, and initiatory lore to future generations. The J great theoretical sophistication....His claims are vast and sweeping, and…could truly revolutionize the and E strands are now seen as constituting understanding of the history of Jewish -- and not only Jewish -- mysticism, spirituality, and theology." priestly esoteric matter par excellence, - Sheldon ("Shaya") Isenberg, University of Florida (Emeritus) while the traditional priestly sections, in contrast, as exoteric.

 

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 11 Reviews Jake in the Box

BY CURT LEVIANT

evil to him”; while in the apocryphal Book of Jubi- phrase b’not ha’aretz, literally “the girls of the land,” Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch lees (ca. 120 B.C.E.) we read: “and Jacob was very or, more colloquially, “the local girls.” Rebecca uses by Yair Zakovitch, translated by Valerie Zakovitch angry with Reuben.” In quoting these extra ancient these words, fearing that Jacob might marry one of Yale University Press, 216 pp., $25 readings, the author makes the empty spaces in the “the local girls” (Gen. 27:46), and later, the text tells Torah text speak. of Dinah going out to see “the local girls” (Genesis Discovering parallels within the biblical text is 34:1), which proves to be her undoing. another of Zakovitch’s strengths. When Jacob has to The garment trick is another fine parallel spotted on’t be fooled by the number of pages in labor another seven years for Rachel (in addition to by Zakovitch, which he calls a “measure for measure Yair Zakovitch’s slim volume. Zakovitch begins with the struggle of Jacob and Jacob was not only the “unexpected patriarch.” Esau in the womb and follows the bibli- calD account of Jacob’s fascinating life until, as his life He is, finally, a tragic figure. ebbs, he speaks to all of his sons. His book packs a punch like a jack-in-the-box. the seven he has just completed), the years passed as punishment.” Jacob fooled his fathe r by wearing his In Jacob we get more than a close reading of the if they were “a few days because of his love for her” brother’s clothes to get the blessing (Gen. 27:15-16); biblical text. Zakovitch shows us Jacob in midrash, (Gen. 29:20). With a keen eye, Zakovitch reminds later his sons fool him with Joseph’s ripped, blood- the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha; he brings us that earlier, when Rebecca had sent her son away stained garment (Gen. 37:32). in the Septuagint, the famous Greek translation of to Laban to avoid Esau’s wrath, it was also for “a few the Bible, as well as the Samaritan and the Syriac days” (Gen. 27:44). And, of course, in both instanc- hen Rebecca was pregnant with twins she Bibles, Qumran texts, and parallels even further es the days stretch into years. Wwent to consult God about the tumult with- afield. All of these shed light on the biblical nar- Zakovitch sees similarity in the parting of Abra- in her, and was given an ambiguous blessing (Gen. rative, especially when it is elusive, ambiguous, ham and Lot, each going his own way (Gen. 13:5- 25:23), ve-rav ya’avod tzair. Zakovitch’s transla- or silent, demonstrating that there were differing 12), and the peaceful parting of Jacob and Esau tion, “Older younger shall serve,” is ingenious, for strands, nuances, and even details within the same (Gen. 36:6-8); both deeds were done to avoid fa- it reflects the either-or aspect of the Hebrew. The basic story. milial strife. The author also likes the echo of the author’s unique and absolutely correct grammati- A fine example of Zakovitch’s method is his anal- cal rendering can mean that the ysis of one famous verse in Genesis. Rachel, Jacob’s younger will serve the older; and favorite wife, has died giving birth to Benjamin. it can mean precisely the opposite. After Jacob names the boy and buries his wife, his Jacob’s enterprising spirit be- son Reuben, son of Leah, “went and lay with Bilhah, gan in the womb when he strug- his father’s concubine” (Gen. 35:22). Zakovitch sug- gled to exit first, before Esau, in gests that Reuben intends to defile her so that Jacob order to secure the rights of the will stop sleeping with her, and Leah’s honor will not first born, and reached its high be offended a second time. He quotes a striking mi- point when as a young man he drash from Genesis Rabba: used tactical advantage—a very hungry Esau dying for a meal—to When Rachel died, our father Jacob took “buy” the rights of the first born. Bilhah’s bed and placed it near his bed. Whether intentionally or not, Za- [Reuben] said: Is it not enough that my mother kovitch shows that Jacob was not was jealous of her sister during her lifetime, but only the “unexpected patriarch,” even after her death? but also a sad, morally ambiguous, and finally tragic figure, despite More surprisingly, he also reminds us of a paral- his being blessed by God. lel in The Iliad. Phoenix, obeying his mother’s wish- Zakovitch reminds us that Ja- es, takes his father Amyntor’s concubine, “so that cob didn’t pack when he ran away the old man might be hateful in her eyes.” from home. At Bethel, he needed a There is more. In the very same verse describ- stone for a pillow. That night, God ing Reuben’s act, we see the words: “Israel (i.e., Ja- promises him plenty (Gen. 28:14- cob) found out.” At this point in the Masoretic text, 15), which makes Jacob happy. Zakovitch notes, come a few empty spaces. But Jacob, the clever entrepreneur (re- there is even more. Under the word “Israel” is an call how he managed to enlarge his etnakhta, a sign showing the midpoint of a verse; flock through an ancient form of let’s call it a semicolon. Then, after a few spaces selective breeding), is the only one comes the letter peh, a Masoretic indicator that—in of the patriarchs who puts condi- mid-verse!—a new parsha (chapter or segment) is tions on his acceptance of God. beginning. The verse continues with an apparent “If God remains with me, if He non sequitur: “Now the sons of Jacob were twelve protects me on this journey that in number.” Zakovitch is rightly puzzled by this I am making, and gives me bread strange pattern. Is it evidence, he asks, that Jacob’s to eat and clothing to wear, and if response has been erased? He then looks to the “Jacob and Rachel at the Well,” ca. late 1890s by James Jacques I return safe to my father’s house,” Septuagint, where the verse continues, “and it was Joseph Tissot. (© The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY.) (Gen. 28:20) Jacob vows, then the

12 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 Lord will be his God. Curiously, the bargain-cum- Somehow, for the “unexpected patriarch,” the rosy see if it can realistically be called “Birkat Ya’akov” vow is made after God has already promised him future promised to him and the bleak and tragic (Jacob’s Blessing), as we persist in calling it. In fact, much of what he is requesting. present go hand in hand. In fact it is immediately af- Jacob himself doesn’t call it a “blessing.” Rather, he In a phrase the early rabbinic tradition seized ter God promises that “the land I assigned to Abra- proclaims to his sons, calling each one by name, that upon, the Torah calls Jacob a tent dweller (Gen. 25:27), which they took to mean a quiet schol- Despite all of God’s blessings and all the promises for ar. But the biblical Jacob is by no means a tent- dwelling, bookish, weakling shepherd—a man op- the future about being a great nation, Jacob’s personal posite to the strong hunter Esau. A shepherd spends his time outdoors fending off the very beasts that happiness has been almost nil. Esau no doubt encountered as a hunter. Shepherds were no tent-dwelling sissies. When Jacob meets ham and Isaac I assign to you,” that Rachel dies in he will tell them what will happen to them at “the Rachel by the well, a huge stone is blocking it, which childbirth (Gen. 35:12-20). end of days,” the only time this apocalyptic phrase he removes single-handedly. In that same verse in Let’s conclude with Jacob’s “blessing” his sons is uttered in Genesis. He starts by severely castigat- which Jacob is called a “tent dweller,” he is described before he dies. Look carefully at the twenty-seven ing Reuben for the Bilhah affair. Then he turns to as tam, which can mean, “simple,” “pure,” “inno- verses in Chapter 49 that comprise this speech and Simeon and Levi, the murderers of Shechem, to cent,” “naïve,” or all of them at once. The curse them. “Jacob is so enraged at them,” Zakov- juxtaposition between that mild word—in itch says, “that he avoids addressing them directly fact, the new JPS translation uses “mild” for and speaks in the third person.” Blessing, indeed! (I tam—and, just a few verses later, Jacob’s fool- would argue that a close reading of Genesis shows ing Esau out of the birthright is a deliberate indirect address is Jacob’s usual manner of speaking, bit of biblical irony. The Jacob of the Bible, but it does not spoil Zakovitch’s point.) like some other ancient heroes, seems to With such a beginning, the other nine sons must have been both strong and devious. have wondered what would follow, but it does get a In rabbinic literature, the strong and little better. Nonetheless, it is only with Joseph, the sturdy, evil hunter Esau is nonetheless con- eleventh of the twelve sons, that the root for bless- trasted to the good, studious, tent-dweller ing “bet-resh-khaf” appears, and in plenitude—six Jacob. This tradition, which persists to this times. And then, in Genesis 49:28, as if to compen- day, also makes Jacob a scholarly type, im- sate for the no-blessing, the Bible goes on to blandly mersed in Torah study. Some two thousand declare that Jacob blessed his sons. Five of them are years ago the sages re-created Jacob to fit compared to animals: Judah, a lion’s whelp and lion; their ideal of a Jew, having him study in the Issachar, a strong-boned ass; Dan, a serpent and vi- famous yeshiva of Shem and Ever (which, per; Naphtali, a hind; Benjamin, a devouring wolf. not surprisingly, is not mentioned anywhere Others Jacob merely describes: Dan will be a judge; in the Torah, for such an institution did not Gad, a warrior; Joseph, a fruitful vine. exist then). Alas, for study one needs texts, Jacob shows no hint of affection to his grown and for texts one must be literate. Alas, sons, but his attitude to Ephraim and Manasseh, again, there is little reason to believe that Ja- Joseph’s sons by his Egyptian wife, is far different. cob, or his father, Isaac, or his grandfather, “Bring them to me,” he tells Joseph simply, “and I Abraham, were literate. Indeed, when Jacob will bless them.” He then kisses and embraces them and Laban make a peace pact (Gen. 31:45- “Jacob’s Vision and God’s Promise,” from a Bible card, in an act that has been repeated for centuries, as Jew- 49), they do not sign anything; rather, they 1906. (Courtesy of the Providence Lithograph Company.) ish fathers recite these verses in blessing their chil- erect a pile of stones that marks their cove- dren on Friday nights. But just as Jacob’s remarks to nant. (The verbkhaf-tav-vet, write, does not his twelve sons were no blessing to most of them, so appear until Exodus.) Jacob’s blessing of his two grandsons is no blessing either. Both Ephraim and Manasseh were of the lost hen Jacob stands before Pharaoh tribes. Which father would really want his children Wnear the end of the book of Genesis to be like Ephraim and Manasseh? and says, “few and bad (me’at ve-ra’im) have Poor Jacob! With the exception of Judah, neither been the days of my life” (Gen. 47:9), he is his blessings nor his curses were efficacious. The- de not exaggerating. “Awful” might be a better scendants of Joseph, Ephraim, and Manasseh disap- translation. Speaking to Joseph’s royal em- peared. And Levi, the cursed son, whom Jacob had ployer, Jacob states crisply what his unhap- tried to punish by not allotting him any portion in py life has been all about. And then Jacob the land and predicting that he would be “dispersed blesses Pharaoh. in Israel,” became the progenitor of Moses, Aaron, Despite all of God’s blessings and all the and the priestly class: kohanim and leviyim, who are promises for the future about being a great still active and honored in synagogues even today. nation, Jacob’s personal happiness has been Zakovitch’s accomplishment in this challeng- almost nil. He stole Esau’s blessing, fled his ing and incisive book is to force us to re-read the homeland, and served Laban for twenty Jacob stories afresh, to follow up on his observa- years. In mid-life, he lost his beloved wife tions and suggestions, and to inspire us to make Rachel in childbirth; he was cuckolded by new discoveries of our own. Jacob: Unexpected his own son; his daughter Dinah was raped; Patriarch has also been so felicitously translated and his two sons, Simeon and Levi, dis- by Valerie Zakovitch that it reads as though it was graced him by murdering the inhabitants composed in English. of an entire town in revenge. Meanwhile, he mourned the apparent loss of his favorite son Joseph for years. And, perhaps, beneath it all Curt Leviant is the author of seven critically acclaimed was his guilt at tricking Esau out of his birth- novels. His most recent book is the short story collection right in exchange for a bowl of lentil broth. “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Rembrandt, ca. 1659. Zix Zexy Ztories (Texas Tech University Press).

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 13 Hebraic America by MATTHEW HOLBREICH

18th century, it is littered with constructions such as thinkers, the Hebrew-Indian thesis proved remark- American Zion: The Old Testament as a “spake” and “thou.” America was called “the Land of ably resilient, surviving well into the 19th century. Political Text from the Revolution to the Columbia” and the town of Concord “Concordia.” There is, of course, something bizarre about the Civil War In other such newspaper articles and pamphlets, idea, given that Americans were supposed to be the by Eran Shalev Yale University Press, 256 pp., $40 In newspaper articles and pamphlets, authors described the United States as stretching from n July 4, 1776, the Continental Con- “Dan even unto Beersheba.” gress assigned Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson the authors began sentences with the King James-esque chosen people and the Indians those who stood in task of designing the Great Seal for the “And it came to pass . . . ” and described the Unit- the way of advancing “civilization.” Nonetheless, UnitedO States of America. Adams turned to Greek ed States as stretching from “Dan even unto Beer- the idea exerted a strange cultural fascination. In- mythology; Franklin and Jefferson turned to the sheba.” Americans not only read the Hebrew Bible, deed, the most successful religious movement of the Hebrew Bible. Franklin’s design had Moses “stand- some wrote American history in biblical style. 19th century, Mormonism, incorporated elements ing on the Shore, extending his Hand over the Sea, of pseudo-biblicism and the Hebrew-Indian thesis. thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh t is, of course, one thing to see the United States Shalev even suggests that “[t]he Book of Mormon who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Ias re-enacting the Hebrew narrative of Exodus, should thus be seen in the context of contempo- Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar chosenness, and covenant in a metaphorical sense. rary texts written in biblical idiom which presented of Fire in the Clouds, reaching to Moses, to express It is quite another to believe it as a matter of fact. themselves as ancient, often Hebraic, in origin, mys- that he acts by Command of the Deity.” Jefferson Shalev shows how belief mingled with pseudo- teriously recovered, and translated from an exotic chose the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by science to produce the theory that the Indians were language for presentation before an American audi- a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Franklin the biological descendants of the Hebrews. Not ence.” Placing Mormonism within the genus of He- wanted the national motto to be “Rebellion to Ty- content with seeing themselves as the metaphori- braic influence is thought-provoking, but one won- rants is Obedience to God.” While that motto was cal descendants of the ancient Israelites, some ders whether an apple that has fallen so far from the not ultimately chosen, Jefferson admired the phrase 19th-century Americans were convinced that the tree is really of the same species. so much he decided to put it on his personal seal. In addition to envisioning themselves as re- That the Exodus was the first choice of these enacting Hebraic narratives, Americans also looked two great figures of the American Enlightenment to to the Hebrew Bible for political teachings. Pastors symbolize the new nation testifies to the influence of such as Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard, Hebraic motifs in early America. But there is much and Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, gave sermons more, as Eran Shalev shows in American Zion, and in which they culled political lessons from bib- it is not just a matter of imagery. For some years, lical stories. During the Revolution, the story scholars involved in Hebraic political studies have of Gideon resonated strongly with the anti- sought to demonstrate the influence that biblical monarchical rebels, who identified with and even talmudic notions of limited government the man of military prowess who saved the and separation of powers exerted on early modern Israelites from their enemies on the bat- Protestant political thought in Europe. Now Shalev tlefield, but refused to be their king. The is making similar claims about the influence of the colonists also enlisted the story of Esther Hebrew Bible in America. and Haman to condemn the corruption of To read Shalev’s book is to be transported to “a the British monarchy. Haman, the model lost intellectual world” in which Americans saw of a corrupt advisor to a gullible monarch, themselves re-enacting the biblical drama of the “did not attempt to attack the polity from ancient Israelites. The early Puritan “immigrants the outside with military power. Instead he and succeeding generations interpreted the Great manipulated and duped a monarch to subvert Migration of the 1630s as a crossing of the Red Sea the empire from within.” Esther’s conduct taught and an escape from the British Egypt.” They were that ambition corrupts and that power needs to be the new chosen people, elected by God for a divine checked. That such references were readily under- mission in the wilderness of the new world. Shalev Interpretation of the first committee’s seal proposal, stood is testament to the widespread biblical literacy shows how Americans’ self-understanding as the Benson Lossing, 1856. of early America. elect living out God’s divine plan reverberated with Apart from noting the frequent appropriation these ideas long after the Puritans and the Revolu- of biblical narratives, Shalev provides an account tion, sometimes in unexpected ways. “actual Israelites, or their biological descendants, of the repeated efforts on the part of Americans, In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a style of [were] walking in their midst.” On this account the from the time of the Revolution onward, to “fully writing arose that Shalev calls pseudo-biblicism. Amerindians were descendants of one of the Lost elaborate on the republican nature of the ancient In 1793, for instance, Richard Snowden wrote a Ten Tribes, which were the progeny of the north- Hebrew form of government and its correlations to two-volume history entitled The American Revo- ern Israelite state that Assyria conquered and then its American counterpart.” In 1784, for instance, a lution: Written in the Style of Ancient History. dispersed in 722 B.C.E. Connecticut preacher named Joseph Huntington Composed in an English archaic even for the late Though reviled by Jefferson and other sober described the United States governed by the rather

14 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 loose Articles of Confederation as living under “the Most of the dramatis personae Shalev brings on waxed from the Puritans to the Second Great Awak- best civil constitution now in the world, the same stage did not play central roles in the American dra- ening and waned in the years leading up to the Civil in the general nature of it, with that he gave to Is- ma. It is hard to tell the story of American political War. Shalev attributes this to a change in American rael in the days of Moses.” Sixty-nine years later, in culture without longer discussions than he provides culture: Hebraic themes were better suited for in- his monumental Commentaries on the Laws of the of the great figures of the founding era, including, stitutional design and grand cultural and political Ancient Hebrews, Enoch Wines, a Congregationalist for instance, George Washington, Alexander Ham- narratives, while the New Testament was a better minister from New Jersey, drew a similar compari- ilton, George Mason, and James Madison. These fit for the individualistic democracy of the mid- son between ancient Israel and America under the architects of the American Constitution—including 19th century, heavily populated by new adherents of Constitution. The Israelite “states,” he wrote, pos- Franklin and Jefferson, their ideas for the Great Seal evangelical creeds focused on their own personal sessed power that “was sovereign within the limits of notwithstanding—are almost completely absent salvation. their reserved rights. Still, there was both a real and from Shalev’s book. The Hebrew Bible also lost ground because it ap- a vigorous government.” Just as in the United States, The case of James Madison is particularly in- peared to many Americans to sanction slavery. Pro- “the Hebrew tribes were, in some respects, indepen- structive. He stayed at Princeton in order to deep- slavery apologists made use of it to show that slavery dent sovereignties, while, in other respects, their in- en his study of Hebrew, but in his pre-Convention was permitted. They famously cited the curse that dividual sovereignty was merged in the broader and personal writings the Hebrew Bible rarely surfaces. 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 Gideon and his army enter the Midianites’ camp, depicted by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a secular country entirely built on secular ideals. 1860. (© CCI/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.) 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 higher sovereignty of the commonwealth of Israel.” In his notes entitled “Of Ancient and Modern Con- shaped it to fit their particular needs: It supported In the eyes of Huntington and Wines, republican- federacies,” written in 1787, for example, he looks the British monarchy in the French and Indian War, ism, separation of powers, and federalism were both to the confederacies of the Greeks, the Romans, and it was then against the British tyranny and for American and Hebraic. the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Germans; he cites republican liberty during the Revolution. It first Montesquieu, Polybius in Latin, and the historian supported the Articles and a loose confederation, t is hard to pick the right word for the work the Malby. There is nothing about the Hebrew Repub- but was then also the new national power under the IHebrew Bible did in the United States. Is it in- lic or from the Hebrew Bible. With regard to the Constitution. Americans employed it both for slav- fluence or reflection, appropriation or inspiration? defining features of the American government— ery and against it. There is no doubt that the Bible was central to separation of powers, checks and balances, a sin- Perhaps the soundest American use of the Bible Puritan culture and that ideas of exodus and cov- gular elected executive, republican government is to reinforce the idea that we Americans are not the enant and chosenness reverberated down through with the majority of office holders elected by a chosen people, but, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the the American generations. But it is harder to assess (relatively) large suffrage, vesting the vast majority almost chosen people. He thought that the Bible’s the magnitude of that influence when one moves of powers in a bicameral legislature—it is hard to moral vision stood above our best efforts, beckoning from the 17th to the 18th and 19th centuries. Per- say that any of this is really taken from the Hebrew us to improve, to reach upwards toward our better haps we ought to distinguish between strong and Bible. selves. We are in an American covenant that we have weak versions of the thesis. In the strong version, There might be some affinities, a few points in yet to achieve and that we must continually strive to the Hebrew Bible played a decisive role in shaping the 17th century when a few wires were crossed here achieve. In wanting God to be behind us, we are li- American culture and political thought. Accord- and there that produced an evanescent spark. But able to forget that He is above us. That was the view ing to the weaker thesis, Hebraic narratives were when one turns from Samuel Langdon to James of America’s greatest biblical republican. used as metaphors and tropes to explain, and rec- Madison, it is hard to escape the conclusion that oncile people to, what was in reality a new order for the political institutions of Jerusalem did not exert the ages. a decisive influence on the political institutions that Matthew Holbreich is a resident scholar at the Straus One can argue both sides. But Shalev does little came out of Philadelphia. Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva to address the preponderance of evidence that runs While the magnitude of the influence of the He- University and a Jacobson Scholar at New York counter to the formative influence of Hebraic ideas. brew Bible is hard to gauge, there is no doubt that it University School of Law.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 15 Karl Marx, Bourgeois Revolutionary

