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Hebrew.” Root Their Jewish Origins in Legendary, Rather Than Traveled to Ethiopia to Visit the Beta Israel Historical Material Walter Laqueur Did One Million Russians Change the Middle East? JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 4, Number 2 Summer 2013 $7.95 Benny Morris The Alarming Signif icance of a Trivial Book SUMMER READING Adam Kirsch Proust & Bialik Alan Mintz A.B. Yehoshua at the Movies Jeffrey SaksS.Y. Agnon in Comics Daniel Johnson Francesca Segal's Brilliant First Novel Amy Newman Smith A Short, Strange, Heroic Life Editor Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Assistant Editor Amy Newman Smith Administrative Assistant Rebecca Weiss Intern Zachary Crockford Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein Publisher Eric Cohen Associate Publisher & Director of Marketing Lori Dorr Marketing Associate Chaya Glasner The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10022. For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or send $29.95 The Posen Society of Fellows is a unique international fellowship for ($39.95 outside of the U.S.) to: Jewish Review of junior scholars and emerging fiction writers. The Fellowship provides Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Please send notifications of address changes to the same address recipients with $40,000 over the course of two years, and the opportu- or to [email protected]. nity to work with seasoned scholars and writers. The application dead- For customer service and subscription-related line for the class of 2014-2016 is January 15, 2014. issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected]. Letters to the Editor should be emailed to letters@ jewishreviewofbooks.com or to oureditorial office, 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited reviews and manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected], or to our editorial office.Advertising inquiries should be sent to [email protected] or call (212) 796-1665. Review copies should be sent to the attention of the Assistant Editor at our editorial office. JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com JEWISH REVIEW Volume 4, Number 2 Summer 2013 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Kosher Tin Foil, Greek Guilt, Chinese Jews, and More FEATURE 5 Benny Morris Athens or Sparta? Patrick Tyler ran the Washington Post’s Middle East Bureau and was chief correspondent for The New York Times. His “inside story” of the Israeli military reveals more about the current prejudices of the chattering classes than it does about Israel and its neighbors. REviews 11 John McWhorter Talking Like That Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Bunin Benor 13 Daniel B. Schwartz Romancing the Haskalah Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism by Olga Litvak 16 Shlomo Avineri Emancipation and Its Discontents Rabbis and Revolution: The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation by Michael Laurence Miller 19 Len Lyons In and Out of Africa Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions by Jacob S. Dorman Black Jews in Africa and the Americas by Tudor Parfitt 23 Amy Newman Smith Cri de Coeur The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris by Jonathan Kirsch 26 Walter Laqueur From Russia with Complications Ha-milion she-shina et ha-mizrach ha-tikhon: ha-aliyah ha-sovietit le-Yisrael (The Million that Changed the Middle East: The SovietAliyah to Israel) by Lili Galili and Roman Bronfman 28 Jeffrey Saks The Man Who Thought in Pictures Shay Ve-Agnon: Shelosha Sipurim (Three Stories) by S. Y. Agnon, illustrated by Shay Charka 30 Alan Mintz Spanish Charity The Retrospective by A. B. Yehoshua, translated by Stuart Schoffman 33 Daniel Johnson More Important Things The Innocentsby Francesca Segal 34 Alan Mittleman Two or Three Concepts of Dignity Dignity: Its History and Meaning by Michael Rosen • Human Dignity by George Kateb ReadingS 37 James A. Diamond The First Debate Over Religious Martydom Did Moses misquote God? On martyrdom and the meaning of Aaron’s silence. 40 Adam Kirsch Proust Between Halakha and Aggada Proust and Bialik were both great literary modernists but they aren’t usually thought of together. Reading In Search of Lost Time in light of “Halacha and Aggada.” Lost & FoUnd 44 Hayim Greenberg Culture and Education in the Diaspora After 1948, Ben-Gurion strongly urged young American Jews to make aliyah. In 1951, Hayim Greenberg, head of the Jewish Agency’s Department of Education and Culture, came to Jerusalem to argue for the dignity of Jewish life in the diaspora—in Yiddish. Last WoRd 47 Allan Arkush East and West On the cover: Illustrations by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Kosher Tin Foil mine whether the animal is kosher. However, his- at least partly driven by the institutional