The Jewsraeli Century Yossi Shain & Michal Schwartz JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 10, Number 2 Summer 2019 $10.45 Dear Bette, Dear Saul Jacob Howland Olmert, Bush, and the Syrian Reactor Michael Doran Among the Last Jews of Yemen Myriam Tangi Allan Nadler Remembers the Poisoned Gefilte Fish of Birobidzhan Jarrod Tanny Dissects Campus Anti-Semitism Ruth R. Wisse Rereads Delmore Schwartz . The Art of Bible Translation Editor Abraham Socher Robert Alter Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush An award-winning biblical translator reflects on the art of Art Director Betsy Klarfeld capturing the literary power Managing Editor of the Bible in English Amy Newman Smith “In a series of short essays, [Alter] delves into the Editorial Assistant minutiae of word choice, syntax and rhythm that Kate Elinsky make up the substance of a translator’s work.” —New York Times Book Review Editorial Board Cloth $24.95 Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein The Book of Exodus A Biography Executive Director Joel S. Baden Eric Cohen Associate Publisher An essential biography Nadia Ai Kahn of one of the Bible’s most powerful and inspiring books Chairman’s Council Blavatnik Family Foundation “[A] masterful piece of scholarship. Baden’s accessible prose will make this exceptional work Publication Committee appeal to scholars and general readers alike.” Marilyn and Michael Fedak —Publishers Weekly Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Cloth $26.95 Susan and Roger Hertog Lives of Great Religious Books The Lauder Foundation– Leonard and Judy Lauder Sandra Earl Mintz Tina and Steven Price Charitable Foundation Pamela and George Rohr Daniel Senor Masada Paul E. Singer From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth Jodi Magness The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and A new account of the famous site criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022. and story of the last stand of a For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks. group of Jewish rebels who held com or send $39.95 ($49.95 outside of the U.S.; digital sub- scriptions: $19.99) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, out against the Roman Empire Denville, NJ 07834. Digital subscription orders must include an email address. Please send notifications of address changes to the “A marvel of clarity and accessibility. Masada will same address or to [email protected]. be the indispensable companion to this site for For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected]. the next fifty years.” —Tessa Rajak, author of Josephus Letters to the Editor should be emailed to [email protected] or to our editorial office, Cloth $29.95 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited manuscripts to the attention of the editors at [email protected] or to our edi- torial office. Review copies should be sent to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be sent to [email protected]. Social icon Rounded square Only use blue and/or white. For more details check out our Brand Guidelines. JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS DO NOT PRINT THIS INFORMATION JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS SUMMER 2019 19-335 JEWISH REVIEW Volume 10, Number 2 Summer 2019 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Garden Betrayed, Mysterium Tremendum or Coping Mechanism?, Lucifer in the Details FEATURE 5 Yossi Shain & The Jewsraeli Century #Yahadutyisraelit: di’ukan shel mahapecha hevratit (#IsraeliJudaism: A Portrait of a Michal Schwartz Cultural Revolution) by Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs Ben-Gurion declared that “with the creation of the state, we are standing on the edge of a new era. Not only in the life of the Jewish community in Israel, but . in the history of Judaism itself.” He was right, but not in the way he thought he would be. REVIEWS 7 Nadia Kalman Spiritual Survival Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff 9 Michael Doran Red Light, Green Light Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power by Yaakov Katz 12 Allan Arkush "Jacob Gazed into the Distant Future" Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen 16 Benjamin Balint The Witness H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds by Peter Filkins • Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community by H. G. Adler, translated by Belinda Cooper 19 Allan Nadler Poisoned Gefilte Fish, Broken Heart Broken Heart/Broken Wholeness: The Post-Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister by Ber Kotlerman 23 Alan Johnson The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky by Susie Linfield 26 Theodore Sasson Open-Door Policy The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World