BY ABIGAIL GREEN

emphasis on Marx as a quintessentially early 19th- size Marx’s self-identification as a German, aware Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life century figure strikes me as particularly original. of his Jewish origins and ambivalent toward them, by Jonathan Sperber Later generations of activists looked to Marx as the but predominately shaped by his socialization from Liveright, 672 pp., $35 prophet of communist revolution, but Sperber ar- early childhood into a very different cultural world. gues that neither his political activity nor the over- Fifteen years before Darwin heralded the rise of ra- Sperber’s Marx is irredeemably bourgeois: in his origins ow should we read the life of a man whose colossal impact on the modern and cultural formation, in his lifestyle and aspirations, and world only became apparent decades— or even more than a century—after his surprisingly bourgeois in his approach to revolution. Hdeath? This problem lies at the heart of Jonathan Sperber’s magisterial new biography of Karl Marx, a whelming majority of the writings published dur- cial thinking and the modern preoccupation with book that brings the world of the 19th-century revolu- ing his lifetime bear out this interpretation. Sper- ethnicity, Jewishness remained primarily a reli- tionary brilliantly to life but, for the most part, avoids ber’s Marx is irredeemably bourgeois: bourgeois gious affiliation, and conversion was more than a tackling the more contentious problem of his legacy. in his origins and cultural formation, bourgeois in piece of paper for children like Marx, whose educa- Indeed, Sperber explicitly sets out to write a post- his lifestyle and aspirations, and surprisingly bour- tion set them on a different cultural trajectory from ideological biography of a man who, in retrospect, geois in his approach to revolution. such an early age. became the founding figure of communism but nev- Born as he was into the newly Prussian Rhine- er quite made it in his own era, either as an economic s we all know, Marx was born Jewish. Baptized land in the aftermath of French occupation, religion and political thinker or as a revolutionary leader. Ain early childhood, the ways in which his Jew- nonetheless defined Marx’s intellectual formation For, as Sperber reminds us, despite producing ishness shaped him remain difficult to grasp. Pos- and place in society, but, Sperber argues, that reli- occasional pamphlets of genius, Marx never got be- terity has emphasized Marx’s Jewish origins—and gion was Protestant Christianity. The Rhineland was yond Volume 1 of Capital in his lifetime and was criticized the “self-hating” quality of his 1844 es- predominately Catholic, but Marx’s father Heinrich, disappointed by its subdued public reception. The say On the Jewish Question, in which he identified an aspiring lawyer, chose to embrace not the Catholi- bulk of his literary output consisted of journalistic capitalism with the Jews in derogatory fashion, ar- cism of the majority but the Protestant religion that articles for papers such as the New York Tribune. guing that “[t]he emancipation from haggling and defined the ethos of the Prussian state. This enlight- Too often, Marx’s energies were diverted into well- from money, thus from the practical, real Jewry ened, rationalist version of Protestantism also in- publicized scraps with fellow exiles and revolution- would be the self-emancipation of our time.” As fused the work of thinkers like the philosopher Georg aries or the exposition of firmly held but frankly ec- Sperber notes, this identification of capitalism and Hegel and the theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, both of centric views—most obviously his contention that moneymaking with Jews and Jewish practices finds whom were key intellectual influences for Karl and Lord Palmerston, the great figurehead of patriotic echoes in the work of his friend, the pre-eminent the Young Hegelian circles in which he moved as a liberalism in mid-Victorian Britain, had for decades forerunner of Zionism Moses Hess, and in the at- student. As Arnold Ruge, lecturer at the University of been a Russian secret agent. titudes of his contemporary Heinrich Heine, who Halle and organizational mastermind of the Young The revolutions of 1848-1849 were the pivotal only converted in early adulthood and whose con- Hegelians, put it, “Prussia is the Protestant state and moment in Marx’s political life, defining his view tact with Jewish culture was consequently far more its principle is light and scholarship.” of the world and the decades of penny-pinching meaningful. Indeed, Sperber is at pains to empha- These influences continued to define key facets 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 A painting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the pressroom of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which and the political economy stemming from it.” This they jointly edited, ca. 1840s. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.)

16 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 of Marx’s thought, even as he rejected both religion publication of Communist Manifesto, which he co- communism. This commitment was entirely consis- (“the opium of the people”) and the authoritarian authored with Engels. As Sperber points out, their tent with his practice as editor of the New Rhineland Prussian state that pursued him relentlessly for de- analysis of history under the sign of class struggle News, which was his chief venue for political action cades to come. As a political exile in Paris and Brus- has been read as universal historical and socio- during the 1848 revolution. It was an open secret sels before the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, political commentary. Yet perhaps a third of the that Marx and his fellow editors were communists, Marx was exposed to the classics of political econo- pamphlet attacked radical political opportunists yet the New Rhineland News clearly targeted an edu- my by Adam Smith, James Mill, David Ricardo, and cated rather than popular audience, published few Jean-Baptiste Say (the English texts in French trans- Compared to his peers, Marx’s denunciations of capitalism, and provided minimal lations) and to the work of Charles Fourier, Pierre- coverage of the nascent labor movement. At a public Joseph Proudhon, and other early French socialists. domestic situation was a meeting of the Cologne Democratic Society in the Exiled again in 1849, he engaged seriously with the aftermath of the June Days, when the French gener- positivist and Darwinist ideas that were current model of social conformity. al Cavaignac had defeated a popular uprising in the in mid-Victorian London. Yet the philosophical most brutal fashion, Marx denounced the idea of a underpinning of Marx’s mature social thought re- who denounced their conservative opponents as revolutionary dictatorship in the name of a “single mained fundamentally German. As Sperber writes, communistic (something Marx himself had done class” and called for a revolutionary government, “he reformulated Hegel’s idealism in materialist when editing the Cologne-based Rhineland News composed of “heterogeneous elements” that would terms and replaced Hegel’s dialectical philosophy in the early 1840s) and praised the brutal energy of “reach agreement about the most appropriate form with a philosophically inflected political economy.” the bourgeoisie, which would tear down the 18th- of administration through the exchange of ideas.” In other ways too, Marx clung determinedly century society of orders and the anachronistic, au- This condemnation of the class struggle was conso- to the social expectations and cultural norms that thoritarian Prussian government that endorsed it. nant with Marx’s ceaselessly anti-Prussian editorial conditioned his upbringing. His life choices, to be Here, Sperber relies on an important re-reading policy and the attempts of the New Rhineland News sure, were far from conventional. He married Jenny of one of Marx’s most famous passages: “All that is to rally the population of the Rhineland against au- von Westphalen, a woman four years his senior, be- solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and thoritarian Prussian rule by disregarding his prior fore he had achieved financial security, set his face man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, commitment to anti-capitalism. against a respectable career, and embraced a revo- his real conditions of life, and his relations with his There was nothing unusual in 1848 about this lutionary world that supported his disorderly, bo- kind.” This has often been taken as a prophetic defi- slippage between radical democratic and com- hemian lifestyle, writing into the small hours and nition of all modernity, but Sperber convincingly munist politics, but the divisions between these sleeping until noon. Compared to his peers, howev- recasts it in far more socially specific 19th-century different groupings became increasingly marked. er, Marx’s domestic situation was a model of social terms as “Everything that firmly exists and all the Yet Marx’s willingness to embrace short-term anti- conformity. Unlike his early collaborators Moses elements of the society of orders evaporate . . . ” It is communism for long-range communist purposes Hess and Friedrich Engels, or younger protégés like a re-reading that illuminates Marx’s commitment to persisted through subsequent decades of political Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx took up neither with the ideal of bourgeois revolution in the mold of the activism. In important ways, his ideas continued to working-class women nor with prostitutes. His liai- French Revolution of 1789 and the Jacobin Republic reflect radical democratic assumptions and the lib- son with the family servant Lenchen Demuth may as a crucial step in the transition from capitalism to eral economic theory of classical English economists 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 art Lafargue, a radical French student living in exile photography and a member of the General Council of the Inter- architecture national Working Men’s Association, Marx warned modernism that his approval was conditional: judaica & bibles holocaust yiddish & hebrew Before the final arrangements of your foreign language relationship to Laura, I must have serious olympic games information about your economic appraisal services

circumstances. . . You know that I have Malerei FotograFie FilM sacrificed my entire fortune in revolutionary Bauhaus Bücher 8. Moholy-Nagy, lázló; Walter gropius. struggle. . . Were I to start my career over again, München: albert langen Verlag, 1927. second revised edition. lg. 8vo 140pp. I would do the same. Only I would not marry. Dust jacket, typography, design and As much as it is in my power, I wish to keep my layout by Moholy-Nagy. influential publication on experimental photography daughter from the cliffs on which the life of her advancing the New Vision of objective visual communication. With essays, charts mother has been shattered. and 33 b/w photographs utilizing a range of innovative techniques: photogram, photo montage, x-ray, double exposure, In this and in his readiness to engage repeatedly long exposure, reverse printing, sequential action frames, darkroom in the duel—a quintessentially German expression manipulation, macro, micro, lighting and of masculinity—Marx remained true to his Rhenish mirrors, along with some documentary images, portraiture and advertisements. bourgeois origins. images by Moholy-Nagy, Man ray, renger-Patzsch, hannah höch, georg Muche, Berliner illustrierte Zeitung, Vanity he gulf between all this and Marx’s revolution- Fair, Paramount Movie studio and more. (32119) $2500. Tary agenda was smaller than one might think. X-ray (detail). Triton Tritonis shell. J. B. Polak, from “Wendingen” Amsterdam. Marx had firmly nailed his colors to the commu- Matter converted to light. nist flag on the eve of the 1848 revolution with the

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 17 that characterized the party of movement during the and the Liberals as lackeys of Russia, but greatly ad- quality that renders them almost as fresh now as first half of the 19th century. Even before he became mired the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli for his when they first appeared. Not for nothing did a communist, Marx had been in favor of free trade, firm anti-Russian stance. Claude Lévi-Strauss, hardly a Marxist, admit that and he continued to hold this position as a critic of he “rarely broach[ed] a new sociological problem capitalism, rather than embracing the cooperative he actual intellectual connections between without first stimulating my thought by reading a solutions of French utopian socialists or the faith in Tsuch ideas and Marx’s extraordinary political few pages of The 18th Brumaire . . .” government intervention displayed by the left-wing legacy were, according to Sperber, in some ways It is here that the comparison with Mazzini ap- German professors known as Kathedersozialisten in beside the point. Subsequent generations of politi- pears most illuminating. For Mazzini, too, was a the 1870s. His vision of revolution remained mod- cal activists have, in his view, been inspired less by prolific and influential writer with international eled on the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, Marx’s ideas than by his “passionately irreconcil- reach, whose political ideas have been regularly mis- able, uncompromis- interpreted in ways that reflect our contemporary ing, and intransigent concerns. Both Mazzini’s Duties of Man and Marx’s nature” and by the Communist Manifesto were written at a particular life of struggle he historical moment and in response to concrete his- led. This goes too far. torical circumstances. Both Mazzinian democratic As a revolutionary, nationalism and Marxian communism have prov- Marx was nothing en remarkably influential ideologies. Yet Duties of out of the ordinary. Man is known only to specialists, while Communist His personal diffi- Manifesto retains at least some of its fame and power culties and political even today. martyrdom were Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx is a wonderful no more impressive book and will remain the standard biography of than that of contem- Marx for a generation. It succeeds admirably in its poraries like Mazzi- mission to return Marx to his proper place in his- 100 mark note featuring Marx and introduced in 1975 by the Staatsbank of the ni, Garibaldi, and tory. But in failing to explore adequately Marx’s former German Democratic Republic. Kossuth, all of whom profound intellectual resonance it falls—perhaps have been canonized inevitably—short. by posterity for their and he never adopted Lasalle’s practice of referring intransigent political commitments. Yet Marx is re- to fellow socialists as comrades, preferring instead membered less as an activist than a thinker whose Abigail Green is a tutor and fellow in history at to remain “Citizen Marx.” His fanatical opposition ideas have provided a remarkably rich soil for gen- Brasenose College, University of Oxford. She is the to tsarist Russia was an equally consistent feature erations of economic, political, social, and histori- author of Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood of Marx’s politics and colored his view of events in cal analysis. Many of Marx’s writings were indeed in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge Britain in unexpected ways: He despised Gladstone parochial and eccentric, but a few have a timeless University Press).

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18 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 A Student-Centered Tradition

BY MarK Gottlieb

of the Baal Shem Tov call it emuna peshuta—simple raised funds to ensure that the mikvah in nearby Pi- Chovas HaTalmidim: The Students’ Obligation faith.” This ability to address the particular person aseczno was heated daily and made available for the and Sheloshah Ma’amarim: Three Discourses and moment was central to both his charisma and women of Warsaw. In 1942, the Piaseczner’s daring by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira his approach to education. and increasingly anguished theological writings fi- Feldheim, 644 pp., $26.99 Until her untimely death in 1937, Rabbi Shap- nally ceased, and he apparently buried them near ira’s wife, Rachel Hayyah, was a full partner in his his home before being deported to the Trawniki la- projects, reviewing manuscripts, making notes, and bor camp outside Lublin. Eyewitness accounts from raising critical questions that his followers might Trawniki tell of a solidarity pact made between n the early 1930s, John Dewey, America’s lead- ing philosophical pragmatist and a founding Shapira’s ability to address the particular person and moment father of progressive educational theory, re- tired from Columbia University. By then, his was central to both his charisma and his approach to education. ICopernican revolution in education was well under way. The child, with his individual needs, was now have been too reticent to pursue. With the outbreak twenty prominent artists, physicians, lawyers, po- at the center of a new educational universe, and the of the war and the German invasion of Poland in litical activists, and communal leaders—including idea of the child’s formation guided by the wisdom 1939, more personal loss would follow in devastat- Rabbi Shapira—not to leave the camp individually embedded in a tradition was banished to the periph- ingly quick succession. First, Rabbi Shapira’s only without safe passage of the entire group. In honor- ery. In those same years, half a world away in War- son and most trusted disciple, Rabbi Elimelekh Ben ing this pact, he apparently passed on an opportuni- saw, Poland, a Hasidic rebbe was writing his own Zion, was mortally wounded by shrapnel during ty to escape the labor camp in the summer of 1943. 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 Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. (Illustration by Val Bochkov.) Shapira was certainly aware of the recent revolu- tions in psychology. Nehemia Polen, author of The an air assault. A second bomb fell on the hospital His martyrdom would come a few months later in Holy Fire, a powerful study of the Piaseczner’s Ho- entrance, killing both Rabbi Elimelekh’s young wife early November, when Waffen SS units surrounded locaust writings, relates a story of one of the Piasec- and aunt. Amidst all this horror, the Piaseczner’s re- the camp and shot all the inhabitants. zner’s hasidim who came to the Rebbe complaining ligious and pastoral leadership continued unabated. After the war, a Polish construction worker that his headaches had returned ever since the Reb- When the Nazi’s established the Warsaw Ghetto unearthed the Piaseczner’s writings together with be’s prescription had faded. When Rabbi Shapira in 1940, the Rebbe’s home became a haven for refu- a note requesting that they be sent to his brother wrote a new prescription, the Hasid placed it firmly gees. With the help of the American Jewish Joint in Israel. One of the resultant books, Eish Kodesh, in his hatband. To amused onlookers, Rabbi Shapira Distribution Committee, he managed a soup kitch- published in English as Sacred Fire, is a collection gently explained, “the modern world would classify en serving fifteen hundred people daily. With the of deep theological meditations on the problem of this as ‘suggestion,’ but we who hold fast to the way German closure of the Ghetto’s mikvaot, the Rebbe evil by way of commentary on the weekly parsha.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 19 It was the last piece of Jewish scholarship written converted and become as little children, you shall not finement of mind, will, and character necessary for in Poland. enter into the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 18:3). that realization lies within the traditional teachings For Thérèse, spiritual childhood is a form of con- of the Torah and in apprenticeship to its demands. hovas HaTalmidim, rendered in this new sciousness acquired when complexity of thought and Ctranslation as “The Students’ Obligation,” is calculation are abandoned: “It is enough to acknowl- his is the second English-language translation the Piaseczner’s educational manifesto and the edge one’s nothingness and surrender oneself like a Tof Rabbi Shapira’s educational treatise to ap- only work published during his lifetime. When it child into God’s arms . . . I rejoice in my littleness be- pear in the past twenty years. Accompanying it is a appeared in 1932, Hillel Zeitlin, the great Hebrew cause ‘only little children and those who are like them biographical sketch by Aharon Sorasky, originally and Yiddish essayist, wrote a celebratory review shall be admitted to the Heavenly Banquet.’” In con- written in Hebrew and appended to most editions calling it a “gateway for anyone, and in particular trast, Shapira invokes the image of “the face of the Di- of the book, which betrays the influence of stan- for the modern Jew who has felt a genuine call- vine” to stress the creativity and spiritual dynamism dard Hasidic hagiography: ing to return to his tradition, to enter the palace inherent in the youthful soul. When the child was two, he suddenly became The intensity and immediacy of our childhood experiences seriously ill. Hasidic elders relate many miracles which took place during those days. express a continuous connection to the divine, which is why As a segulah (mystical remedy) against the convulsions, his father requested that some of they leave such a lasting impression on us. the child’s fingers be bound together with the leaves of his lulav, which he had set aside to be of Hasidism.” Shapira’s goal was actually two-fold: Rabbi Shapira teaches that the child is the most used for baking matzos. to dissuade Polish Hasidic youth from defecting potent expression of the possible. The pupil occu- to the secularist—socialist, Zionist, and Yiddish- pies a space between what is dynamic and changing Nevertheless, it manages to convey something of ist—forces then laying siege to the traditional life and what is eternal. In this way, the child is an apt the genuine holiness and deep human wisdom of the of faith, and to cultivate an elite cadre of spiritual symbol for the meeting point of the divine and the Piaseczner’s personality. As for the translation itself, seekers (bnei aliya) who would infuse the tradi- human, the “face of the Shekhina.” The intensity and it betrays its origins in the work of a committee com- tional world with renewed religious energy. immediacy of our childhood experiences express missioned by Feldheim Publishers. Unlike the ear- In his posthumously published Hakhsharat this continuous connection to the divine, which is lier rendering by Micha Odenheimer, published in HaAvrekhim (The Young Men’s Preparation), a sort precisely why they are capable of leaving such a last- 1995 and still in print, it substitutes a certain stylistic of sequel to Chovas HaTalmidim, Rabbi Shapira ing impression on us. flatness for the author’s often finely worked turns of wrote that his goal, and really the ultimate goal of By developing a distinctive personality and call- phrase and suggestive plays on words. For instance, any form of religious education, was to “uncover ing, every human being can instantiate the Anpei the Feldheim translation has the author ask: one’s soul,” to “grab one’s soul by the scruff of its de-Shekhina, that quality of the divine that is most neck,” and force it into an encounter with reality. By identifiable and accessible in this material world But what are we supposed to do in our first sensitizing the individual student to the holi- and is most powerfully embodied in the person of generation where children’s independence and ness within him or her—through imagination, song, the young. It is the main task of the parent or edu- emotions develop far before their time? . . . then and spiritual fellowship—the sanctity of the Torah cator to tap into the particular spiritual excellence that enthusiasm will find its outlet elsewhere— and the living tradition of holy texts and personali- of the individual child, cultivating her distinctive in the false beauty and decadent culture of the ties would eventually be grasped and understood. qualities and drawing them up from the realm of secular world. The Piaseczner’s teachings on childhood steer a the potential into the realm of the actual. middle course between a Rousseauian celebration of These student-centered ideas have been enthusi- Odenheimer renders the same passage as follows: childhood and a more classical positioning of the child astically embraced by many in today’s Jewish world. as a kind of incomplete adult. He begins the book by In some neo-Hasidic circles, however, the Piasec- But what choice do we have in our generation, arguing that habituation and socialization, the hall- zner’s insistence on the concrete demands and com- when feelings and sense of self develop so marks of a classical education whether sacred or secu- mitments of God-given law has been bypassed in precociously? . . . [our young people] will be lar, were no longer sufficient. Children were maturing favor of meditation upon the autonomous self. This moved and excited by foolish stimulants, by the faster than ever; were more likely to become alienated was not Rabbi Shapira’s intention: “in writing this base beauty that is found in the world. from parents, culture, and tradition; and were increas- book, we have no intention of releasing you from ingly robbed of the kind of personal investment that the obligation and necessity of poring over the Tal- In a few cases, entire passages have been either removed fosters lasting meaning and commitment. He reads, mud, Midrash, Shulchan Arukh, and all the other or condensed, one suspects out of a paternalistic inten- sometimes, like a Hasidic Neil Postman. holy books that guide us upward on the path to tion to shield the uninitiated from the more mystically Repeatedly, Rabbi Shapira points to the spiritual God.” Shapira’s great pedagogical insight is precisely recondite elements of Rabbi Shapira’s thought. force latent in the young student’s soul and the duty that one could adapt to the child without forsaking Still, the benefits of this edition—it is handsome- of teachers to develop it. tradition. Indeed, both the pupil and the tradition ly produced and bilingual, with the English trans- require just such an approach. lation facing the Hebrew original—should not be Since a Jewish child has the spirit of God, the overlooked, aiding both newcomers and seasoned breath of the Lord, hidden and concealed We must adjust ourselves to [the student], and students in the study of a seminal work of pedagogy within him from the moment of birth, it is speak in a language that he can understand— and theology. necessary to raise and educate him to bring out almost to the extent of becoming children We may well wait in vain in this new century for and reveal this godliness and allow it to flourish. ourselves . . . It is not enough to merely teach a transformative figure of Rabbi Shapira’s stature to the youth that they are duty-bound to listen to appear again. In the meantime, one can encourage In Eish Kodesh, Shapira expands on a suggestive their teachers . . . the most important thing is to educational traditionalists and progressives alike— kabbalistic image from Tikkunei HaZohar that iden- teach them that they themselves are their own in fact anyone who has, in Hillel Zeitlin’s words, tifies schoolchildren with “the face of the Divine educators. They are seedlings that Hashem has “felt a genuine calling to return”—to read and think Presence” (Anpei de-Shekhina). planted in the vineyard of Klal Yisrael, and they about The Students’ Obligation. This might be instructively contrasted with anoth- alone bear the responsibility for their development er theological account of the child, one made famous into towering atzei chayim, trees of life—righteous by St. Thérèse of Lisieux. St. Thérèse (1873-1897), a and deeply learned servants of Hashem. Mark Gottlieb is senior director of the Tikvah Fund. Carmelite nun whose Story of a Soul has influenced Prior to joining Tikvah, he served as head of school at readers from Jack Kerouac to the present pope, was For the Piaseczner, while each single student has Yeshiva University High School for Boys and as principal inspired by the Gospel’s insistence that “unless you be a distinctive essence waiting to be realized, the re- of the Maimonides School in Brookline.