interests of Timothy Lytton, in his thought-provoking article torically, a few Ashkenazi Jews took on the added the kashrut agencies themselves. “Chopped Herring and the Making of the American stringency of refraining from eating that meat en- Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman Kosher Certification System” (Spring 2013), is surely tirely, even when investigation showed it to be ko- via jewishreviewofbooks.com correct when he says, “The U.S. kosher market gen- sher. This is the standard of keeping “glatt kosher.” erates more than $12 billion in annual retail sales, Modern kashrut agencies have promoted this ad- Timothy Lytton Responds: and more products are labeled kosher than are la- ditional stricture, in pursuit of higher standards, Rabbis Newfield and Finkelman suggest that kosher beled organic, natural, or premium.” However, the in accordance with the economics of the central- certification sometimes has more to do with mar- author neglects to mention that more and more of ized meat packing industry, and in their own best keting than with Jewish law. They allege that leading these kosher-labeled products do not need kosher interest. In consequence, merely kosher, “non- certifiers provide unnecessary certification to non- certification in the first place! Many are not even glatt” meat has more or less disappeared from the food products. In defense of this practice, Rabbi foods. marketplace. Yaakov Luban, an executive rabbinic coordinator at Based on the Talmudic concepts of notein ta’am li- However, the agencies certify as glatt the meat the OU, explains that many companies believe that fgam (contributing a non-beneficial taste) and eino of cattle with some abnormalities. Thus someone kosher certification offers them a marketing advan- ra’oh le-akhilat kelev (not fit for a dog to eat), non- who wants to keep the old standard of plain kosher tage—a kind of rabbinic Good Housekeeping seal food items should not need kosher certification. But must accept the additional stricture of glatt, and of approval—and that the OU provides certification a quick glance at the current ShopRite Kosher Prod- even though the agency does not consider it neces- ucts Directory shows that this is not the case: The sary, provided that there is some halakhic basis for OU certifies as kosher aluminum foil, food storage doing so. In the case of aluminum foil, for example, bags, sandwich bags, foaming cleanser with chlorine the OU has posted on its website an article detail- bleach, antibacterial hand soap, laundry detergent, ing concerns about the use of non-kosher oils in the wool wash, sponges, heavy-duty scrubbers, hydro- production process. Ultimately, consumers must gen peroxide, and isopropyl rubbing alcohol. judge for themselves whether transparency about As competition increases, it becomes harder for the role that marketing plays in certification of non- the kashrut agencies to grow. Perhaps this is what food products legitimizes the practice and whether leads them to certify products that, according to the the use of non-kosher ingredients in products such strict letter of Jewish law, do not require certification as aluminum foil raises legitimate halakhic con- to begin with. This recent development is problem- cerns. Certification is, of course, harder to justify in atic for two reasons. Firstly, by adding kosher cer- the case of products that never come into contact tification to products that don’t need it, the kosher with food, such as bleach and floor cleaner. consumer is forced to pay more when they could Rabbi Finkelman additionally alleges that agen- pay less without certification. Secondly, the agencies cies promote excessively stringent standards in seem to be overstepping the biblical injunction of order to gain competitive advantage over other “thou shalt not add thereto,” (Deut. 12:32). agencies by appealing to a broader range of kosher Rabbi Yossi Newfield consumers. He suggests that this practice is driven Brooklyn, NY by agency self-interest. The agencies respond that someone who wants to keep the old stricture of glatt it demonstrates their responsiveness to consum- Timothy Lytton’s “Chopped Herring and the Mak- must accept new leniencies pioneered by the agen- ers’ religious preferences. The two views are not ing of the American Kosher Certification System” cies. Furthermore, some poultry now appears with incompatible. As I argue at greater length in my records, with admirable flair, the triumphs of the agency certification, along with the legend “glatt,” book, kosher certification is both a business and a kashrut agencies. Indeed, the agencies have cre- even though the term is meaningless when applied sacred trust. Indeed, it is precisely the combination ated an unprecedented mechanism, a kind of in- to poultry, lamb, or veal.
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