by Robert H. Mnookin 28 Isaac Inkeles The Sounds of Silence Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray 30 Jarrod Tanny In My Country There Is Problem Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar READINGS 33 Ruth R. Wisse On a Story by Delmore Schwartz In 1937, the editors at Partisan Review placed “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by a 24-year old unknown improbably named Delmore Schwartz before pieces by Wallace Stevens, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Pablo Picasso, to relaunch their magazine. They knew what they were doing. THE ARTS 36 Myriam Tangi Visiting Yemen in the 1980s: A Photo Essay LOST & FOUND 39 Jacob Howland "Love Between Writers": Saul Bellow and Bette Howland “I thought you knew that I belonged to the Truth Party too,” Bette Howland wrote her fellow novelist, mentor, and sometime lover, Saul Bellow. Her son recently found a new cache of letters between them that illuminates two brilliant artists at work. LAST WORD 42 David J. Fried Learning Yiddish After 60 On the cover: Love Letters, etc. by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Garden Betrayed modes of meaning making whose function was to (Lewis was always careful to point out, whenever In “In Giorgio Bassani’s Memory Garden” (Spring aid individuals in finding solace in their suffering. he praised Lindsay’s novel for its form, that its phi- 2019) Diane Cole fails to mention Bassani’s long- The social sciences (quite unsurprisingly) treat losophy was, as he says in the letter to Ruth Pitter, lasting anger with the film adaptation of his novel religion as a reflection of society and its problems. on the “borderline of the diabolical.”) The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Nowhere does There is nothing inherently wrong with this ap- Perhaps, in the light of this, Bloom’s agon with the film’s director, Vittorio De Sica, underscore proach, but it does perhaps miss the point for the Lewis could be seen as a literary counterpunch— that Italian Jews overwhelmingly supported fas- multitudes of the faithful who find both mystery reclaiming Lindsay’s novel after Lewis’s rewriting cism, Bassani’s major point, thereby whitewash- and majesty in their religious faith and practice. of it. But I have to agree with Weingrad’s view of ing history. Had he done so, he would have been This just makes me wonder, is it not at all possible Bloom’s novel itself that, as literary counterpunches forced to confront the greater issue—majority sup- that the religious passions of (at least) some of go, it lacked the necessary force. port for Mussolini and his party by the populace. these Mizrahi women are simply rooted in a pious Murray Ewing Roberta Hanfling Schwartz desire for a genuine experience of the divine? Some East Grinstead, West Sussex, United Kingdom Evanston, IL anthropological food for thought. Nehemia Stern Michael Weingrad has a slowly growing monop- Diane Cole Responds: Department of Sociology and Anthropology oly on learned and original treatments of con- Thank you for noting Giorgio Bassani’s strong Ariel University of Samaria temporary Jewish fantasy. Nobody writing today objections to the 1970 film version of The Garden has more interesting things to say about the very of the Finzi-Continis directed by Vittorio De Sica. Lucifer in the Details possibility—and limitations—of Jewish fantasy I did not discuss the film in my essay because my I’d like to make a point not to refute but perhaps and science fiction, especially the way Jewish focus was the book itself, my purpose to engage to complicate Michael Weingrad’s conclusion and Christian theological and cultural contexts readers directly with Bassani’s vivid realization of (“Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling?,” Spring 2019) that respectively shape the forms and structures of this the Jewish community of Ferrara and its downfall Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence in writing wildly popular genre. His most recent contribu- under fascist rule. The Flight to Lucifer was not so much its explicit tion is a case study of the failed fantasy of a he- As for the film, it did indeed take many liberties source, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, as retical Jew, the Shakespearean scholar and critic, in tone and plot with the novel on which it was C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra. This is because Lewis’s Harold Bloom, and the subterranean influence of based, and Bassani detailed the reasons for his an- Perelandra was not just influenced by the form his Christian foil, C. S. Lewis. ger and frustration in the essay “Il giardino tradito” of Lindsay’s novel but contains its own anxious Weingrad, in a thoughtful meditation on the role (“The Betrayed Garden”).