20 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 On Not Bringing Up Baby

BY abby W. Schachter

that today, when you look at what people say is their veryone knows that college costs so much What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: ideal number of children, the answer has changed Ethese days that parents might limit the num- America’s Coming Demographic Disaster dramatically compared with a couple of decades ber of kids they have in an effort to “afford it.” But by Jonathan V. Last ago. In the 1980s and 1990s the percentage of people what is it about car seats? Is Last really arguing that Encounter Books, 248 pp., $23.99 who said either no children or one child was their making kids safer in cars has depressed fertility? As the author correctly notes, car seat laws “didn’t The number of children one make life any easier for parents with lots of kids.” In 1976 when car seat laws began to be enacted “16 views as “ideal” depends percent of American women had four children and n January 2013, Jane Eisner, editor of the 20 percent had five or more,” Last writes. The per- English-language Jewish Daily Forward, very much on one’s level of centage who had five or more kids by 2010 was 1.8 wrote that what “keeps [her] up at night” percent. So kids are somewhat safer (Last reports and “haunts” her is worrying that young lib- religious observance. that an average of 263 children’s’ lives are saved by Ieral Jews are not marrying within the faith or even car seats each year), but there are fewer of them. choosing to marry at all: ideal family size more than doubled, while the per- And the fact that having more than two kids obli- centage that idealized four (or more) kids dropped gates parents to purchase a bigger car because they The non-Orthodox birthrate in America is far by more than half. And overall, the fertility rate in need more room for car seats shouldn’t be underes- below replacement level . . . In this and so much America, is for the first time, tilting below replace- timated as an economic deterrent, either. else, most younger Jews in America simply ment level. In Last’s estimation, housing has had both nega- reflect trends in the larger society, where highly Last analyzes surveys from other countries, like tive and positive effects on fertility, depending on educated people are marrying later, giving Austria and Germany, and worries that just as in particular trends. Apartments push people to have birth later, and living in a far more pluralistic fewer kids, as happened in Europe af- environment than even a generation ago. ter World War I. After World War II in America, there was an acute hous- Jonathan Last, who catalogues the current fer- ing shortage until the advent of the tility crisis in his wittily titled book What to Expect mass-produced, single-family homes When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demo- such as those in the famous Levittown. graphic Disaster, puts parochial worries (will there By 1948, the number of newly built be as many people like me in the next generation?) homes was 1,183,000, and of those in a larger context. A senior writer at The Weekly units the vast majority were single- Standard, Last explains that the current below family homes. Lo and behold, the years replacement-level birth rate is a national, even glob- 1946 to 1964 coincide with the Baby al, affliction for which there are multiple explana- Boom. As Last explains, “Levittown tions—including religious affiliation and practice— became home to so many children that and which we ignore at our peril. locals jokingly referred to it as ‘Fertil- One reason for the current birth-rate crisis is ity Valley’ and ‘The Rabbit Hutch.’ Such that the number of children one views as “ideal” was the awesome power of the single- depends very much on one’s level of religious obser- family home.” Powerful yes, but not vance. As Last notes, recent “surveys show that just completely dominating. In the 1960s 21 percent of non-religious Americans view three or tenements made a comeback and con- more children as being ideal family size . . . Among dominiums became more common. those who attend church every week, 41 percent say The result? “The percentage of tene- that three or more children is ideal.” This means that ments as part of the total housing stock as “Americans have become more secular, they’ve increased by 40 percent from 1960 to cut back on having children.” 1970 and by another 23 percent from Of course, there are other reasons. Middle class 1970 and 1980. Surprise! It’s the precise American women are reproducing at below replace- timeframe during which America’s fer- ment level because more women are going to college tility numbers went into steep decline,” than ever before, because more women (and men) Last explains. are delaying marriage, because of the Pill, which gives Last doesn’t focus solely on the us greater choice about when to have a child, because United States, however. He chronicles Theater marquee featuringNo More Children in which Dr. Lee of housing, because you don’t need your kids to take Krauss explains birth control, ca. late 1920s. (Courtesy of the Library the trouble caused when countries care of you in your old age when there is Social Se- of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) that had enacted lower fertility pub- curity, not to mention car seat laws, the high cost of lic policies then try to change course strollers, daycare (the National Association of Child to get people back to having more Care Resource and Referral Agencies reports that those countries, a sub-replacement U.S. birth rate babies. “In 2000,” Last chronicles, “[Singapore] an- full-time care for an infant cost, on average, between may come to be seen as the “ideal” family size be- nounced . . . the ‘Baby Bonus’ program, which paid $9,630 and $14,591 per year in 2008, depending on cause of what people see around them. “When peo- families—straight cash—for having children: $9,000 where the care was provided), college, and all of the ple grow up in a world without babies, they might for the second child and $18,000 for the third.” The other expenses that go along with having kids. stop wanting babies for themselves. Even in the ab- result of these and other family formation efforts The combination of all of these factors means stract,” Last writes. has been unmitigated failure. “In 2001, Singapore’s

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 21 fertility rate was 1.41. By 2004 it was 1.24. Today it is his policy suggestions are, he admits, rather modest 1.11,” Last observes. and tentative. He reiterates that fertility is a prob- New Series from Brill: The United States, thankfully, isn’t in the same lem that cannot be deferred forever. Once the birth Library of boat with Japan and Singapore. We got Paul Ehrlich’s rate drops below a certain point there may be little 1968 blockbuster The Population Bomb, instead. Eh- to nothing we can do to reverse course. Looking at Contemporary rlich claimed in that book that come the 1970s there the modest successes with natalist policies in France Jewish Philosophers and Scandinavia, Last argues that “efforts to stoke We are facing a baby bust fertility must be sustained over several generational brill.com/lcjp cohorts.” But given our current national habit of ISSN 2213-6010 that no one seems to want enacting short-term solutions for long-range and deeply complex problems, the idea of redirecting to confront, Last argues. the birth rate upwards in this way seems almost a fool’s errand. Last also claims that bribery won’t Eliezer Schweid wouldn’t be enough food to feed all the people on the work, so paying parents to have more kids is a non- The Responsibility planet. “[H]undreds of millions of people are going starter. So what can be done? of Jewish Philosophy to starve to death,” Ehrlich declared. As Last calmly Last cites Phillip Longman’s proposal to reform So- notes however, the exact opposite happened and cial Security to encourage parents to have more kids Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson was happening even as Johnny Carson was devot- by lowering a couple’s FICA taxes by a third “with the and Aaron W. Hughes ing a whole program to Ehrlich’s message of doom. birth of their first child, by two-thirds with the birth Translated by Leonard Levin “[W]hat’s so wonderful about Ehrlich’s silly book,” of a second, and then eliminated completely with the Last wryly notes, “is that he was wrong at the exact third (until the kids turn 18).” Last also critiques col- moment when the very opposite of his prediction lege as an unnecessary “credentialing badge,” which

• June 2013 • ISBN 978 90 04 23507 6 • Paperback (xv, 255pp.) • List price EUR 25.- / US$ 35.- • Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, 1

Jonathan Sacks Universalizing Particularity Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

• October 2013 • ISBN 978 90 04 25721 4 • Paperback Governments have designed policies to limit fertility, only to attempt to reverse them later. • List price (Family-planning poster printed by the Chinese government, ca. 1970s.) EUR 25.- / US$ 35.- • Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, 2 was unfolding” with American and worldwide fer- places a heavy financial burden on middle class fami- tility rates sinking “like a stone.” lies. Telecommuting is another of Last’s recommenda- Wrong as Ehrlich was, though, his message is tions because then people could live in less expensive David Novak the one you find still widely claimed and circulated. areas (and therefore afford to have more kids) rather Natural Law and Revealed Torah Even more than forty years later and much avail- than in high-cost cities. He also argues for more im- able evidence to the contrary, Ehrlich’s view is held migration because immigrants tend to have higher Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson by precisely the college-educated elites least likely fertility rates than native-born Americans (although and Aaron W. Hughes to have lots of children and most likely to influence he notes that within a generation immigrants tend to others not to do so. Even the very mildest sugges- conform to American norms). tion that more children would be good for America What of Jane Eisner’s Jewish worry? She is en- leads to angry comments about the “dangers” of too tirely correct that non-Orthodox Jews live like other many people. The result, as Last argues, is that we secular, modern Americans, so it is no surprise that • December 2013 are facing a baby bust that no one seems to want to they aren’t reproducing at replacement level—which • ISBN 978 90 04 25820 4 confront. And the results, Last is afraid, will be dire: is to say that the cultural world Eisner cherishes is • Paperback not being replenished. She ended her editorial with • List price EUR 25.- / US$ 35.- [S]ub-replacement fertility rates eventually lead the stark admission that, within this world, there is • Library of Contemporary to a shrinking of population—and throughout no “vocabulary” to even discuss this problem. Mean- Jewish Philosophers, 3 recorded human history, declining populations while, in the pages of Ha’aretz, a 91-year-old Paul have always followed or been followed by Very Ehrlich recently advised Eisner’s Israeli counterparts Bad Things. Disease. War. Economic stagnation that “true Zionists should have small families.” All titles in this series are also available in hardback. For more information visit or collapse. brill.com/lcjp Last may well be right that economic stagnation, Abby W. Schachter blogs about family life and if not a zombie apocalypse, is headed our way, but government policy at captainmommy.com.

22 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 All-American, Post-Everything

BY Allan Arkush

Rabbi Gershon Henokh of Radzin, whose work was has perhaps found himself or herself davening in a American Post-Judaism: Identity and prized by Carlebach and Schachter-Shalomi for its minyan that included “Renewed” Jews wrapped in Renewal in a Postethnic Society antinomian daring. In the present work, he moves huge, multicolored prayer shawls, swaying rhythmi- by Shaul Magid beyond the Radziner, Carlebach (whose conspicu- cally and chanting rapturously. What right, one could Indiana University Press, 408 pp., $40 ous absence throughout the book is only underlined ask, do I have to impugn such people’s piety? In fact, by the seven-page Epilogue-cum-elegy devoted to I don’t mean to do so. I readily acknowledge the au- Magid reassures us that, “Post-Judaism is not the erasure made it through my last summer at Camp Ramah in Connecticut in 1964 without ac- of Judaism but a reassessment of some of the founding quiring the ability to swim, but I did at least learn how to make a tallit. This was one of the principles upon which Judaism was constructed.” Ithings that Zalman Schachter (not yet with the hy- phenate Shalomi) taught me and the other campers him), and even Schachter-Shalomi. Magid argues thenticity of their religiosity, and I am less sure than in a special club (or chug) that met two or three af- that the Renewal movement’s “critique of Judaism Magid that it is as radically distinct from that of more ternoons a week. We did some meditating and some and its constructive alternatives reach down to the traditional synagogue members as he suggests. I just traveling, too. I remember, most of all, a great eye- very roots of Judaism and Jewishness, offering vari- don’t want to confuse Judaism and post-Judaism, a opening swing through Connecticut, New York, ous ways to reconfigure Judaism for what I call a term that Magid has done us a service by inventing, and New Jersey to visit, among other sites, a con- post-Judaism age, an age where Judaism remains re- even if he doesn’t use it consistently. vent, an ashram, the offices of the Catholic Worker, lated to but is no longer identical with Jewishness.” and, of course, Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern American Post-Judaism fleshes out this claim ven as he notes that Renewal’s critique of Juda- Parkway in Brooklyn (where Zalman, a wayward with an account of Renewal’s basic orientation, as Eism reaches down to its very roots, Magid re- Lubavitcher, was still at least somewhat welcome). well as several extended discussions of issues that assures us that, “Post-Judaism is not the erasure of In the years that followed, Reb Zalman, as he is Renewal can help Jews rethink, such as the relation- Judaism but a reassessment of some of the founding commonly known, became the leading figure in Jew- ship of Judaism to Jesus and the significance of the principles upon which Judaism was constructed.” ish Renewal, a movement in which I never took any At the same time, however, he part as an adult, not even on its fringes. But about insists that, “Renewal’s pro- ten years ago, I read for the first time a number of gram is a radical departure Schachter-Shalomi’s writings, and those of some of from the very foundations of his colleagues and acolytes, after being asked to write Jewish tradition.” None of the an essay on Jewish Renewal for a volume titled Jew- religion’s truly fundamen- ish Polity and American Civil Society. I subsequently tal principles, it seems, sur- described them, as my sole reviewer put it (in The vive reassessment, not even Weekly Standard) in a “benignly satirical” manner. the most basic. The radical If Shaul Magid also noticed this, it did not pre- theology of Renewal goes so vent him, in his newly published American Post- far as to subvert “the biblical Judaism, from identifying my essay as “a useful monotheistic template” and assessment of Jewish Renewal.” This caught me by replace it with something surprise, since the movement that I gently mocked that can be identified as “cos- is one that represents, to his mind, a guiding light motheism.” This unfamiliar for American Jews. But the further I made it into term is not Magid’s coinage, his book, the better I understood where we were in but one he borrows from Jan accord. We both view Renewal as a path away from Assmann, for whom it rep- Judaism as it has hitherto existed. The difference -be resents, in Magid’s words, “a tween us is that Magid, unlike me, believes that it theological construct based has marked out the road that Jews ought to take. on the premise that the divine Magid, by his own account, began life as a sec- Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Berkeley, 1988. world (the cosmos) and the ular Jew, but became a ba’al teshuvah at the age of (Courtesy of the Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi Collection, The University world we live in are inextrica- twenty under the tutelage of Dovid Din, “an ob- of Colorado at Boulder, Archives.) bly intertwined.” Cosmothe- scure and enigmatic hasidic rabbi” who had been ism “believes in a plurality of a student of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi back in the divine life in the world—and sixties. After attending a variety of yeshivas, Magid Holocaust. Magid attempts to explain, in addition, its accessibility to the human—focusing more on settled for three years “in a collective community in why Renewal’s radical theology is singularly capable ritual, or cultus, than scripture or text.” Israel founded by students of Shlomo Carlebach,” of“saving Judaism in America from obsolescence.” Nothing, it would seem, could represent a more Zalman’s erstwhile spiritual companion. Eventually But his book leaves me no more convinced than I complete departure from the very foundations of Ju- Magid left for academia. Now the Jay and Jeannie had been that Renewal is a genuine form of Juda- daism. True, Schachter-Shalomi “gestures,” as Magid Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indi- ism, one that preserves something more than some puts it, “toward a cosmotheism that always existed ana University, Magid has published numerous and of its appearances. Nor does it lead me to believe in the Hebrew Bible and has survived as a repressed valuable scholarly studies of Hasidism and modern that we are on the cusp of the “post-Judaism age” theology throughout most of Jewish history,” most re- Jewish thought. But he has not left Jewish Renewal that Magid envisions. cently in Hasidism. Yet Magid has his doubts about behind. His first book was on the Hasidic thinker Such words may sound unjust to someone who the real significance of such gestures. The “final act

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 23 of erasure of classical theism in the form of biblical be a way of breaking down barriers separating more readily accessible territory. What might be the monotheism is perhaps,” he tells us at one point, for spiritual, ethnic, and national identities in order “something” in this new amalgam that such a per- the Renewal theologians, “even more a product of the to foster a global consciousness that is founded son might find distinctively “compelling”? But this American religious context in which they live and on diversity with permeable boundaries. This isn’t a very different question from the one we have think (theologically and politically) than the hasidic includes, among other things, the creation of new left hanging: Why does Magid himself feel that the archaic and dilapidated house of Judaism should be If intermarriage rates were in fact to decline, Magid might so massively renovated instead of just being treated as a teardown? even consider such a development to be a regrettable sign of One might not need to ask this last question if Magid followed Arthur Green in holding onto, in the Jews’ retreat back into their “exclusivist cocoon.” Magid’s words, “the mythic community of Sinai” and affirming the “mythic ethnos as having valid- tradition that serves as the source of their inspiration.” rituals, conscious syncretism by utilizing practices ity today.” But these are notions about which he Magid’s uncertainty on this score practically vanishes of other faiths adapted to Jewish sensibilities and expresses nothing but skepticism. Perhaps Magid a few pages later, following his account of Schachter- symbols, and the notion of inclusivity as a post- is outlining his own position as well when he de- Shalomi and Renewal theologian Arthur Green’s “rev- halakhic ideal. scribes Schachter-Shalomi as believing that olutionary, metaphysical revision that serves as the basis for undoing much of what has The move to theological globalism is not been accomplished in historical Judaism.” meant to subvert particular communities from Their work, Magid concludes, is “a serious having their own distinct identities. Following revision—even a subversion—of classical Durkheim, this is a natural inclination of Jewish metaphysics founded on American human civilization that cannot be usurped. religious principles.” But even if Schachter-Shalomi’s But even if one has a natural right to maintain “post-monotheistic theology and Gaia- one’s own distinct identity, one doesn’t necessarily consciousness Judaism” are essentially re- have a duty or a reason to do so. The place of rea- flections of the thinking of Ralph Waldo son can be taken, however, by a wish. Magid is, by his Emerson, William James, and New Age own account, someone who remains “fascinated by, religious figures such as Ken Wilber, this and deeply invested in, the complex nexus of Juda- clearly does not detract in any way, as far ism and the American counterculture” in which he as Magid is concerned, from their legiti- became enmeshed when he was young. At bottom, it macy. Pouring new wine into old bottles appears, it is his own experience that has left him so is precisely what modern Jewish thinkers strongly attached to what we might call cosmotheism do. Canonical modern Jewish thinkers with a post-Jewish face. from Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen to Mordecai Kaplan have unabash- hat traditional Jews will necessarily find such edly upheld versions of Judaism that take Ta blend altogether unacceptable goes without their bearings largely from one or anoth- saying. But is there any reason why non-traditional er or a medley of Gentile philosophers. Jews, including secularists, should respond in the Most of them, I would say, have done so same fashion? Why should they find Magid’s post- with far more justification than the advo- Judaism any less admissible than, say, Mordecai cates of Jewish Renewal—but I’m not go- Kaplan’s Reconstructionism (to which Magid ac- ing to make that argument. What I think knowledges a significant debt)? is worth asking in Magid’s case is why does For all his theological radicalism, Kaplan at he bother? Why isn’t it enough for Jews just least upheld a concept of Jewish peoplehood. His to drink the new wine straight out of the God may have been a purely notional being, but he American vat from which it comes? defined the Jews as “an international nation, func- Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi at a High Holidays service, The advocates of Renewal have to do a Los Angeles, late 1990s. (Courtesy of the Zalman M. Schachter- tioning as such by virtue of a common past, their lot of work, after all, before they can refash- Shalomi Collection, The University of Colorado at Boulder, aspiration toward a common future and the will- ion Judaism into a suitable receptacle for Archives.) to-cooperate in the achievement of common ends.” a postmodern American return to a pre- Magid emphatically rejects any such idea. That the Mosaic cosmotheism. It’s not only the old Jews, “whether in the Diaspora or in Israel, are one metaphysics that has to be discarded, but “much of This new and wide-open antinomian nomos, people and thus the drama of one Jewish society is what has been accomplished in historical Judaism.” Magid believes, will not only revitalize the Jewish the drama of another,” is, in his opinion, “a myth that Magid doesn’t supply us with a comprehensive list people but will be something of a magnet to outsid- is less and less convincing.” Kaplan saw the Jewish of the things that have to be thrown out, but what ers as well. He is not looking for converts, but rec- homeland as “the symbol of the Jewish renascence he clearly regards as most objectionable are the laws ommends that the people who come to it “because and the center of Jewish civilization” throughout the that have kept the Jews in their “exclusivist cocoon.” there is something about it, or about Jews, that is world. According to Magid, the Jews of Israel, the The Jews today constitute, in his opinion, “a peo- compelling” but who do not wish to convert “should only other Jews in today’s world to whom he gives ple with no relevant halakhic anchor yet a commu- be allowed to choose to take on aspects of Judaism any consideration, live in a country that “is increas- nity in need of a nomos with little precedent to guide and be considered part of the Jewish community.” ingly becoming its own Jewish civilization,” one her.” They are thus in need, according to Magid, of Magid is thus fully in accord with Schachter- which is of marginal concern to him in this book Shalomi’s “principle that Judaism and Jewishness and to which he pays attention mostly for purposes a new Judaism responding to a new era in need not be fused.” What he does not explain is why of (generally invidious) comparison with the Unit- human history (and not just Jewish history) that they need to remain joined at all or why, in the new ed States. The eyes of the author of American Post- demands it to move toward the world rather than synagogue, the distinction between Jew and Greek Judaism are focused far more on Gentiles in this use halakha to protect itself from the world. By has to be preserved. One also wonders why anyone country’s “postethnic society” than on Jews else- adopting a New Age post-millennial perspective, would feel the need to enter the realm of Judaism where, for in his scheme of things, they have a much Renewal presents a Jewish vision founded on the in order to benefit from a religious message that more important role to play. very “un-halakhic” idea that Jewish nomos should has only recently been imported into it from other, Magid doesn’t think that ethnicity has disappeared

24 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 or will disappear in America, but he does believe, fol- he is very hopeful about the future. He believes that lowing the historian David Hollinger among others, “American Jewry and Judaism are in the midst of a that it “will become something other than purely a systemic shift in identity, belief, and practice, the consequence of ascription or descent.” What we now effects of which will be felt for the next few genera- nEw in pApEr see coming into being, largely as a result of massive tions” and that things may be moving in the direc- intermarriage, are “new ethnicities that are created tion that he desires. by a combination of descent and consent, ascription Things look different to me. My guess is that the and affiliation.” Postethnic America therefore “pres- Renewal communities will remain the marginal ents serious challenges to the continuity and survival phenomenon that they have been for decades, as of- of Jews and Judaism precisely because it undermines ten as not an entry point to more mainstream forms the very notion of ethnicity that served Jews as an an- of Judaism. But even if they grow much larger, I do chor for most of its history.” not believe that they will become a dominant ele- Magid mentions people such as Alan Dershow- ment in the future of American Judaism, especially itz and Elliott Abrams who are deeply dismayed by if they follow the path that Magid has marked out. this state of affairs and seeking to alter it by vari- If that is where they choose to go, I believe, they

Unlikely Collaboration Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma barbara will “Brilliant and fascinating . . . This exceptional study provides new insights into previously hidden corners of Stein’s life.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A fine-grained, unflinching, and nuanced history.” —New York Review of Books

“Extremely detailed and erudite.” —Jewish Ideas Daily

Early morning prayer gathering at an ALEPH-sponsored retreat. (© 2013 Janice Rubin.) ous means, but gives them very short shrift. Their will stray further and further from other Jews, and proposals are futile, he writes. They ought to realize eventually merge with cosmotheists of other stripes, that “postethnicity is with us for the foreseeable fu- their real spiritual kindred. ture.” The Jews must therefore “learn how to think The publication of American Post-Judaism was within its boundaries and not simply deny its ex- supported, as a stand-alone page in the front-mat- istence or remain wed to old-paradigm ‘oughts’ in ter proudly announces, by a grant from the Jew- order to create models for survival, continuity, and ish Federation of Greater Hartford. Reading this, I renewal.” It is easier, no doubt, for Magid to adapt couldn’t help but recall the way Stephen King be- The Letters of to this new situation than it is for the other writ- gan his commencement speech at Vassar in 2001: ers he mentions, for he doesn’t find it unwelcome in “You here at Vassar have invited the man most Gertrude Stein the way that they do. Given his overall theo-political commonly seen as America’s Bogeyman” to give and Carl Van Vechten, outlook, he has good reason to consider it desir- this address, “and I have to ask you: What were 1913-1946 able. If intermarriage rates were in fact to decline, you thinking? What in God’s name were you think- he might even consider such a development to be ing?” What, indeed, were the people at the Jewish edited by edward burns a regrettable sign of the Jews’ retreat back into their Federation thinking when they proffered this sub- “[Burns] has arranged and annotated “exclusivist cocoon.” It will surely be easier to foster vention? Did they have any idea how radically sub- these [letters] with extraordinary skill and the kind of new rituals and conscious (yet somehow versive of both monotheism and worldwide Jewish diligence.” controlled) syncretism that Magid recommends in solidarity its recipient would aim to be? My guess —Times Literary Supplement communities devoted to post-Judaism that include is that they did but they weren’t too troubled by many non-Jewish members. such matters. I can readily imagine that they see “The Stein–Van Vechten letters reveal, afresh Like Schachter-Shalomi, Magid wants a re- Magid’s ideas as a relatively harmless means of res- and anew, the world of twentieth-century newed Judaism “to participate fully in the global cuing a few stray young souls from whatever other genius and bohemia. Edward Burns has concern for the well being of the planet and all its postethnic, New Age alternative might otherwise edited this human archive with the deeply- inhabitants.” He wants its “resources, insights, and be in store for them. informed precision of a leading Stein scholar.” teachings” to “contribute to the larger humanis- —Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University tic concerns of the day.” Today, Magid acknowl- edges, Renewal is still mostly confined to a “fairly Allan Arkush is Professor of Judaic Studies and History CoLUmBiA UniVErSiTy prESS small group of alternative communities scattered at Binghamton University and the Senior Contributing www.cup.columbia.edu · cupblog.org throughout the landscape of North America.” But Editor of the Jewish Review of Books.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 25 Exogamy Explored

BY SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN

tions, and her analysis and policy recommendations often surprised to discover that they care more 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith are keyed to that preference. about the rites for newborn naming ceremonies Marriage Is Transforming America In an effort to account for the rising number of and the religious upbringing of their children than by Naomi Schaefer Riley “interfaith couples headed to the altar” these days, they might have imagined. Religious coming-of- Oxford University Press, 256 pp., $24.95 Fuzzy romantic ideas that obscure the very real tensions of interfaith marriage, the author charges, are also at fault in the n recent years boundaries between American ethnic and religious groups have shifted and lack of realism that many couples bring to their relationships. blurred. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have officially slipped into minority status. While Schaefer Riley cites the words of David Slagle, an age celebrations loom as children approach middle Ieconomic stratification remains quite real, religion evangelical pastor in Atlanta: “Young people today school. The death of a parent arouses not only grief and, to a large extent, ethnicity have declined as the are intentional about their education, their career, but also guilt and the desire to seek out familiar bases for social division. Friendships and marriages thinking through the possibilities for an occupation religious consolations. across religious lines have multiplied, and culture- and where they want to live and buying a home.” Money, Schaefer Riley observes, also “can be a wide norms of endogamous marriage have passed a However, when it comes to profoundly important source of great conflict in any marriage,” but it can tipping point: Pew research data show that one-third be an especially touchy subject in intermarriages, of new marriages in the United States bring together particularly those between Jews and Christians. spouses from two different religious groups. Two Non-Jewish spouses who have grown up without National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS 1990 and the custom of church membership dues—and cer- NJPS 2000-01) underlined this trend for the Jewish tainly without the custom of paying for tickets in community: Jewish intermarriage rates were some- order to worship in church on the holiest days of where between forty-three percent and fifty percent. the year—are “taken aback by the idea” that Jewish (In the 1950s, about only seven percent of American synagogues usually demand that congregants pay to Jewish households had included one Jewish and one pray. Some Jewish religious institutions have reacted non-Jewish spouse.) As The New York Times colum- to such objections to the high cost of being Jewish nist David Brooks recently commented, America by trying to lower the financial boundaries of group has become “a nation of mutts, a nation with hun- membership in order to attract new adherents. dreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, in- However, since contemporary American Judaism termarrying and intermingling.” does not require tithing and has no central religious Naomi Schaefer Riley grew up in a moderately financial holdings to create cushions for congrega- affiliated Jewish household and is married to an -Af tions, the elimination of paid dues or High Holiday rican American man from a Jehovah’s Witness back- tickets is difficult. ground who has not converted to Judaism. They are In some intermarried households husbands and happy in their marriage and in agreement on raising wives find themselves engaged in a power struggle, their children as Jews (an agreement, she reports, in which each is “allowed” by the other to attend re- that she stipulated on the first date), but Schaefer Ri- ligious services in his or her own religious tradition, ley has not written an “I’m OK, you’re OK” celebra- with one caveat: Neither should “dig their heels in” tion of interfaith marriage. In ’Til Faith Do Us Part: and become too much attached to a particular reli- How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America, gious tradition. Schaefer Riley’s interviews indicated Schaefer Riley surveys Christians, Jews, Muslims, that some husbands and wives seem motivated not Naomi Schaefer Riley. (Courtesy of James Allen Hindus, Sikhs, and others married to spouses from Walker.) only by a kind of rooting for one’s home team, but divergent cultural backgrounds. She finds that cou- also by jealousy. Maintaining a balanced but limited ples sharing specific values—including religious devotion to one’s religion is a sign that the marriage is values—report higher levels of happiness and mari- personal choices—mindfully choosing one’s life important—more important than religion. tal satisfaction, as well as more resilient marital re- partner, spouse, and parent of one’s children—“our This deep awareness of real religious contradic- lationships. Intermarriages “bring less satisfaction romantic view of marriage precludes intentionality.” tions tends to make interfaith couples especially un- to spouses” and “result in a higher likelihood of Fuzzy romantic ideas that obscure the very real ten- easy about the resonances of rituals and ceremonies. divorce.” Working from an Interfaith Marriage Sur- sions of interfaith marriage, she charges, are also at Schaefer Riley repeatedly describes spouses defin- vey that she commissioned and also from interviews fault in the lack of realism that many couples bring ing and redefining “uncrossable lines.” Many Jewish “with close to two hundred members of the clergy, to their relationships. spouses report, for instance, that they can tolerate marriage counselors, and interfaith couples,” as well Christmas flowers, stockings, or small trees within as a review of recent research on marriage across re- ife cycle changes bring with them new sensi- the home, but resist, even deeply resent, outdoor ligious and cultural lines, Schaefer Riley details the Ltivities to religious differences. Using a variety Christmas lights or wreaths, which seem to adver- manifold ways in which religious difference stimu- of suggestive interviews along with some statistical tise a Christian home to the world. Schaefer Riley lates conflict in interfaith families. Throughout the data, Schaefer Riley reveals how differences in reli- is disdainful of those who obliterate or ignore the book, she criticizes efforts to resolve such conflict gious training often trigger unexpected but power- distinctiveness of religious traditions: “The notion through religious homogenization or syncretism, ful resistance to the presence of different religious that Hanukkah and Christmas are both ultimately favoring instead the meaningful practice and dy- narratives and rituals in the home, especially but celebrations of light is now common in certain set- namic transmission of distinctive religious tradi- not only where children are involved. Spouses are tings, but it requires an extraordinary dilution of

26 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 both religious occasions—the birth of the savior more assimilated and less attached with every suc- and a Jewish military victory over religious perse- cessive generation, while a fervent Muslim minority cution—in order to arrive at this point.” will “grow in prominence” within the highly identi- A History of fied community, determining “the future of Muslim Jewish-Muslim ntermarriage may not be good for religious par- institutions from mosques to religious schools.” This Relations Iticularism, and it may be associated with high analysis will no doubt remind many readers of the From the Origins to rates of divorce, Schaefer Riley asserts, but it has an 2011 study of the Jewish population of New York, the Present Day upside. It clearly enhances religious tolerance. In- which reflected a similar polarization. Edited by terweaving discussions of diverse religious groups ’Til Faith Do Us Part also includes illuminating Abdelwahab and individual experiences with the findings of discussions of individuals and couples who don’t Meddeb & large national statistical studies, she cites the “Aunt match stereotypical perceptions of interfaith cou- Benjamin Stora Susan principle” demonstrated in Robert Putnam ples, including Druze, Mennonite, and Roma indi- and David Campbell’s American Grace: How Reli- viduals. Schaefer Riley’s interviews bring the ritual gion Divides and Unites Us, namely that the pres- non-exclusivity of Eastern religions into vivid light: ence of family members of different faiths liberal- This is the first encyclopedic guide to the history of relations between Jews and Muslims around the world izes Americans. Contemporary American society Daha, a Sikh, and his wife, Haimi, a Hindu, also from the birth of Islam to today. Richly illustrated and has been profoundly influenced by the fact that it believe strongly that their children should be beautifully produced, the book features more than 150 is harder to believe that infidels are going to hell exposed not only to each other’s holidays but authoritative and accessible articles by an international when Aunt Susan is an infidel. Today’s demo- also to those of other faiths. Haimi recalls that team of leading experts in history, politics, literature, anthropology, and philosophy. graphics have created a religious ecology in which when she was growing up, her parents would Cloth $75.00 978-0-691-15127-4 Americans are more tolerant because they inter- put up a Christmas tree. “We do that for our marry more, and they intermarry more because children. We don’t ever want our children to they are more tolerant. Is this dilution of religious feel isolated. Those are great holidays. Why cultures, both a cause and an effect of increased in- wouldn’t we want to celebrate them? We have termarriage, a virtuous circle? no problem. If it’s a holiday, we’ll celebrate it.” How Judaism Turning to a group often perceived as being lo- Daha and Haimi also typically celebrate their Became a cated somewhat earlier in the process of accultura- respective holidays with their families. Indeed, Religion tion, Schaefer Riley asks whether American “Mus- they have asked both sets of grandparents An Introduction to take an active role in raising kids to Modern Jewish Thought religiously. The religious leaders in Leora Batnitzky 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- “A bold new interpretation of modern Jewish thought ing up children in more than one tradition by one of the leading scholars in the field.” —Micah Gottlieb, Jewish Review of Books means you must get beyond the traditional meaning of the holidays or at least gloss “Superb and thought-provoking.” over how the meanings of the holidays may —Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine contradict each other.” Paper $19.95 978-0-691-16013-9

ndividuals who marry outside of their Iown ethnic and religious groups tend to Cultural marry substantially later than those who Exchange marry endogamously, a subject that Schae- Jews, Christians, and fer Riley—never shy about uncomfortable Art in the Medieval subject matter—enthusiastically takes on. Marketplace In her penultimate chapter, “Jews, Mor- Joseph Shatzmiller 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 “This valuable book supports the view that from their current low point, well under medieval Jews in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies were open to the style and replacement level. iconography of their Christian neighbors, despite the Schaefer Riley cherishes the Ameri- protest of Jewish and Christian authorities. . . . [N]o Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah. can freedoms and social openness that al- other book provides a comprehensive state of the field for researchers and general readers alike.” low Jews and others to make free personal —Ivan G. Marcus, Yale University lims will in fact go through the same process that choices, but she warns readers about potential prob- Cloth $35.00 978-0-691-15699-6 Catholics and Jews” have experienced and “be sub- lems that are implicit in those free choices, imply- sumed by the melting pot” while retaining particu- ing that if Jews want less intermarriage—or if they laristic pride. Comparing the trajectory of Muslim want more successful marriages no matter who the See our E-Books at acculturation to that of Jews, she suggests that re- spouses are—they should support conditions that press.princeton.edu laxed Muslims who marry out of the faith will grow foster earlier marriage and Jewish in-marriage. She

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 27 suggests that Jews can learn from the Mormons how to have a rather spotty grasp of the important cor- mal and informal Jewish education from childhood to keep their commitment to their own particular- pus of American local, national, and international through the teen and college years, familial Jewish istic values and behaviors strong, while at the same Jewish demographic research—even when those ethno-religious activities, and youth groups, camps, time minimizing entry obstacles. Mormon practice data might support, contradict, or shed interesting and Israel trips. Independently, each of these factors illustrates that “it is actually possible to advocate additional light on her major points. Her neglect of is highly predictive of the likelihood of in-marriage. in-marriage—even denying the possibility of living this body of writing leads to some serious misstate- Together they have an impact that is greater than the eternally with one’s family—while at the same time ments with regard to her Jewish subjects. She asserts, sum of its parts. welcoming intermarried couples in the community” for example, that “almost no demographic factor or Schaefer Riley might have focused more on the and actively encouraging conversion, she says. This comparison is intriguing but naive. Schae- Today’s demographics have created a religious ecology in which fer Riley pays insufficient attention to the important organizational, structural, and ideological differ- Americans are more tolerant because they intermarry more, ences between Mormons and Jews. For example, the hierarchical Church of Latter-Day Saints is far and they intermarry more because they are more tolerant. more centralized economically and as a polity than the highly decentralized Jewish religious groups. In childhood practice seems to change the likelihood dramatic differences between men and women in contrast to the liberal and permissive upbringing that a marriage will be an interfaith one.” Numerous patterns of intermarried Jewish family life. Inter- of the majority of young American Jews, which ex- studies (most of which she does not cite) however, married Jewish women—like the author herself— presses itself powerfully in romantic choices, young unequivocally demonstrate that having a Jewish edu- most often aim to raise Jewish children. Intermar- Mormons are strongly disciplined by communal ex- cation greatly enhances the probability that one will ried Jewish men, in contrast, frequently articulate pectations and are urged to give a number of years make Jewish choices. Over and over again, national ambivalent feelings about religion in general and to missionary activities around the world. and local studies have revealed the demographic fac- Judaism specifically—and not coincidentally about Schaefer Riley makes imaginative use of a broad tors that affect the likelihood of intermarriage: Jewish Jewish women. These men are less likely to transmit range of examples, but despite her eclectic incorpo- population density, Jewishness of friendship circles Jewish religious culture to the next generation, and ration of data on diverse ethnic groups, she seems during high school and college, continuation of for- 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- Click. 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 Flip. Swipe. 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, One subscription. self-fulfillment, and individual autonomy that Jews and others have gratefully embraced. Some readers have attacked Schaefer Riley for Three great ways to read. her politically incorrect emphasis on the funda- mental problems that emerge within many inter- Print + Web + App faith marriages. Other readers—including this one—resonate with her conviction that the indi- www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/subscribe 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 JEWISH REVIEW countercultural willingness to challenge American OF BOOKS 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 Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. of Contemporary Jewish Life and is co-director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

28 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 Fiction and Forgiveness

BY MICHAEL WEINGRAD

contemporary culture. an individual’s existence that no part his or her life A Guide for the Perplexed: A Novel At the same time, A Guide for the Perplexed feels need any longer be lost or forgotten, at least from by Dara Horn somewhat different from Horn’s previous novels. the perspective of a search engine. It is Facebook on W.W. Norton, 352 pp., $25.95 The geographical focus is not the American-Eastern steroids, a Google Glass watching the totality of our European Jewish axis but the Islamic world, both in lives from birth to death. That this is a retelling of the biblical Joseph story is no atching on the Web as crowds secret, and Horn’s novel movingly exposes the horror spilled into the streets of Cairo by the millions lent an unexpected ur- inhabiting that biblical text, the blinding hatred that gency to the experience of reading DaraW Horn’s new novel. Whether they were protest- can exist between siblings. ing the evisceration of Egypt’s few democratic in- stitutions, defending the theocratic visions of the medieval times and today. An even more palpable Marinating hellishly in envy of Josie’s success Muslim Brotherhood, denouncing Zionist plots, or difference is that, despite its heavy freight of cul- is her older sister Judith. So eager is Judith to ex- simply giving voice to their tottering nation’s starva- tural allusion, this novel is Horn’s speediest read perience a bit of freedom from her brilliant sister’s tion and rage, the waves of humanity crashing each yet. Maimonidean argument and biblical narrative long shadow, which extends back into a childhood day into Tahrir Square underscored the timeliness in which Josie was always the family’s favorite, that of Horn’s A Guide for the Perplexed, which is mostly when the government of Egypt extends Josie a set in present-day Egypt and contains, along with somewhat dodgy invitation to spend several weeks a great deal else, grim if occasionally hopeful com- working as a data management consultant for its mentary about that country’s weighty history and new, modern library in Alexandria, Judith presses current crises. the buttons of Josie’s ego as only a sibling knows The thirty-six-year-old Horn is one of the most how to do. Jewishly ambitious novelists working in America Josie heads off to Egypt. This is a land whose today. In her debut novel, In the Image, she explored maladies are depicted in the novel in spiritual as issues of faith and theodicy, bridging contemporary much as historical terms: Egypt as Jewish tradition’s American literature, classic modern Yiddish fiction, Mitzrayim, the place of human narrowness and con- and the Book of Job. Restless in this world, she at- striction of hope (which might, one muses, watch- tempted in her next novel, The World to Come, to ing CNN, be as accurate as any geopolitical analysis imagine her way into the afterlife via a plot involv- at this point). There she is kidnapped. Imprisoned, ing Marc Chagall and the Yiddish writer known as brutalized, and cut off from contact with the outside Der Nister. Her third novel, All Other Nights, was set world, she is soon given up for dead by her family. during the Civil War and dramatizes the distinctive Judith increasingly insinuates herself into the void American Jewish tension between universalism and left by her accomplished sister, until the novel’s particularism through the prism of the Passover outcome hangs on what sacrifices one sister might story. make for the sake of the other. Horn’s literary energies are generated cumula- tively through plot, moral weight, and elegant the- hat this is a retelling of the biblical Joseph matic architectures built from the storehouses of Tstory is no secret, and Horn’s novel movingly Jewish culture, rather than through the indrawn exposes the horror inhabiting that biblical text, the breath prompted by lapidary individual sentences. blinding hatred that can exist between siblings. Af- (There are exceptions, such as her description of “a Dara Horn. (Courtesy of Michael B. Priest.) ter reading the account of Josie’s imprisonment in summer mountain twilight, thick with the smell of Egypt and her abandonment by her family, it will wet wood and encroaching darkness, the twilight be impossible for me this fall, when I again hear fragrance that children imagine to be possibil- are central to the book, but its structure is that of the Torah readings recounting Joseph in the pit ity and adults know to be regret.”) She is first, and a popular thriller, and its three hundred pages fly and in jail, not to feel more freshly and painfully foremost, a storyteller, yet these stories carry Horn’s by even more effortlessly than her previous novels. the trauma Jacob’s son underwent and the act of readers higher and further than many of her con- (This may also be because it is not part of her larger will and self-mutilation required to endure it. The temporaries do with dazzling prose. project of trying to solder American Jewish memo- term “midrash” is thrown around too casually As its Maimonidean title would indicate, A ry more deeply to its Ashkenazi antecedents.) these days, applied to any mediocre poem or novel Guide for the Perplexed offers the same lofty level At the center of the novel’s plot is Josephine that happens to have a biblical figure in it. In draw- of Jewish substance and theme as her previous nov- Ashkenazi, a computer genius with a touch of As- ing new depths of meaning and experience from els. In addition to wrestling with the conundrum perger’s Syndrome (never mentioned but perfectly the biblical story, Horn earns the term. of divine providence as presented in Maimonides’ described: “The wave of accuracy surged within her, However, with characteristic narrative ambition, philosophical magnum opus, Horn’s novel also acts unstoppable, like nausea”) whose ultimate software Horn also weaves into the novel two other stories, as an extended midrash on the biblical Joseph sto- design achievement would seem the stuff of science similarly set in Egypt and dealing with relations be- ry, telescopes back in time from the 21st century to fiction were it not so close to what is happening tween siblings. The first is Solomon Schechter’s -re the 19th and 12th centuries, and explores the themes around us each day. She has created a computer ap- covery of the Cairo Geniza in 1896-1897. A geniza of memory and forgiveness in the Bible and in our plication that so thoroughly records the minutiae of is any synagogue storeroom in which worn-out

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 29 Jewish texts are deposited, but ever since the Cam- brother David, who, we learn from a poignant letter, awareness that our now endless video records of bridge scholar (later head of the Jewish Theological perished at sea in a shipwreck while on a business our children, our social media walls and tumblr Seminary in New York) carted off to England the venture. chronicles, only asymptotically approach the real- contents of the one in the synagogue in old Cairo, Horn deftly weaves together her three nar- ity of our children’s selves, and can sometimes even it has become the geniza. What Schechter, following ratives—Josie’s, Schechter’s, and Maimonides’— occlude it. clues given him by the Cambridge scholar-travelers through a series of common motifs and themes: and identical twins Margaret Gibson and Agnes sibling rivalry (and Schechter, like his Cambridge n A Guide for the Perplexed, Horn voices a deep Lewis, found was a cultural treasure trove like noth- friends Gibson and Lewis, had an identical twin, Iskepticism that any of us, even the careful his- ing else in Jewish history. Israel, who helped found the, for Horn’s purposes, torian, can be confident of our access to an objec- tive past. As the twins of Cambridge presciently Where Horn’s novel shines most, and most darkly, is remark to Schechter: in its central plot. A geniza-like perfect memory, Horn But just consider how much material there will be for historians in the future, now that teaches, has no place for forgiveness. we have printing presses, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and mail deliveries two or three Miraculously, the Cairo Geniza preserved centu- perfectly named Israeli town of Zikhron Yaakov, times a day. For every book and letter we find ries of texts and documents and letters and poems, or “memory of Jacob”); the precarious existence in this genizah, the genizah of the future will including vanished Hebrew originals of ancient throughout history of Jews in the Muslim world; surely have hundreds of thousands. It will be apocryphal texts, lost collected works of the literary the destructive lure of fame; the mysteries of provi- endless. The past will become a bottomless titans of medieval Spain, and, through financial and dence; even asthma. pit. legal records, first brilliantly analyzed by historian The most important of these thematic strands S.D. Goitein, a socio-economic record of medieval is memory, our relationship to the past, as it is This does not make the Cambridge ladies de- Jewish life in the Mediterranean unparalleled in its embodied in the Cairo Geniza as well as its astro- spondent. Rather, they cheerfully accept that all richness and detail. Over a century after Schechter’s nomically larger, present-day avatar in the inter- reconstructions of the past are creative, as much visionary rescue of the material, historians are still net. Josie’s computer application is in fact named like the work of Horn the novelist imagining Mai- profitably sifting through it. Geniza, and part of her hubris is to believe that the monides’ guilt over his brother’s death as they are The second story Horn weaves into the novel is total recall it allows can enable her to capture the like that of Schechter the scholar archiving papyrus that of the preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher essence of a person. Yet the centuries-old chaos of fragments. Moreover, they calmly deny that any of Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), some of whose papers, scrolls, and fragments liberated by Schech- these reconstructions can ever arrive at the truth of own letters and manuscripts were discovered by ter directly challenges our confidence that what we a life in its entirety. “[P]eople find what they wish to Schechter in the Cairo Geniza. Horn imagines the now call data, no matter how rich, big, or perfectly find, and remember what they wish to remember, relationship between Moses, a Cairo resident seven recorded, will bring us into the soul of another regardless of the evidence presented to them,” says hundred years before Schechter’s sojourn, and his person. Horn’s novel may also reflect a parent’s Margaret to the perplexed Schechter.

30 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 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- mo•sa•ic cause of its rigorous fidelity to the totality of the recorded past, cannot tell stories about or draw /mo za’ ik/ 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- 1. of or pertaining to Moses or the laws, faith, almi found his own illustrative model in “Funes el memorioso” (“Funes the Memorious”), a short institutions, and writings attributed to him. 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. 2. an artwork made of small pieces of inlaid He cannot forget anything. Without the ability to stone, tile, marble, glass, etc., forming forget, Funes becomes paralyzed, swallowed in the ocean of undifferentiated existence, unable to a patterned whole. judge or think. Horn’s arabesque-like dips into Schechter and Maimonides are cleverly constructed. Yet, despite 3. a new web magazine advancing their thematic force, they feel ornamental (a prod- ideas, argument, and reasoned uct of geniza-like coincidence rather than Mai- monidean providence—though perhaps that is judgment in all areas of part of her point), and they are less vividly drawn Jewish endeavor. 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 read our most recent edition, featuring a powerful essay to the historical record. “We treasure that tiny dis- covery of a world that was,” they tell Schechter, who on the end of European Jewry by Michel Gurfinkiel, visit us at: worries that his scholarly researches may inadver- tently misread or even falsify the past, “Even if it was a world that wasn’t.” www.mosaicmagazine.com 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. ADVANCING Michael Weingrad is academic director of the Harold JEWISH Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of American Hebrew MOSAIC THOUGHT Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States (Syracuse University Press).

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 31 Who Owns Margot?

By Nadia Kalman

can’t be helped—it is human nature to see our- tive pages, in the Diary). The fictional Margot -al Margot: A Novel selves in others. Some of it, however, relies on a ludes to her former scholarship and religiosity, but by Jillian Cantor willful blindness. seems to have retained little of either. There are few Riverhead Books, 352 pp., $16 references to any books besides her sister’s diary, nfortunately, now Anne’s sister, Margot, has few references to Judaism besides candle-lighting, Ubeen subjected to the same kind of treatment. and no mention of Israel at all. As I read Jillian Cantor’s new novel, I encountered Margot’s current interests include eye color. a very different Margot than the one who appeared If she isn’t remembering that Peter van Pels’ eyes hese are exciting times for those of us in the Diary and her friends’ recollections. The were “blue, like the sea,” she is noticing (or re- who grew up reading comics and Asimov historical Margot had many interests and studied noticing, many, many times) that the eyes of her before “graduating” to literature. Some widely, including five different languages and liter- American love interest are “gray-green.” This thirty- of the most interesting fiction now be- atures, advanced mathematics and science, ancient three-year-old woman experiences what appear to ingT written includes elements from popular genres: be novel and intriguing sensations of Jonathan Lethem’s sad superheroes, Lev Gross- “warmth” in the presence of these men man’s elitist magicians, and Gary Shteyngart’s future and their eyes. Another of her interests is world, in which jeans have become transparent, but romantic rivals, both real and imagined. Jewish parents are the same as ever. At their best, Watching the film version of the Diary, these works bring complex characterization and she is most upset not by its lack of real- multilayered imagery into the imaginative realms of ism, nor by painful memories it has trig- genre and other “low” forms. gered, but because it is Peter and Anne The possibilities offered by speculative fic- kissing in the final scene: “And Margot, tion—the fiction of what might have been—often she is nowhere to be found.” lead Jewish writers to a rewriting of the events of In Cantor’s reimagining, Margot’s the Holocaust. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish past includes a secret romance with Policemen’s Union, millions are fictionally saved, Peter van Pels. Far from midwifery in given temporary refuge in Alaska. More often, Palestine, this novel’s Margot dreamt of though, authors pull single victims safely out of wifery in Philadelphia, where she and history. In The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth specu- Peter had planned to reunite. The book lated upon what kind of adulthood Anne Frank is set in the Philadelphia of 1959, where might have had (as has Shalom Auslander more Margot has taken on the non-Jewish recently). Ellen Feldman’s incandescent novel The name “Margie Franklin,” concealed her Boy Who Loved Anne Frank does the same for Pe- roots, and found work as a legal secre- ter van Pels. And now Jillian Cantor has written tary in a Jewish practice. Margot, imagining the life of Margot Frank had As I read on, I realized that Mar- she survived Bergen-Belsen. got’s closest literary cousins were to be It is not surprising that we return so often to found not in speculative fiction, but in Anne Frank and those close to her. In Cantor’s less romance novels, where the focus is on than felicitous but certainly memorable phrase, love and the endings are happy. Several Frank is a “Holocaust icon.” Why Anne Frank? In tropes of the romance genre come into the brilliant essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Cyn- play in the novel: a romantic rivalry thia Ozick argued that the answer lies in both the with a scheming sister (in this case, with power of her writing and the malleability of her im- Anne, which gave me pause, as the fic- age. The Diary of a Young Girl is keenly observant, tionally scheming rival was not yet six- darkly humorous—and deceptively accessible. The teen); a mousy secretary in love with her Anne Frank, left, and her sister, Margot, at the beach, ca. 1935. shallow analogies we can draw between our lives (Courtesy of Anne Frank Fonds/Anne Frank House via Getty boss; and a hidden identity that, once and Anne’s have allowed “a world that made of [the Images.) revealed, makes the love interest all the Diary] all things, some of them true, while floating more enamored. lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhab- Although Margot/Margie is studying ited evil.” It is easy to misread Anne’s diary, to think and modern history, as well as practical subjects, to be a paralegal (a slight anachronism in 1959, if I that because we know what it is to be young and such as shorthand and bookkeeping. According to am not mistaken), she doesn’t seem to have much misunderstood, we understand the Holocaust and the Diary, in her spare time, Margot read “about interest in her work outside of the opportunity it its victims. It is easy to identify with the smiling girl everything, in particular about religion and medi- provides to see her boss and crush, Joshua Rosen- in the photograph and to drape her in comforting cine.” Margot planned, after the war, to become stein. A workplace discrimination suit brought by sentiments that are easily disproven by the facts of a midwife in Palestine. She probably would have an Auschwitz survivor inspires excitement and am- her life and death. done well; her friends and the Diary describe a bivalence, but not for the reasons you might expect: We cast Anne Frank in our own image. In The kind, levelheaded young woman. Ghost Writer, an august judge sees Anne Frank as Of that Margot Frank, Cantor has retained lit- As I wait for Joshua to come out of his office, a beacon of Jewish community-minded probity, tle, mainly just her knowledge of shorthand and just before noon, my cheeks grow warm at the whereas the young protagonist Zuckerman sees Anne’s teasing description of her as a “paragon of notion of our upcoming lunch, just the two her as the ultimate assimilationist. Some of that virtue” (two facts that appear early, on consecu- of us. Then I find myself thinking,That was

32 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 how it began with Peter and me, lunch. And it novel. The trouble is, it is not being presented to less to say, Anne never came close to jeopardizing her is confusing how my mind wanders to Peter, readers as a romance, but as serious literary fiction. family’s safety like that. There are more important when I am so eagerly awaiting the time with Advance blurbs mention its truthfulness and psy- things than romance, as she well knew. Joshua. chological subtlety. Yet, this novel houses its roman- To some, including perhaps Cantor herself, the tic hero on Knight Street, repeatedly, and nonsensi- inclusion of terrible historical events makes Mar- The men in her life are little more than points in cally, uses skipping to denote childhood innocence got more than a romance novel: It’s the Holocaust a romantic triangle. Peter is a lover from her past; (Cantor imagines that Anne and Margot, at ages as ballast, with romance as bait. In this view, the Joshua represents her potential romantic future; twelve and fifteen, are often skipping home from sugary love story is there to help the lessons of the otherwise, they are very similar. They both com- school), and gives everyone the same stilted and Holocaust go down easily. But there is very little plain about their parents in rather adolescent terms melodramatic speaking style. As for psychological to be learned about human suffering from a book (granted, Peter is an actual adolescent at the time). insight: Of her father’s decision to publish the diary, in which no one is fully human. There is a reason Margot says: why most genre fiction is so stylized, its characters There is very little to be subservient to plots. To put it starkly, conventional If nothing else, Father is a good businessman, genre fiction tries to offer readers an escape from learned about human and when he realized he could get the diaries unwieldy and unhappy human realities, whereas published, make money, profit from the books, literature mostly tries to do the opposite. An au- suffering from a book in I am sure he thought, Why shouldn’t I? thor does, ultimately, have to choose between the two. which no one is fully (In reality, of course, sixteen English-language pub- As lines between genre and literary fiction blur, lishers rejected the Diary before it finally sold. Sell- some writers seek the gravitas conveyed by serious human. ing a victim’s story to a determinedly postwar world subjects without being willing to grapple with the was not the quickest way to make a buck.) messiness of actual events and humans. Unfortu- They both woo Margot with clichés (“You’re really In ordinary life, someone who places romance nately, for every genre-bending Art Spiegelman, beautiful, even if you don’t know it,” says Peter, an- above all else may seem merely neurotic. In times of there is someone who learned precisely the wrong ticipating a One Direction song of two years ago). war, that person seems deranged, and this novel’s “ro- lesson from Maus: that it is possible to depict those And, of course, they both have nice, albeit differ- mantic” approach to the achterhuis residents distorts who suffered and died in the Holocaust as cartoon ently colored, eyes. their characters. When the Green Police come to the characters. Other characters function mainly as catalysts door, the narrative focus is on a fictional plot twist to Margot’s love life. Even Peter’s cat, Mouschi, that could have been lifted from a soap opera: Anne best known in the Diary for his urinary antics, gets discovers Peter and Margot in bed together. (In Can- Nadia Kalman is the author of The Cosmopolitans dragged in to do his bit, plopped in Margot’s lap so tor’s invented version of events, Peter was two-timing (Livingston Press). An NEA recipient, she is presently that Peter can say, “He knows that you are special,” the sisters.) Anne then becomes hysterical, screaming working on a novel of speculative fiction set in and Margot can experience exciting sensations of at the police and refusing to leave. In reality, need- revolutionary Russia. 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- “This is a very important study. ken English, “I see way he look at you . . . You more It does not follow the well-trodden than secretary.” paths, and does not employ the phraseology frequently found in y favorite parts of Margot were those not BECOMING books on Soviet Jewry. This study tethered to the marriage plot. Some of opens up vistas for additional work M that will be written in its spirit. Margot’s early reactions to American acquaintanc- SOVIET JEWS It successfully analyzes the deep es and popular culture, including the film Some social and cultural processes that THE BOLSHEVIK EXPERIMENT Like It Hot, are well-rendered. Bryda, the bitter, took place in Soviet Jewry.” IN MINSK canny plaintiff of the discrimination case, seemed —Mordechai altshuler, hebrew university like an interesting character when she was first introduced. Some descriptions of the camps are “Elissa Bemporad has deepened and enriched our understanding of the haunting, although the impact of several startling social transformations Soviet Jews phrases diminishes with their repetition. Edith experienced in the two decades Frank, in Margot’s memory, says some sensible after the revolution. Mining hitherto and character-appropriate words. inaccessible archives, she deftly links Ultimately, though, the drive toward a happy larger historical processes to the ending takes priority, and the book begins knock- changes in the lives of ordinary— and some extraordinary—Jews in ing off obstacles. One such obstacle is Ezra Rosen- one of the great centers of Yiddish stein, Joshua’s father and boss, whose focus on culture and Judaism. Judiciously using earnings prevents Joshua from pursuing cases that photographs and the prose and poetry “help people.” So, Ezra sickens and dies. Joshua and of the time, Bemporad vividly shows Margot open a practice that matches Joshua’s ideals, that tradition exerted a powerful where he wears shirts that match his eyes. Joshua influence even in Soviet times but was also breaks off his engagement to the brassy, snobby eventually defeated by the combination of attractive new opportunities, in Penny, a romantic rival out of a Taylor Swift video. intensive resocialization, and terror.” (Apparently, the wedding was all Ezra’s idea.) The —Zvi GitelMan, author of A Century of queasy-making historical irony—that their happi- AmbivAlenCe: the Jews of russiA And the soviet ness results from the death of a purportedly money- union, 1881 to the Present obsessed Jew—eludes the blithe pair. The trauma of Holocaust survival poses another obstacle and is ELISSA BEMPORAD 800-842-6796 dispensed with equal efficiency. iupress.indiana.edu United lovers, a happy ending: Margot certainly meets the basic genre requirements for a romance

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 33 Meanwhile, on a Quiet Street in Cleveland

BY Eitan Kensky

The actual creative breakthrough may have hap- the years, Superman has transformed into a power- Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of pened the year before, when Siegel and Shuster col- ful god who fights other godlike beings. In the new Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators laborated on an illustrated short story called “The hit movie Man of Steel, he saves humanity from the of Superman Reign of the Super-Man.” On the surface, there’s apocalyptic Kryptonian “World Engine.” But the ear- by Brad Ricca little resemblance between “Reign” and the later liest Superman of Siegel and Shuster’s Action Comics St. Martin’s Press, 448 pp., $27.99 Superman. The Super-Man of the early story was was a social reformer: He used his super-strength to Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, The earliest Superman was a social reformer: He used his super- and the Jewish-American Way by Harry Brod strength to strong-arm a corrupt mine owner into investing in Free Press, 240 pp, $25 better safeguards and to fight the scourge of reckless driving.

Bill Dunn, a Depression-era tramp who gained the strong-arm a corrupt mine owner into investing in uperman was born on a hot, restless night in ability to telepathically control others after a mad better safeguards and to fight the scourge of reckless Cleveland, Ohio. It’s 1933 and Jerry Siegel, scientist secretly fed him an experimental serum. driving (“The auto accident death rate of this com- barely out of high school, has already been This Super-Man is a super villain! He’s used his munity is one that should shame us all!” Superman trying for years to make it as a science fiction mental powers to bring the world to the brink of correctly muses in Action #12). This was a Super- writer,S or a comic strip writer, or a writer of crime war. But suddenly he gets a glimpse of a future man working for the good of humanity. fiction, or a pulp publisher, or anything creative that when he won’t be able to replicate the serum and Yet “Reign of the Super-Man” only partially ex- could take him away from small-time retail. Dazed, is once again destitute. The Super-Man repents in plains Superman’s origins. Siegel and Shuster’s bi- he wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea. ographers, Superman’s biographers, and com- He goes to his desk and starts writing. But he’s too ics historians are all obsessed with answering tired, and it’s too hot, and he goes back to bed . . . the question, “Where did the idea of a super- only to be compelled back to the desk! In two-hour powered man come from?” Superman is, after cycles he wakes, writes, and goes back to his fitful all, not only the exemplary superhero, he is the sleep. There’s something about this idea that won’t firstof his kind, the one whose success spawned let him go. There’s also something about the night one of the richest, most popular, most endur- itself that clarifies the jumble of images in his mind. ing, and most malleable genres in American cultural history. X-Men, The Avengers, Batman, Clouds drifted past the moon. Up there the TV shows, the movies, the comics—none was wind. If only I could fly. If only . . . and would have existed without Siegel and Shuster’s SUPERMAN was conceived, not in his entirety, Superman. but little by little . . . So our biographers and historians frantical- ly hunt for explanations. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The next morning he runs to the home of Joe John Carter was a human who gained incred- Shuster, his best friend and frequent collaborator. ible jumping abilities in the lower-gravity envi- Siegel knows that the idea should be a comic, be- ronment of Mars. Is Superman, an alien, John cause seeing the Superman would be essential to Carter in reverse? Did the idea for Superman’s the experience. Despite their many previous fail- secret identity come from Lamont Cranston/ ures, Shuster believes in his friend. They start work- The Shadow? Did the adventure plots come ing immediately. from Douglas Fairbanks movies? Did the idea It’s a good story, though it is almost certainly for a man with super strength come from Philip made up. In another version, it’s 1934. Siegel had Wylie’s novel Gladiator? From bodybuilding diligently worked on his Superman idea all day magazines like Physical Culture? From the Jew- and awoke only to fill in the gaps. Then there is the ish strongman Siegmund Breitbart, who was nature of the story itself, the too-perfect elements. called “Hercules” and “Superman” by the Cleve- True, Saul Bellow once claimed that “You never Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, seated, in their studio, ca. 1942. land papers? Or was Joe Shuster inspired by a have to change anything you got up in the middle (Personal collection of Brad Ricca.) different Jewish strongman, Joseph Greenstein, of the night to write,” but few writers and artists The Mighty Atom? It was said that Greenstein actually compose this way, least of all Jerry Siegel. somewhat Jewish tones: “I see, now, how wrong was shot between the eyes in Galveston, Texas in In Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry I was. If I had worked for the good of humanity, 1914, only for the bullet to flatten on his forehead Siegel and Joe Shuster—The Creators of Super- my name would have gone down in history with a and drop to the floor. Or maybe Superman is simply man, Brad Ricca nicely describes Siegel’s story as blessing—instead of a curse.” Jerry Siegel’s response to a childhood trauma. “a magical tale about the creative process . . . After Ricca remarks that the story contains “every sin- Others have wondered if Superman can be ex- all of the failures, the one idea comes, as if from gle element of the superhero character that was be- plained by Siegel and Shuster’s Judaism. Did the idea heaven, and saves him.” The truth of Siegel’s cre- ginning to wake,” but this understates what “Reign” for super-strength come from the story of Samson? ative process is the failures, the false starts and mis- actually captures. The abrupt shift in the character- Superman did threaten to tear down the pillars sup- steps that nevertheless contained something worth- ization of the Super-Man marks Siegel’s real creative porting a building in order to force a peace settle- while, interesting, maybe even new. insight: Depression America needed a hero. Over ment. “A guy named Samson once had the same

34 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 someone similar. Ric- prominently detailed in Gerard Jones’ Men of To- ca reads Siegel and morrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Shuster’s earliest work Book, the best book on the creation of the comic in their high school book industry. newspaper, The Torch, Ricca is unique, however, in how aggressively with unusual precision he seizes on this idea. Ricca finds echoes of Michel and care in order to Siegel’s death throughout individual issues of Super- show that they were al- man. In Superman #2 (1939), Superman confronts ways autobiographical a criminal who dies suddenly of a heart attack. Su- artists. Siegel unsubtly perman stops to think, “Dead . . . Heart-failure! The translated his unre- excitement was too much for him!” To Ricca, this quited crush on a girl suggests “Siegel’s possible anger at his father for not named Miriam into being able to handle the ‘excitement’ of the robbery melancholy poems that kills him.” Later, Ricca argues that Superman’s and crude detective father’s decision to send Kal-El into space rather than stories. It was a mode save himself is “perhaps a carefully constructed my- of writing he contin- thology through which the young Jerry can attempt ued in Superman: Lois to understand his father’s death.” While neither read- Superman comic book pages outside Joe Shuster's boyhood home in Cleveland Lane was taken from ing is entirely compelling (and the second is less so celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Man of Steel. (© Tony Dejak/ /AP/Corbis.) Lois Amster, a girl Sie- than the first), the underlying premise is sound. Sie- gel admired from afar. gel thought through comic books. Though he doesn’t Shuster’s sense of phys- quite say it, Ricca is really arguing that comic book idea!” (Superman #2) Was super-strength a response ical inadequacy led to an obsession with bodybuild- creators draw no less from their own lives than other to the insecurity that Siegel and Shuster felt as Jews ing and strongmen. Moreover, his biggest handicap, artists. We resist this conclusion because they write in America? Or, as Harry Brod argues in Superman poor eyesight, was the one Superman used to project about impossibly proportioned men and women in Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to weakness as Clark Kent: those nerdy glasses. spandex, but we shouldn’t. Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way, is The most important biographical detail that Indeed, it is impossible to ignore the way that the combination of Superman’s super-strength and inspired Superman was the death of Michel Siegel Siegel and Shuster’s frustrations with their pub- Clark’s weakness a commentary on how Jewish men in 1932 after three men robbed his clothing store. lisher increasingly found their way into the comics. were perceived? Does the way his parents saved the There were reports that Siegel was shot, but it was It was years from the time Siegel and Shuster cre- future savior from destruction by sending him to later determined that he died of a heart attack ated Superman until Superman’s first appearance in Earth in a small rocket make him like Moses? Others caused by the shock. Ricca is not the first to connect Action Comics #1 (1938). They extensively revised have suggested that there is something fundamental- Superman, the world’s ultimate crime-fighter and and resubmitted their Superman proposal while ly Jewish about Kryptonite. Only the old-world past a man impervious to bullets, to this event. It was also developing other characters. They created Dr. 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- A Jewish Day School tioning also shows the enduring fascination of Sie- gel and Shuster’s creation. It is, apparently, almost impossible to believe that Superman came through where curiosity and creativity the constant writing and rewriting, drafting and re- drafting, of two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland. are part of the picture. Est. 1991 erry Siegel and Joe Shuster have typically Jewish JAmerican 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 Beit Rabban Day School store on Central Avenue, earning enough money Early Childhood . Elementary Education to move the family to a comfortable home in Glen- ville, a Jewish neighborhood on the east side of Beit Rabban is an innovative day school, offering: Cleveland. Siegel read the comics, crime fiction, • Superior secular education, using an interdisciplinary curriculum adventure, and proto-science fiction magazines • Love of Torah; in-depth text study such as Astounding Stories. He sent letters to the editor and tried writing his own stories. All were • Hebrew language proficiency and a passion for Jewish life terrible. Shuster’s parents were also immigrants. • Intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills His father, once a tailor, worked as an eleva- tor operator at Mount Sinai Hospital. The family Discover how we help your child put moved to Glenville in 1929, eventually living in a small apartment. Joe “read” the newspaper comics all of the pieces together. with his father even before he could read words. Schedule a private tour or attend our Open House, He began drawing at the age of four and began to Monday, November 11th at 8:00 pm teach himself illustration by tracing newspaper cartoons. His family encouraged his talent, and he Contact Mary Peldman, Director of Admissions won several contests. At 212-595-1386 or email [email protected] Ricca’s Super Boys is at its best during Siegel and Shuster’s youth. Ricca captures the excitement of Beit Rabban Day School • 15 West 86 Street (between Central Park West and Columbus), New York • www.beitrabban.org what it means for a nerdy outsider to finally meet

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 35 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 Superman exhibit at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. rich from the Superman newspaper strip. But they never earned as much as they felt they deserved, and unquestionably his best work in at least a decade. cial justice, of tzedek. To others, the clearest sign that they received less over time. The two eventually sued Even more remarkable is who he chose to draw. Superman is Jewish is his secret identity, Clark Kent, National for the rights to Superman and Superboy. A His men look like Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen; his the weakling, the nebbish (or the man with a secret court ruled that National owned Superman but not women like Lois Lane and Lana Lang. Other than identity trying to pass as a mild-mannered WASP). Superboy. They settled for close to $100,000 in 1948; the need for money, we may never know why Shus- Harry Brod, who once edited an anthology subtitled the money almost immediately disappeared to law- ter illustrated fetish magazines. But the explanation, Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, embellishes this yers, back taxes, and Siegel’s divorce settlement. offered by Craig Yoe in the sumptuously produced idea. The genius of Superman is the embodiment of The ups and downs of the rest of Siegel and Shus- Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co- the weak Jew and strong Gentile in one character: ter’s careers make for a largely depressing story: Creator Joe Shuster, that this was his retribution for their failed comics; their legal efforts to regain their mistreatment by National Publications has a certain Clark’s Jewish-seeming nerdiness copyright; the mass public relations movement that poetic justice that makes me hope it’s true. and Superman’s non-Jewish-seeming belatedly led to Siegel and Shuster’s official recog- hypermasculinity are two sides of the same nition as the creators of Superman and an annuity ut, to return to Harry Brod’s question by coin, the accentuated Jewish male stereotype from Time Warner, the current rights holder; and Bway of Ricca, if Siegel and Shuster were au- and its exaggerated stereotypical counterpart. the continued legal struggle on behalf of Siegel and tobiographical writers, does that make Superman Shuster’s heirs. But it is worth highlighting two later Jewish? Arguments for a Semitic Superman are Many of these data points are compelling in iso- creative achievements. increasingly widespread. You can find them in lation but less so in context. Clark Kent’s weakness Siegel began writing Superman again in the magazine articles, in coffee table books, in Super- is only “Jewish” when read a certain way. Jules Fei- 1950s and 1960s. Working with a number of artists, man biographies, and in scholarly discussions of ffer famously described Clark Kent as “Superman’s he helped create the comic’s new light-hearted, kid- American popular culture. Yet while Superman opinion of the rest of us.” He’s not a commentary on centric tone and wrote some of his best Superman unquestionably has Jewish elements, to argue that strength and weakness or Jew versus Gentile; he’s a stories. He was even given the chance to kill Super- Superman is essentially Jewish is to misunderstand hook for powerless Clark Kentish readers who wish man in 1961’s Superman #149. In the “imaginary” the nature of comic book narrative. they could reveal superpowers of their own. Like- story (meaning, it never “happened”), Lex Luthor Comics are exciting, in part, because they are al- wise, few of the Jewish elements occur simultane- reforms and creates a cure for cancer. Superman tes- ways moving. Comics embrace reinvention. They ously. Superman was a New Deal Democrat in the tifies that Luthor should be released from prison for even birthed the beautiful term “retroactive continu- late thirties, a time when Krypton was little more his work on behalf of man (shades of “Reign of the ity” (or “retcon”) to describe and excuse creators’ ten- than a name. Kryptonite, the old world as weapon, Super-Man”), and the two become friends. But it is dencies to freely change aspects of a character’s past. didn’t appear in the comics until 1949. all a charade, an elaborate scheme to catch Superman We can read a truly Jewish take on Superman and a Krypton, however, was a major part of Siegel’s sec- off guard! Luther traps Superman and bombards him completely Christological one and an atheistic sci-fi ond run on Superman. In Siegel’s “Superman’s Return with Kryptonite until he dies. Though it was an imag- one—and sometimes find them all in the same story. to Krypton” in Superman #141 (1960), Superman is inary story, Siegel got the rare opportunity to bring The arguments for Superman’s Jewish identity catapulted back in time to before Krypton exploded. a serial character full circle. He was given the right start with his Kryptonian name, Kal-El. Brod trans- He lives a life there, falling in love with a beautiful to choose what character trait would lead to Super- lates this as “all is God” or “all for God,” while oth- actress and growing close to his birth parents. He man’s demise: his kindness or his belief in the good of ers more convincingly read it as “voice of God.” The is ultimately forced to watch the destruction of his humanity. (By contrast, when DC Comics decided to destruction of Krypton is sometimes alleged to have home world, incapable of doing anything to solve the kill Superman in 1992 they had him lose a fight—the something to do with the kabbalistic creation myth crisis. It’s a poignant story, one that nicely illustrates villain Doomsday was stronger than he was.) of the breaking of the cosmic vessels, and Superman’s that great Superman stories are about human weak- Shuster’s late-aesthetic triumph is more dubious. periodic homesickness a kind of survivor’s guilt. ness and failings as well as strength and possibilities. Broke in the mid-1950s, he ended up illustrating fe- Others emphasize Superman as an Americanization It can also reasonably be interpreted as a Jewish, post- tish comics, drawing pictures of men and women narrative: The immigrant comes to America and is Holocaust story: The old world is suddenly more in elaborate bondage poses, in various stages of un- accepted, even becomes the symbol for America. meaningful to the American Jew now that it has been dress. The subject may be coarse, but the art is re- Others see Superman’s progressive, New Deal poli- destroyed. But it can also be interpreted as an alle- markable. There is a care and surety to the line. It is tics as distinctively Jewish. He was a paragon of so- gory for Siegel’s return to National and Superman. It’s

36 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 exciting, but he also has no control over the character he created. He is a bystander to its fate.

hen there are the “other” Supermen. Bryan TSinger’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 new! 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 Commentary are amplified or muted depending on the needs of a specific time signature. In 1998, in a three-part story, two children of the conservative. 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 informative. influential. 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 everywhere. 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 introducing commentary complete! anything. But in the beginning, it was simple. As Brad It’s all of Commentary 24/7. Print, website and iPad.... Ricca’s Super Boys reminds us, Superman was cre- ated by two Jewish teenagers who dreamed of an You’ll get 11 issues of the print edition, plus artistic life and who had the rare ability to continue 24/7 access to the iPad edition, website, and archive. working on an idea until it was developed, then to continue working on it until it became something All for one low price of $19.95! larger, more poignant, more resonant, more every- SubScribe online at commentarymagazine.com thing. That was their superpower.

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

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 37 Reading The Day School Tuition Crisis: A Short History

BY RONA Sheramy

hen New York’s police commission- cluding a few pages devoted to the “all-day school,” out precluding the Americanizing experience of the er complained in 1908 about young which occupied a relatively small but growing part public schools. Yet, Chipkin’s assessment of the day Jewish immigrants’ disproportion- of the Jewish educational network. In 1901, there schools’ prospects cannot be dismissed as merely ately high rate of street crime and were only two day schools in North America; by the biased reflections of a supplementary school ad- truancy,W he wasn’t demanding that they spend more 1935, that number had grown to eighteen, from vocate. As historian Jonathan Krasner notes, even time in Hebrew school. But his comments unwit- the “Old-type Yeshibah,” to the “Modern-type Chipkin sent his children to day school. tingly spurred the most massive effort to improve Yeshibah,” to the “Private Progressive-type.” If Chipkin had revisited the scene a quarter of a Jewish education that American Jews had ever seen. A cadre of Jewish philanthropists and educators, While the postwar economic boom emboldened American stung by the commissioner’s accusations and con- tending with hundreds of thousands of immigrant Jews to set up hundreds of day schools, the great cost of children whose parents had little time or money to invest in Jewish schooling, set out to professional- sustaining these schools always hovered over their efforts. ize Jewish education in New York and situate it as a communal—rather than family or congregational— Despite his general optimism about the future of century later, he would have had some real chang- responsibility. Jewish education, Chipkin was skeptical about the es to report. By the mid-1960s, the growth of the A century later, in the midst of the biggest finan- “all-day” format: Orthodox community, revived interest in things cial meltdown most American Jews had ever seen, the Jewish sparked by the Holocaust and Israel, dis- question of communal responsibility for Jewish edu- All these all-day schools are essentially enchantment with public schools, and a postwar cation was at the forefront again. The problem to ad- institutions for the few and the select. They are ethnic revival led to very significant growth in the dress was no longer kids pickpocketing and skipping financially prohibitive to the masses and cannot day school movement. In 1940, there were thirty- school, but rather unsustainable school budgets and readily become the typical community school. five day schools enrolling 7,700 students in seven Jewish families hit hard by the financial crisis. Many states and Canadian provinces; by 1964, these fig- feared that, as during the Great Depression, Jewish Although he believed that there would continue ures had grown to 306 schools in thirty-four states education would fall low on the Jewish community’s to be “a sufficiently interested minority within the and provinces, enrolling 65,400 students. Roughly overburdened agenda. Of particular concern was the community who will make every sacrifice to main- nine percent of those children receiving some form day school system, one of the biggest success stories of Jewish education in the United States attended a of post-World War II Jewish education, but also the day school; in New York City, that figure was closer most expensive. Funding this system, which by 2008 to twenty-nine percent. Most of these schools were stretched over more than eight hundred schools and under Orthodox auspices, launched by the Torah more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand Umesorah movement and other organizations that youth, had always been a problem. Now the unre- sought to promote Torah education in America. solved questions of how much parents could bear in While it was common for non-Orthodox fami- tuition payments, schools could bear in enrollment lies to send their children to Orthodox institutions, and revenue shortfalls, and communal organizations day school advocates within other movements be- could bear in subsidizing this system assumed new gan laying the groundwork for their own schools. urgency. These proponents argued that only a truly inten- At the time of the police commissioner’s infa- sive Jewish education could prepare future leaders mous report, the majority of the three hundred and of their movements, especially in a post-Holocaust sixty thousand elementary-aged Jewish children in world that no longer had the reservoir of European the United States were receiving no formal Jewish Jewry to provide an intellectual and cultural elite. education at all, and the schools that did exist were The Reform community did not establish its first mostly inadequate. Institutions such as the Bureau day school until 1970 and supporters were in the of Jewish Education of New York and the Teachers minority until then, but Emanuel Gamoran, one of Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary sought the pioneers of Reform education, made a sympa- to rectify the situation by creating standards for the thetic case for such schools in 1950: “We must ad- vast network of schools and those who taught in mit that there is a great need for the training of Jew- them. In 1937, following the twenty-fifth anniver- ish leadership of which Hebraic education is a basis. saries of these institutions, Israel Chipkin, head of Israel Chipkin. (Courtesy of the American Jewish We have no such basis now in the ranks of Reform the Jewish Education Association of New York City, Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.) Judaism. Without it we shall be largely dependent published an assessment of the progress of Ameri- on Orthodox and Conservative Jews to supply us can Jewish education. tain them” and expected these schools to “supply with children who have a sufficient Hebraic back- Much had changed. The number of American that contingent of intensively trained Jewish youth ground to go into Jewish work, into Jewish educa- Jewish children of elementary school age had in- who enter our higher schools of Jewish learning,” he tion, or into the rabbinate.” Day school advocates creased to eight hundred thousand, due in large concluded that they “must always remain the op- among Conservative Jews, who began setting up part to mass migration from Europe (which had, portunity of the exclusive few.” day schools in the 1950s, made a similar argument. however, virtually ceased after the immigration leg- As a disciple of the great Jewish educator Samson “The growth of the day school will help the Conser- islation of 1921 and 1924). Only about a quarter of Benderly, it is not surprising that Chipkin concen- vative movement to create a reservoir of intensely these children were receiving any Jewish education. trated most of his attention on the Talmud Torahs, educated and deeply dedicated men and women,” Nonetheless Chipkin could write an extensive re- intensive afternoon supplementary schools, which declared the United Synagogue Commission on port on a broad array of positive developments, in- would provide a substantive Jewish education with- Jewish Education in 1958.

38 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 Nonetheless, outside of ultra-Orthodox circles, problems became an issue on which much of the proving school facilities, faculty salaries, Judaic and most mid-century Jewish parents simply did not Jewish future seemed to ride. A “continuity crisis” secular programming options, and the like, “most regard day schools as necessary or an option. Day had engulfed the Jewish community, with reports American Jews may never consider this form of edu- schools were not on the radar of the vast majority of of waning Jewish affiliation, especially among the cation, and even when they do, will not elect it.” A American Jews, who were more accustomed to send- young. The National Jewish Population Survey, is- flurry of activity on the part of philanthropists, foun- ing their children to an afternoon school or Sunday sued in 1990, shocked the Jewish community with dations, federations, and organizations to improve school at their local congregation. Moreover, state- its claim that roughly fifty percent of American Jews and build day schools, in addition to high fertility ments like those of Gamoran and the United Syna- intermarried. “The Jewish community of North rates among Orthodox Jews, resulted in significant gogue Commission on Jewish Education notwith- America is facing a crisis of major proportions,” growth in enrollment, as noted by a series of stud- standing, many, perhaps most, postwar Reform and declared A Time to Act, the landmark call-to-arms ies conducted by Marvin Schick for AVI CHAI over Conservative Jews had profound misgivings about a report issued that same year. “Large numbers of the following decades. In 1998-1999, there were one day school system that threatened to undermine both Jews have lost interest in Jewish values, ideals, and hundred eighty-five thousand students attending 670 congregational schools and the hard-sought integra- behavior, and there are many who no longer believe day schools, which represented an increase of twen- tion of Jews into the wider ty thousand to twenty-five thousand students since American society. the early 1990s and twenty percent growth in non- One of the factors that Orthodox schools; by 2008-2009, there were more impeded enrollment in than eight hundred Jewish day schools in the United day schools, even within States, matriculating 228,174 students, which rep- the Orthodox community, resented an enrollment increase of twenty-five per- was the very same prob- cent over 1998-1999, including five percent growth lem of tuition that Chipkin in non-Orthodox schools (the greatest increase be- had described. While the ing in community day schools, which accounted for postwar economic boom roughly nine percent of day school students, followed emboldened American by almost six percent in Solomon Schechter schools, Jews to set up hundreds of and two percent in Reform schools). day schools, the great cost Despite these successes, a sense of foreboding of sustaining these schools about day school finances persisted into the early always hovered over their 2000s, spurred by underlying weaknesses across efforts. Writing in 1955, numerous institutions: low enrollments, a paucity the principal of a Brooklyn of endowments, budget deficits, and this all in the yeshiva complained about context of what the historian Jack Wertheimer has the difficulties involved in described as “the high cost of Jewish living.” While providing financial aid: the devastating economic events of 2008 exacerbat- ed these problems and catapulted them into a crisis, I know of no central it was a crisis that had been brewing for years and Hebrew school, Colchester, Connecticut, ca 1940. (Photograph by Jack Delano, educational agency one that several observers saw on the horizon. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.) that has attempted to The most recent statistics suggest Orthodox bring to the lime-light and community day school enrollments had small the question of tuition. And yet, the very that Judaism has a role to play in their search for to non-existent growth 2012-2013 relative to the problem has been annoying and embarrassing personal fulfillment and communality.” previous year. But, declines continue to be seen in to parents, [and] vexing to the school . . . What The organized Jewish community mobilized on Reform and Conservative institutions, and there is policy, if any, may a Yeshiva pursue in the several fronts, but no arena received more attention concern about the financial impact on families who admission of children? Shall all applicants be than Jewish education. Jewish learning—formal remain in the system and the viability of smaller admitted regardless of the parents’ ability to and informal, in schools, in camps, for youth, for schools. The oft-repeated joke, already circulat- pay? Or shall certain “quotas” . . . be established adults—moved to the forefront of the communal ing in the 1990s, that day school tuition was one of to regulate admission? If the first be adopted, agenda. As A Time to Act put it, “the responsibility the most effective forms of contraception in Jewish such a liberal policy might soon deplete the for developing Jewish identity and instilling a com- families, is met today with more of a wince than a school’s funds and deprive all children, paying mitment to Judaism for this [disaffected] popula- chuckle in some Jewish circles. Rabbis Aryeh Klap- or non-paying, of a Yeshiva education. On the tion now rests primarily with education.” More so per and Yitzchok Adlerstein have recently made the other hand, the second course might exclude than any point in the history of the modern day argument quite seriously for different parts of the too many children clamoring for admission. school movement, educational, communal, and Orthodox community. philanthropic leaders viewed day schools as the best The NYU economist Paul Romer, among others, An attorney active in the day school world be- hope for saving American Jewry. Day schools are has observed “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” and moaned that growing enthusiasm for day schools “arguably the most impactful single weapon in our the organized Jewish community has taken note. did not resolve the question of how to support arsenal for educating Jewish children and youth,” With the very real threat looming overhead that day them: “In the past few decades, the Yeshiva move- asserted the 1995 Report of the North American schools could become “financially prohibitive to the ment has made tremendous progress in the United Commission on Jewish Identity and Continuity. Day masses,” foundations, federations, research institutes, States and Yeshivos have not only become accepted schools were no longer solely the province of Or- and day schools have mobilized in unprecedented but have become increasingly popular…The most thodox families or those who sought an alternative fashion. They are focusing not simply on promot- important problem that is facing the normal prog- to the public school system; they were for any fam- ing day schools and offering short-term solutions to ress of the Yeshiva movement today—as always in ily who cared deeply about raising Jewish children. tuition shortfalls, but on creating structural changes the past—is the lack of funds.” A half-century later This message resonated particularly with parents that will sustain these institutions in the long run. that complaint still resonates. who had attended the supplementary schools in the Many of their ideas will bear fruit—if at all—several 1960s and 1970s and who lacked the Judaic skills years from now; the question remains how lower- hile the burden of tuition and balancing the they sought so eagerly for their daughters and sons. and middle-income families and schools on the edge Wbudget always caused much worry among But these schools were also “seriously under- will fare in the interim. day school families and administrators, it was not funded,” according to the first comprehensive study until the 1980s and 90s, when many people began of day school finances commissioned by the AVI to see an all-day program as the sine qua non of CHAI Foundation in the school year 1995-1996. Rona Sheramy is the Executive Director of the “serious Jewish child-rearing,” that these financial And if proper investments were not made in im- Association for Jewish Studies (AJS).

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 39 Controversy Athens or Sparta? A Response

BY Patrick Tyler

s the most prolific of the new historians do with good scholarship. Mr. Morris distorts the r. Morris begins his review with a personal of Israel, Benny Morris has made a sig- scope of archival material available to researchers on Manecdote about his refusal to report for duty nificant contribution to the historiog- the Arab-Israeli conflict. He points with pride to the in the Israeli army in 1988, an act of conscience raphy of the Jewish state. His trenchant fact that Israel has declassified a great deal of mate- against what he considered an “oppressive” occupa- andA unvarnished reconstructions of war and strat- rial and that the Arabs have opened almost noth- tion of Palestinian lands that cost him a three-week egy, including Israeli expulsions and “brutal” [his ing. But surely he is aware that the archives of Brit- stay in jail. He uses this anecdote to contest the word] assaults on Palestinians and on neighboring ain and the United States are probably the greatest metaphor that I employ in Fortress Israel to explain Arab populations, have helped to document the so- sources of information on the Arab-Israeli conflict. that in the mid-1950s, when David Ben-Gurion was bering cost of war and conflict in the Holy Land. Yet As Mr. Morris presumably knows, these archives redesigning the nation for a long struggle with the his unsentimental prose and dispassionate scholar- are rendered in English. Most egregiously, Mr. Mor- Arabs, he chose Sparta rather than Athens as the ship led to vicious and unprovoked assaults on his ris maligns me personally by comparing my work model for his nation-building efforts. The Israeli professionalism and his character. Some Israelis ac- to “the spate of books and articles that appeared in army would become the paramount institution of cused him of betraying the cause of Zionism and Western Europe in 1936 through 1938 repudiating Israeli society. Citizens would be required to serve undermining the legitimacy of Israel. the legitimacy of the newly formed Czechoslovakia in uniform for three years at the conclusion of high Thus it is disheartening and ironic that Mr. school, but then remain tethered to the Morris would turn the same ideological invec- military in active reserve forces until the tive, of which he was a victim and about which age of forty-nine. The civilian population he so passionately complained, toward my book became the army to a great extent. Mr. Fortress Israel, and toward me personally, a journal- Morris’s point is that because he got off ist and historian with no ideological profile or agen- with a light jail term, my Sparta metaphor da and certainly no animus toward the State of Is- is defective. Sparta, he insists, would have rael. No longer a detached scholar, Mr. Morris now treated his defiance more brutally. I say: aligns himself with the ideological right, enabling Who knows? That is hardly the point. its hopes for Arab expulsion by justifying ethnic This strained logic allows Mr. Morris cleansing as a necessary instrument of history and to avoid addressing the reality of the open- by demonizing the Muslim world as a monolithic ing chapters of my book, focused as they enemy out to annihilate the Jewish state. And in his are on Ben-Gurion’s monumental struggle lengthy review of my book, he has employed many with colleagues in 1954-1955 over the tra- of the propagandistic traits of distortion and un- jectory of the nation. Indeed, nowhere in truth common to some of the movements in history his review does Mr. Morris engage the cen- that he professes to abhor. tral theme of Fortress Israel: that the domi- Fortress Israel is a political biography of Israel’s nance of the military and the weakness of ruling class from David Ben-Gurion’s time to the competing civil institutions dedicated to present era of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is buttressed diplomacy and negotiation arise from the by nearly 1,000 notes to the text citing archival ma- seminal clashes of the first decade, when terial in Israel and the United States, but also inter- Ben-Gurion set out to destroy his chief in- views with dozens of Israeli generals, intelligence tellectual rival, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s for- officials, political figures, and analysts; it is drawn eign minister and second prime minister, from first-person accounts, memoirs, and contem- over the crucial questions of war and peace. poraneous press accounts. I employed two Israeli Indeed, as I point out, it is impossible to research assistants, both of whom served in the Is- understand the modern debate in Israel raeli Defense Forces, to translate material from He- over whether to engage the Arabs without brew where it was not available in English; I asked going back to the first decade, when Ben- prominent Israelis, including a former Mossad chief Gurion’s militancy toward the Arabs was and the head of the Moshe Sharett archive, to read rampant even as Sharett was pushing for my manuscript, and they contributed useful criti- peace and opening secret channels to the cism. No less an Israeli historian than Martin van same Arabs. As Ben-Gurion incited his Creveld praised the work in advance. military commanders to exploit the chaos I state these facts because Mr. Morris does not. in the Arab world to dismember Leba- He seeks at the outset of his review to portray me Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, with Uzi Narkis, left, and non, seize the West Bank from Jordan, and Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, right, enter Jerusalem, June 1967. as a rube from Texas, untutored in Hebrew or Ara- seek a pretext for war with Egypt, Sharett (Photo by Ilan Bruner, courtesy of the Government Press bic, who never ventured beyond the LBJ Library in struggled to keep Ben-Gurion’s war im- Office, Israel.) Austin to research this book. How appalling it must pulse in check by successfully wielding a seem to the readers of the Jewish Review of Books to majority of the ruling political party’s stal- see such a prominent attack on a book dismissed by before its sacrifice to the Nazi wolves.” He has never warts, including Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol against Mr. Morris as a frivolous scribble from the chatter- met me, yet he concludes that my personal motive his militant plans. These are incontestable facts that ing class. was to blacken the image of Israel. It is one thing to have emerged with the opening of archives, but Mr. In point of fact, I have lived and traveled more offer a critical review of another’s work of history, Morris does not approve of a hard, realist look at the extensively in the Middle East than Mr. Morris has, but to resort to such calumny simply undermines internal Israeli power struggle, which is the subject but would be the first to admit that this has little to the integrity of the reviewer. of my book.

40 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 So much of my book tracks the remarkable po- Ariel Sharon—were generals. The he immediately and chief military liaison for the secret atomic litical alignment that Ben-Gurion achieved and en- retreats by saying that you could also count Men- bomb project, the most profound military under- forced after it had seemed his political career had achem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, since they both taking of the state. Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir come to an end in late 1953 and how the story of ran underground military organizations. (Shamir may have been civilians, but both surrounded modern Israel is the delamination of that align- also ran Mossad operations across Europe.) He ne- themselves with generals and intelligence chiefs, as ment through the next five decades. But Mr. Mor- glects to point out that Benjamin Netanyahu was if to reassure the country that the prime minister ris is not interested in this evolutionary theme. an officer in the country’s most elite commando had the confidence of the military establishment. His review sets up an army of straw men so he can unit and that he owed his political career to the Mr. Morris neglects to provide any of this context. knock them down; he seems to think that if he can fame of his brother, Jonathan, who commanded Another comical straw man is Morris’s asser- find any military man who joined the peace camp, and died a hero’s death during the 1976 Entebbe tion that I know nothing of the Israeli military this repudiates my book. No, the fracturing of the hostage rescue; he fails to mention that Ehud Ol- 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- Fortress Israel is a political biography of Israel’s ruling mine what Morris was referring to, all I can find is an introduction to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, class from David Ben-Gurion’s time to the present era in which I said, “In what seemed to be a stab at of Benjamin Netanyahu. 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 political consensus—of Ben-Gurionism—is the mert twice served in the military, washing out of the beret, not the color, but I am sure Mr. Morris subject of my book; it is the story of how military one elite unit as a teenager and joining again in got that. men like Yitzhak Rabin migrated from a strongly the early 1970s when he needed military creden- Morris is revisionist in trying to show I mis- militaristic outlook to an understanding that there tials for his political career. Mr. Morris might have placed facts about the run-up to the 1967 war. First is no military solution to the Palestinian problem; it added that Ben-Gurion was the ultimate military of all, he is incorrect in stating that the slide to war is the story of the arrogation of power on the politi- leader; he founded the mainstream Jewish un- began with Syria’s sponsorship of Palestinian op- cal right and the collapse of the Rabin consensus for derground, transformed it into the IDF, an army erations across Israel’s border and Syria’s water di- peace, which still plagues Israel, the Arabs, Ameri- that he insisted must be loyal to the Labor political version efforts. The slide toward war began with ca, and the international community. federation he headed; he fired generals, planned the hostile Arab League declarations of January There is almost a comic quality to how Mr. battles in 1948, and ordered the expulsion of Pal- 1964, declarations that convinced General Rabin, Morris attacks my theme of the paramount im- estinians by military means. Ben-Gurion’s young the chief of staff, that another round of war with portance of the military and security establish- protégé, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, did the Arabs was inevitable. This came at a time when ment. He asserts that out of Israel’s twelve prime not serve in uniform, but he became Ben-Gurion’s it was becoming clear to the world that Israel was ministers, only three—Rabin, Ehud Barak, and deputy minister of defense, chief arms merchant, secretly building an atomic bomb with the help of

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Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 41 France, while also expanding its conventional mil- still existed in Israeli society. Mr. Morris says that secretary of state, had reassured Israel that despite itary and working assiduously in Washington to what I wrote was “blatantly untrue,” but when he the suspension of Phantom sales, Washington would convince President Johnson to provide tanks and explains what he means by this accusation, he ad- quietly replace the mounting Israeli losses with up to modern American fighters to its military, some- mits that, “It is true that a semi-messianic euphoria eight Phantoms and twenty Skyhawks. thing no American president had done. Morris took hold, but post-1967 Israel was nonetheless I can only assume that Mr. Morris is confused. fails to state that when the Arab League failed to a deeply divided society and remains so down to It is true that on the last day of the air war, Israeli stand behind Syria when its bulldozers attempted the present.” With these words, Mr. Morris accu- planes staged an ambush on Soviet fighters, but it to block Israel’s expansion of water resources, Syr- rately described my book. So what was “blatantly was only after Israel had lost a number of its own ia pulled in its horns and stepped up support for untrue”? planes. This is an established fact. A careful reviewer Palestinian militants. He fails to take note of the would have checked. aggressive steps Israel took in sending its troops, s it wears on, Mr. Morris’s review is revealed as Mr. Morris claims I engaged in hyperbole in along with bulldozers and patrol boats, up against Asmoke and mirrors. In describing the War of At- stating that Ariel Sharon ordered the “saturation” Syrian positions in the demilitarized zones of the trition (the interwar period between 1967 and 1973), bombing of Beirut during the ill-advised and ill- northern front to provoke Syrian fire so the IDF he twists history again, falsely stating that Israel had fated Lebanon invasion of 1982. Mr. Morris says could then attack and seize territory. Moshe Dayan, no intention of terrorizing Egyptian civilians at a that because only six hundred people died that day as Mr. Morris knows very well, spoke candidly of time when Golda Meir’s government was seeking to (in a city from which many had fled), and because this tactic late in his life. In the midst of the clashes destabilize the largest Arab enemy and topple Nasser not all neighborhoods were targeted, the term “sat- of May 1967, the Soviets floated false reports of an by showing that he could not defend his people. Mr. uration” amounts to “agitprop, not history.” He ar- Israeli military buildup on the northern border. In Morris talks about the death of “thousands of Egyp- 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 My book was never meant as an overarching history on Feb. 13-15, 1945, the Allies dropped thirty-nine hundred tons of bombs, less than the typical ton- of Israel, but rather a portrait of the leadership class. nages that Israel was employing a half-century later. The IAF dropped eight thousand tons of bombs in my book, I stated forthrightly that the Soviet re- tian soldiers and military construction workers” and its campaign against Egyptian cities. And though ports were “mostly” disinformation; the qualifying claims, falsely, that I wrote that Israel deliberately the IAF has not published tonnages (of iron bombs adverb “mostly” only added the nuance that the targeted civilians. This is what I wrote: For“ the first and artillery) thrown against Beirut in August IDF was on a high state of alert and that both Es- time, American bombers played the most prominent 1982, Mr. Morris would be loathe to place a wager hkol and his director of military intelligence had role—U.S.-made F4 Phantoms terrorized Egyptian on which total was greater. The word “saturation” been making bellicose and escalatory threats, so cities. Hundreds of Egyptians died in the raids, in- seems more than valid when one views the impact much so that President Johnson admonished them cluding 47 children in one mistaken [my emphasis] of the hundreds of sorties the IAF flew against the to tone it down. attack on an elementary school. Seventy civilian Lebanese capital, synchronized with artillery bar- Mr. Morris says, inaccurately, that because I pro- workers were killed in one factory. Nasser told an rages and shelling from ships offshore. Mr. Morris vided this nuanced account of the run-up to the American diplomat visiting Cairo, ‘For the first time himself, in his own history, describes the air cam- war, that I have “by implication’’ asserted that Israel I feel bitterness. There was no bitterness in the time paign as “brutal.” He added, “Begin, with his view was planning an attack. This is nonsense. Nowhere of Dulles . . . but now, with the killing of children and of [Yasser] Arafat as a resurrected Hitler and Beirut in Fortress Israel do I blame any side for the onset of workers and civilians, there is.’” as Nazi Berlin in 1945, seemed to feel that the city war. As political biography, my book explains and One need only read the words of Yitzhak Rabin, deserved its fate.” No less an Israeli historian as Avi examines the motivations of leaders and the context who at the time was ambassador to Washington, Shlaim of Oxford University has written that Sharon of political forces in which they were operating. Mr. to see how the military establishment was bent on ordered a “saturation” bombing of Beirut on August Morris knows from the work of Ami Gluska and taking the war to Egypt’s cities in a campaign of 10. Hardly “agitprop,” and certainly a valid descrip- others that Prime Minister Eshkol faced a revolt of terror that might topple Nasser. Mr. Morris claims tion of historical fact. his generals in delaying an attack, but at the request that, during the bombing, life in Egypt went on as Most of the rest of Mr. Morris’s review is in a of President Johnson, his friend, he was trying to normal. This is absurd, as anyone who visited Cairo similar vein of slapdash assertions and straw men hold back the rush to war on the hope that John- at the time and saw Israeli Phantoms flying down erected dishonestly so they can be slapped down. son might succeed in organizing an international the Nile to frighten and intimidate the population He takes my political biography and argues that maritime force to back Nasser down. Again, at this would testify. In one raid on an Egyptian army train- because I didn’t include this or that bit of history, crucial moment, Mr. Morris fails to point out that ing camp, the detonations blew out the windows of the book is anti-Zionist in the zero-sum world Mr. the main theme of my book was Eshkol’s attempt the Cairo American School. Hardly business as usu- Morris now inhabits. And yet my book was never to lead the country through these perilous times as al. Most of the bombing raids were within twenty- meant as an overarching history of Israel, but rather Ben-Gurion and Peres were attacking him from the five miles of Cairo. a portrait of the leadership class. He suggests that sidelines for taking unacceptable risks with the se- During the War of Attrition, the Israeli Air Force the missing bits add up to a conspiracy to slant his- curity of the nation and while Dayan, Begin, and the lost a number of aircraft and some of its pilots were tory in favor of the Arabs. This is false, and there are Mossad chief, Meir Amit, worked behind the scenes captured due to the arrival of highly competent So- a hundreds of examples to prove otherwise. There to force Eshkol into the war camp. viet air defense forces, including both MiG-21 pi- is no sympathetic Arab history lurking in my book; It is interesting that Morris does not review my nar- lots and sophisticated SAM3 missile batteries. This there is only a search for understanding about the rative of Eshkol’s dilemma and the political realism of confrontation with the arriving Soviet military force character and nature of the Israeli leadership class, the war’s onset. In this and other instances, he avoids ultimately led to Israel’s decision to suspend its air its development, evolution, and its difficulty in -en substance and lapses into ideological or ad hominem war. I point out in Fortress Israel that Soviet forces gaging in the processes of diplomacy due to the attack. Is this the modus operandi of a historian? shot down a half-dozen Israeli Phantoms. Mr. Mor- outsized influence of the military, a theme that has As the master of quibble, Mr. Morris takes aim at ris responds, “This never happened.” Notwithstand- been extensively identified as relevant and legiti- my observation that the stunning military victory ing that my information came from declassified U.S. mate in the historiography of Israel. of 1967 transformed national politics with dreams intelligence reports, today you can find confirmation of a much expanded Jewish state. “It seemed that of downed Israeli Phantoms and captured pilots on with few exceptions, everyone in Israel had em- Wikipedia. Abba Eban writes of his concerns about Patrick Tyler served as chief correspondent for The New braced a creed that envisioned a Greater Israel, Israeli air losses in 1970, and the senior American York Times and was the Middle East bureau chief for from the Mediterranean to the Jordan,” I wrote, diplomat in Cairo has written that he was apprised The Washington Post. His books include Running and then went on to explain how broad divisions by the State Department that Henry Kissinger, then Critical, A Great Wall, and A World of Trouble.

42 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 Athens or Sparta? A Rejoinder

BY Benny Morris

here is ill will and there are mistakes, and tory. In my review, I pointed to Tyler’s assertion that while Shaldag, 669, and Shayetet 13 wear blue ones.) both are legion in Mr. Tyler’s Fortress Israeli paratroops wore black berets as symptomatic Actually, Tyler digs himself even deeper into the pit Israel and, perhaps more surprisingly, in and revealing as to this deep ignorance. (In fact, they when he adds a second, more general error in saying his response to my review of that book. wear red berets.) In his rebuttal, he writes: “I have that he meant that only commandos and paratroops OneT might have expected Mr. Tyler to exercise a written no such thing . . . [I wrote] ‘In what seemed wear berets. Actually, almost all Israeli soldiers, infan- bit of caution. But, apparently, he is constitution- to be a stab at burnishing a military profile, he [Prime try, armor, artillery, air force, etc., wear berets. Tyler ally incapable of shaking off the old, mendacious Minister Levi Eshkol] absurdly wore a black beret, a might dismiss all of this as “quibbling.” I would say 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 fact that the Israeli Air Force used American-built jets the book, page 391, for example. Tyler writes: “On April 18 [1996], Israeli artillery gunners targeted— is neither here nor there, except as it relates to Tyler’s clear mistakenly, they said—a UN refugee center at Kana [in southern Lebanon] and slaughtered a hundred disapproval of American arms sales to Israel. civilians—women, children, and the elderly—in an inferno of shrapnel and explosion.” One wonders, symbol of Israel’s elite commando and paratrooper that his mistakes are symptomatic of his basic lack of were there really no army-age males present, but forces.’ It was the symbolism of the beret, not the col- knowledge of what he is writing about. the “mistakenly, they said” tells it all. This is typical or [that I was referring to] . . .” Perhaps more troubling is his continuing ten- Tyler, Fortress Israel epitomized. In fact, Israel sub- Let me reiterate: My reading of this passage (it’s dency to play fast and loose with the truth. In sequently admitted the mistake and, if I am not mis- simple English) is that Tyler is saying that Israel’s Fortress Israel, on page 212, Tyler wrote: “[In 1970] taken, apologized, but this is what happens in wars “elite commando and paratrooper forces” wear black the Soviet air force sent its own pilots with mod- in which terrorists/guerrillas operate from within berets and that’s why Eshkol donned one. In fact, Is- ern jet fighters and shot down a half dozen Israeli and next to inhabited areas, however much their rael’s commandos wear red or blue berets. (Sayeret Phantoms . . .” In my review, I said that this was opponents try to take care. Matkal and Sayeret Tzanhanim wear red berets, untrue. So now, without admitting error, Tyler 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 Middle East Quarterly almost nothing. But surely he is aware that the archives of Britain and the United States are probably the greatest sources of information Edited by Efraim Karsh, on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Mr. Morris presumably knows, these archives are rendered published by Daniel Pipes, in English. the Middle East Quarterly $12

Here is Mr. Tyler at his best, doubling down on offers stimulating the innuendo. He implies that in my works I haven’t insights on this SUMMER 2013 VOLUME 20, NUMBER 3 used British and American archives and would do David Bukay complex region. David Rusin well to consult them, though a mere glance would Islam’s Hatred of Can Muslims Sway Non-Muslims U.S. Elections? prove otherwise. And he implies that, by contrast, Gerald Steinberg Peter Olsson How Human Rights Watch he has used them, thoroughly. But nothing could The MEQ brings you Protects Arab Tyrants Why Homegrown Paul Carnegie be farther from the truth. Almost all of the “nearly Terrorists Kill An Indonesian Model groundbreaking studies, for the Middle East? 1,000 notes” (his phrase) in Fortress Israel refer the F.M. Loewenberg Hilal Khashan Lebanon’s Sunnis Sidelined insightful commentary, The Jews’ Unbroken Tie reader to secondary sources, newspaper articles, A.J. Caschetta to the Temple Mount Bin Laden as and interviews. Tyler’s book has 846 footnotes—of and hard-hitting reviews Family Man and Quarry which less than fifty refer to archival documents on politics, economics,

(not a proportion characterizing serious works of Reviews by Abrahms, Al-Tamimi, Gelbard, culture, and religion Khashan, Lebl, Lula, Phelps, history). And his footnotes reveal that he has made Saraswati, and Schwartz no use of any British archives, virtually none of across a region from any Israeli archives, and such limited and eccentric Morocco to Afghanistan. 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 READ IT TODAY! use archives. Nothing more. Web: www.MEForum.org Tyler goes into risible contortions to explain away his basic ignorance of the realities of Israel and its his-

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 43 tries obfuscation: “During the War of Attrition, the located inside an army base and a factory. Other- been many thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian Israeli Air Force lost a number of aircraft . . . due wise, Egypt’s cities suffered no attacks and life in civilian deaths. But over the two months of bomb- to the arrival of highly competent Soviet air de- them went on as usual, though once or twice Israe- ings in summer 1982, civilian deaths were in the fense forces, including both MiG-21 pilots and so- li jets unleashed sonic booms over Cairo to bring hundreds. phisticated SAM3 missile batteries . . .I point out in home to Egyptians Nasser’s inability to deal with Not everything that Tyler writes is wrong. He Fortress Israel that Soviet forces shot down a half- the Israel Air Force, perhaps to engender public is certainly right about Ben-Gurion’s sidelining of dozen Israel Phantoms.” This is (probably) true: pressure to end the War of Attrition against Israel’s Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister (1948- Soviet surface-to-air missile crews shot down Israeli positions along the Suez Canal. The fact that the 1956) and second prime minister (1954-1955), in 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- Throughout his self-described “biography” of Israel’s political posite actually happened: Israeli pilots shot down five Soviet-piloted MiGs. Why not simply admit to leaders, Tyler resolutely ignores the reality of Arab rejectionism having made an error? as a crucial factor in their actions and decisions. yler does not always operate by way of innuen- Tdo, misleading implication, and obfuscation; Israeli Air Force used American-built jets is nei- effect giving the defense establishment primacy, as I often enough he indulges in the big lie. In his book, ther here nor there, except as it relates to Tyler’s detailed twenty years ago in Israel’s Border Wars 1949- and in his response, he writes that in the Israeli- clear disapproval of American arms sales to Israel. 1956. Sharett tried to reach out to Arab leaders and Egyptian War of Attrition (1969-1970) Israel delib- In Beirut, when the IDF was besieging the PLO, talk peace. And (as Tyler fails to tell his readers) Ben- erately bombed “military and civilian targets” and there was targeting of PLO headquarters and posi- Gurion allowed him to pursue the diplomatic ave- “U.S.-made F4 Phantoms terrorized Egyptian cit- tions, and probably an effort to kill PLO chairman nues, especially between 1949 and 1950 with Jordan’s ies,” and that, a decade later, in 1982, it indulged in Yasser Arafat—but there was no deliberate targeting King Abdullah. But Ben-Gurion simply didn’t believe “saturation” bombing of Beirut. In both cases, he of civilians, and no “saturation” bombing, which ex- that the Arab world—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—was makes it sound like the Luftwaffe’s assault on Lon- plains the relative paucity of civilian Lebanese casual- ready at the time for peace or even wanted it. And don and the Allied counter-bombing (and far more ties. In his “rebuttal,” Tyler mendaciously cites bomb Ben-Gurion was right. In 1951 a Palestinian gunman devastating) offensives against Germany’s cities in tonnage as proof of “saturation” or carpet-bombing. assassinated Abdullah because of his secret nego- World War II. The question isn’t one of tonnage but of intent and tiations with Israel. Other Israel-Arab peace contacts These, simply, are lies. In the yearlong bomb- against whom the bombs were directed and, most (with Zaim’s Syria and Nasser’s Egypt) led nowhere. ing of Egypt’s military bases, Israel twice—and importantly, of actual casualty figures. Had Israel Only in the 1970s did there emerge an Arab leader, mistakenly—hit civilian sites: a school that was engaged in saturation bombing, there would have 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).

44 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 lost & Found The Joy of Being Delivered from Jewish Schools Results in a Stiff Foot

By Solomon Maimon

ith extraordinary chutzpah and deep had good reason to cry). My brother noticed my first Book of Moses reads, “Jacob sent messengers to philosophical seriousness Solomon eyes and asked what had happened. At first, I didn’t his brother Esau,” talmudists like to claim that the ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed want to answer him, but, finally, I confided: I had messengers were angels. Now while the Hebrew word himself after his medieval philosoph- been crying because we aren’t allowed to gossip. My “malachim” can mean, to be sure, both messengers icalW hero Moses Maimonides and became Solomon brother understood me quite well. He was so out- and angels, these miracle-chasers opted for the sec- Maimon (1753−1800). Maimon was arguably the raged that he wanted to set my teacher straight. I ond meaning simply because the first doesn’t suggest most brilliant and certainly the most controversial, asked him not to do that, however, since the teacher anything miraculous. Students, in turn, come to be- even disreputable, Jewish philosopher of the late 18th presumably would have punished me for gossiping. lieve firmly and rigidly thatmalachim means nothing century. He embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn (who Now I must relate something about the general other than angels, and thus the primary meaning of asked him to leave Berlin), provoked Kant, and in- condition of Jewish schools. The school is commonly messenger gets completely lost for them. It is only by spired Fichte, among others. a smoky shack in which students are scattered around; studying on one’s own, and by reading Hebrew prim- In his autobiography, Salomon Maimons Leb- some on benches, others on the dirt floor. With a ers and philological commentaries on the Bible, e.g., ensgeschichte, published in two volumes in 1792 and filthy shirt on his back, the teacher sits on his desk David Kimchi’s and Ibn Ezra’s (which just a few rab- 1793, Maimon told the picaresque story of his life with commanding his regiment. All the while, he holds bis use), that bit by bit one will be able to achieve a candor, humor, and occasional exaggeration. His lit- between his legs a bowl of tobacco, which he works correct understanding of the Hebrew language and erary exuberance notwithstanding, Maimon’s autobi- over into snuff with a pestle as massive as the club of work toward sound exegetical practices. ography is a key source for understanding traditional Hercules. His assistant teachers conduct drill sessions Children are condemned to such a hell at pre- Jewish life in Lithuania, the early Hasidic court of the in their own corners of the room, each one ruling over cisely the time when their youth is in full bloom. So Maggid of Mezheritch (of which he drew a somewhat those in his charge just as the teacher himself does: one can easily imagine the excitement with which acidic portrait), and the Jewish Enlightenment (Haska- despotically. Of the breakfasts, snacks, etc. that the they look forward to getting out of school. On high lah) circles of Berlin, through which Maimon passed, as children bring with them to school, the teachers keep holidays, we (my brother and I) were picked up and he himself characteristically remarked, “like a comet.” the lion’s share for themselves. Indeed, sometimes the brought home. During one of those trips, the follow- Maimon’s account here of his education as a boy is an poor boys get nothing at all. And if the boys want to ing event—which would prove to be of crucial sig- early, influential, and characteristically funny version avoid facing the wrath of these tyrants, they won’t nificance for me—took place. My mother had come of the Haskalah critique of the brutality and irrational- complain. Here children are locked up from morning before Pfingstfest [Whitsuntide, the week leading ity of traditional Jewish education. until evening. They have free time only on Fridays and up to the celebrations held on the Sunday following Despite its influence, popularity, and frequent an- on the afternoon of new moon days. Easter Sunday] to the town where we were going to thologization, Maimon’s autobiography has not been As to the actual curriculum, at least the Hebrew school, because she needed to buy various things for translated into English since the 19th century and has alphabet is studied quite properly. By contrast, the her household. Afterward, she took us home. -Be never been translated into English in full. The present method for acquiring the Hebrew language is very ing freed from school, coupled with the sight of the text is taken from the forthcoming translation by Pro- odd. Teachers don’t go over the principles of gram- beauty of nature, which at this time of year wears its fessor Paul Reitter, professor of German literature at mar, which, instead, students learn ex usu—that finest attire, made us so ecstatic that we came up with The Ohio State University and a frequent contributor is, by translating the Holy Scripture, much like the all kinds of reckless ideas. As we were approaching to these pages. common man who through normal use learns the our hometown, my brother leapt out of the wagon grammar of his mother tongue in only an incom- and ran the rest of the way on foot. I wanted to copy y brother Joseph and I were sent to school in plete way. Nor is there a Hebrew dictionary. Stu- his bold jump, but I wasn’t strong enough. I tumbled MMirz. My brother, who was about twelve at dents begin right away to interpret the Bible. Since down and landed next to the wagon in such a way the time, lodged with a famous schoolmaster named the Bible is divided into as many sections as there are that my legs wound up between the wheels, one of Jossel. This man was every young person’s night- weeks in the year (so that students can read through which ran over my left leg, crushing it horribly. They mare, the scourge of God. He handled his charges the Books of Moses, as they are read every Saturday brought me home half-dead. My foot seized up and with an unheard of brutality, whipping them for in synagogue, in a year), each week students inter- was completely immobile. the slightest offense until the blood flowed, and not pret several verses from the beginning of the section A Jewish doctor was consulted; he hadn’t, to be infrequently tearing off ears and gouging out eyes. for that week, making every possible grammatical sure, studied medicine at a university and earned a And when the parents of his unfortunate victims mistake as they proceed. But there is no good alter- regular degree. Rather, he had acquired his medical came to complain, he would hurl at them rocks or native here. For the students’ Yiddish-Polish native knowledge by working under a doctor and by read- whatever was at hand; who the parents were didn’t language is full of grammatical deficiencies, and so ing some Polish medical books. But he was neverthe- matter. With his walking stick, he would then pro- when Hebrew readings are glossed in the students’ less a very good practical physician who had success- ceed to chase them out of his rooms—all the way native language, the Hebrew they learn through fully healed many patients. He had, he said, no supply back to where they lived. His students became ei- it will naturally be of the same poor quality. Thus, of medicine, and the nearest pharmacy was twenty ther dunces or great scholars. Only seven at the students gain just as little knowledge of the Hebrew miles away. Thus he couldn’t prescribe a cure using time, I was sent to a different schoolmaster. language as of the Bible’s content. his normal method. In the meantime, however, an There is one anecdote that I must tell here. In part In addition to that, talmudists have buried the easy household remedy should be employed. Some- an illustration of deep brotherly love, it should also Bible under all manner of strange ideas. The ignorant one should kill a dog and insert the seized-up foot be seen as expressing the mentality of a child hover- teacher confidently believes that the Bible can have into it. Repeating this several times would definitely ing between the hope that he will find relief from no meaning other than the ones these explicators bring about some relief. His order was followed, a misfortune and the fear that the misfortune will give it, and his students are compelled to share this with the success that we had hoped for: After several become worse. One day, I came home from school belief, with the result that the correct interpretation weeks, I could move my foot and put weight on it. with eyes that were red from crying (I certainly had of words necessarily gets lost. For example, where the Gradually, moreover, my foot healed completely.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 45 Notice Posted on the Door of the Kelm Talmud Torah Before the High Holidays

BY RABBI SIMCHA ZISSEL ZIV

n the early 1850s, Simcha Zissel (Broida) Ziv chanting, meditative prayer, and group discussions be untied, and (God forbid) the world would be de- (1824-1898) left his hometown of Kelm, Lithu- on issues of moral development. This was met with stroyed. As our sages of blessed memory said, “were it ania to meet Rabbi Israel Lipkin Salanter, the political opposition in the Jewish community, and not for the fear [of the government], a person would controversial rabbi who had recently been Simcha Zissel was eventually forced out of Kelm. swallow his neighbor alive” (Mishnah Avot 3:2). Thus hiredI by the Jewish community in the city of Kovno. He briefly reestablished the yeshiva in Grobin (in the unity of the subjects maintains the kingdom. Rabbi Salanter had been giving public sermons that modern-day Latvia), but was forced to close it down Rabbenu Tam of blessed memory wrote in his called on his fellow Jews to devote time and energy to after only a few years due to his declining health. He Sefer Ha-yashar that we can find the way to serve the musar—to the deliberate and methodical improve- spent the last decade of his life back in Kelm teaching King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One based on the ment of one’s moral character. Salanter urged his listen- a few close disciples who would eventually spread the service given a king of flesh and blood. And so we can ers to fear for the punishments that would await them Musar movement throughout Europe and beyond. understand that the essence of fulfilling [the com- if they did not focus on developing virtues of reverence, He came to be known as the “the Alter,” or elder, of mandment] “that you make me king over you” is in humility, justice, and kindness. Many traditionalists Kelm. Among the most influential of his students the unity of the servants of the Blessed One. Thus it is admired Salanter’s fierce opposition to the Jewish En- were Rabbis Reuven Dov Dessler, Yerucham Halevi written, “There will be a king in Jeshurun”—when?— lightenment movement (Haskalah), but they were dis- Levovitz of the Mir Yeshiva, and Nosson Tzvi Finkel “when the heads of the people will be gathered, when turbed by the prospect of a new sectarian movement (who was eventually known as the Alter of Slobodka). the tribes of Israel will be united” (Deut. 33:5). that, like Hasidism, seemed to reject the central role of Rabbi Simcha Zissel posted the following notice on Therefore there is an obligation upon us, prior to Talmud study and to introduce other models of piety. the door of the Kelm Talmud Torah in the month of the Day of Judgment (may it come upon us for good), As a devoted student of Talmud, Simcha Zissel Elul, which immediately precedes the High Holidays. to occupy ourselves during the entire year with the seems to have initially shared the concerns of these tra- In its specific prescription for ethical self-development positive commandment “You shall love your fellow ditionalists. Having also studied some of the modern through meditation and its careful, rigorous, even as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). And through this there will subjects favored by the Haskalah, including German, philosophical, linking of devotion to God with de- be unity among the subjects of the Blessed Lord, and he may have also been troubled by Salanter’s fierce votion to one’s fellow man, it is characteristic of the [God’s] Kingship will come into our hands well . . . opposition to general studies. But he found himself en- Musar movement. It is translated here by Geoffrey But if (God forbid) the sin of hating people is thralled by Salanter’s spiritual vision and personality. Claussen, who directs the Jewish Studies program at on our hands, how can we not be ashamed and dis- When Salanter resigned from his communal post and Elon University and is working on a book about Sim- graced to be speaking lies . . . when we ask [in prayer established a new private study hall for young men in cha Zissel’s ethical thought. for God to] “rule over the entire world, in Your glo- Kovno, Simcha Zissel followed ry”? We have not prepared ourselves to do what is him. essential for maintaining the kingdom of heaven in In the 1860s, Simcha Zissel power over us . . . And so we must accept upon our- returned to his hometown and selves the work of loving people and of unity. With founded a unique yeshiva in- this, one’s path will slowly, slowly improve—and, spired by Salanter, the Talmud in any case, one will already have turned a little bit Torah of Kelm. In some respects, toward repentance. And, if we merit a community the Talmud Torah was fiercely that is immersed in this work during the entire year, traditionalist, expelling students who can measure the greatness of the merit for us who challenged Orthodox theol- and for the entire world? ogy, including Isidor Elyashev, No one should say that this work is too difficult. who later became a distinguished It is not only the decree of the King, but we hope literary critic. In other respects, that when one works at this, with appropriate re- however, it was open to the Has- flection, it will slowly, slowly, become easier, and kalah’s legacy. The Talmud Torah one will find great joy in it . . . This message should was the first traditionalist yeshi- remain before our eyes all year long. And so may va in Eastern Europe to set aside we all merit to be written and sealed for good [in time for general studies, includ- the Book of Life] with the whole people of Israel. ing mathematics, geography, and Amen—may this be God’s will. Russian language, literature, and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv’s Talmud Torah in Kelm. (Drawing by Loren It is good to set aside a place for thinking of this Hodes: www.lorenhodesart.co.za) history. Simcha Zissel also insist- matter every day during prayer. The clear place for ed on adopting the manners and it in prayer is in the blessing “True and Firm” [when dress of European bourgeois culture, encouraged many s is known, the sages taught [that God command- praising God for redeeming Israel from Egypt, with of his students to consider careers in commerce, and Aed]: “recite verses of kingship before me . . . so that these words]: “Upon the shore of the sea, they were made periodic references in his lectures to figures such you make me king over you” (Babylonian Talmud, all together”—this is love and unity. And thus [the as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whom he regarded as Rosh Hashanah 34b). liturgy continues] “they all praised God and made great ethical teachers. When we meditate upon the power to maintain a God King.” Without such [love and unity], God for- Perhaps most radically, Talmud Torah’s curricu- kingdom [ruled] by [a king of] flesh and blood, [we bid, there is no full acceptance of the kingdom of lum cut yet further into the time traditionally allotted find that] the kingdom is maintained only when the heaven. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to con- for the study of Talmud by devoting an unprecedent- king’s subjects are all like one person in their service tinually make an effort at this, and may we merit to ed number of hours to the study of moral literature, to him. And if . . . division were to emerge among the fully accept the kingdom of heaven with the whole contemplative visualization exercises, impassioned subjects of the king, the knot of the kingdom would people of Israel.

46 Jewish Review of Books • Fall 2013 last word Hebrew School Days

BY ABRAHAM SOCHER

hen I was nineteen, I saw an ad at for the “r” sound, and that the word for chalkboard form of spirituality.” But when the announcement the UCLA Career Center for a job was the same as the one used to describe the tablets on of our destination came, it turned out that, some- teaching “Jewish history through which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. And where along the line, plans had changed radically. drama,” at the Sunday school of a I remembered Rabbi Leibowitz coming into class to We were going to St. Andrew’s, a Benedictine retreat largeW nearby temple. It was only a couple of hours a show us the way the strings and knots of the tzitzis on in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Ange- week, but it paid maybe four times as much as my a tallis could be added up to 613, the number of com- les, to celebrate the Sabbath with the monks. After job at the Student Store. Needless to say, I hadn’t mandments in the Torah. And I remembered impu- the announcement, Lisa took me aside to warn me taught Jewish history or anything else, but I had dently climbing out the window with a friend when that the change in plans meant that I would need to acted in a student production of Beckett’s Endgame another teacher turned to the blackboard. bring my own food if I wanted to keep kosher. that summer. (I was Hamm, or maybe it was Clov.) But mostly I remembered playing touch football On Friday night we met some of the monks (they At the interview, it turned out that the school before and between classes out in the street with Jake were nice), lit candles, and had a Shabbat dinner. It director, who I’ll call Lisa, had, as far as I could tell, and Steve—one-on-one (it was a small class) with Jake turned out that one of my students, Maurice P.—a no idea what she meant by “Jewish history through as all-time quarterback. We’d diagram the plays on our speedy wide receiver—also kept kosher, or at least drama.” There was no particular period she wanted palms, and then Jake would run around Kenny Sta- thought he did, or perhaps he just thought he would covered, no book she had in mind, and no theory of bler-like, joyfully, but pointlessly (no one was rushing keep me company. We split my take-out order from how to teach acting, or Jewish history for that matter, him), while Steve or I tried to get open for the down- the Kosher Kolonel. to junior high schoolers. But she was duly impressed The next morning, the rabbi came to spend the with the Beckett, and she found the fact that I had day with the kids. We met him in the parking lot as been in a yeshiva only two years earlier fascinating. he drove up. He took a Torah out of his hatchback Mainly, she wanted to talk about her study of “Ha- and led us all to a little clearing in the woods, where sidic philosophy,” with a local Chabad rabbi. I nod- he laid it gently on the ground as he told us that ded politely and didn’t try to disabuse her of the idea two hundred years ago the holy Ba’al Shem Tov had that studying the Tanya in Bel Air was very much like prayed in the woods. Then he unscrolled the Torah studying Talmud in Jerusalem, even if hats played a to that week’s portion and, using a twig as a pointer, role in both experiences. I also learned that the tem- read a few verses. When he finished, he said (per- ple’s school had won awards for innovation and ex- haps thinking of the Lubavitchers we weren’t visiting cellence, and that I would be required to accompany or even the Benedictines we were), “You know kids, my students on a weekend Shabbaton in the spring. some people think that every word of the Torah is Those first Sunday mornings were terrifying. priceless, like a diamond, but we don’t My half-baked idea had been to introduce them to think that. We believe,” he said, ges- some obscure and exciting episode of Jewish history turing at the California scrub around and then find some way to dramatize it. Having read him, “that the Torah is like a diamond a little (very little) of Gershom Scholem, I thought mine, and you’ve got to clear away all that maybe the false messiah Shabbtai Zevi would the rubble to get at the diamonds.” It’s be a good idea—it wasn’t. Given that the kids were actually not a bad description of clas- iffy on King David (or Jesus for that matter) and had sic 19th-century liberal religion in the never really thought about the idea of a messiah, light of biblical criticism with a twist of personal or otherwise, the 17th-century adventures Buber, but I’ve often wondered what, if of a melancholic mystic in the Mediterranean was anything, he was trying to teach those a tough sell. I remember once looking wildly out particular L.A. kids with their little of my classroom window as Lisa approached while fund of Jewish knowledge. fourteen-year-old boys and girls slammed into each At lunch, sloppy joes were served. other in an exuberant interpretation of a Turkish The rabbi and one of the monks led a Sabbatean mob. She returned my look blandly and “Long Bomb” by Mark Anderson. somewhat desultory theological con- marched right past the classroom door. versation about images of God to which the students and-out bullet or the long bomb. More than anything paid less than full attention. Afterward we had a rous- f course, I had myself gone to Hebrew school— else, Hebrew school for me was running down Jef- ing game of touch football. The following morning, Othat’s what we always called it though very little ferson Avenue with Jake’s rainbow pass soaring above we observed—but did not partake in—Communion, Hebrew was ever learned—through most of elemen- me and little Stevie Klein showing me his heels as the and took the bus back to West Los Angeles. tary school. I’d walk the five blocks down Bancroft afternoon light faded and the sweet, earnest Rabbi Not long after Shabbat at the monastery, Lisa told from Berkeley’s Washington Elementary School to Lifsics calling us to come back inside. me that it was time to provide written assessments of Congregation Beth Israel (fading orange-red bricks, each of my students for the year. This baffled me. I was worn-wood floor, and Israeli and American flags ctually, touch football turned out be more use- certain that she couldn’t possibly want academic grades. flanking the aron kodesh), where a part of the sanc- Aful for my teaching than my distinguished ca- (Had I received grades in Hebrew school? I couldn’t tuary was partitioned off to make a classroom from reer on the stage. I settled into a pattern of turning remember.) Eventually I decided that what she must four to six on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. some passage from the weekly Torah portion into a be requesting were assessments of the students them- Even at nineteen, not much of that experience kind of playlet and playing sports with the kids dur- selves. I picked up a grade card, looked at the name, and had stuck with me, certainly not enough to be of help ing the break between classes. wrote, “Maurice P. is a very fine football player.” with lesson plans. I remembered a glamorous Israeli As the year wore on, Lisa occasionally spoke with teacher named Varda teaching us that the word for me about her idea of bringing all the kids to Chabad Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of chalk was gir, with an exciting back-of-the-throat trill for the Spring Shabbaton to observe “a different Books. He teaches at Oberlin College.

Fall 2013 • Jewish Review of BooKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 165 East 56th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10022

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