Reading Trilling David Grossman's New Novel the Chabad Paradox
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JEWISH REVIEW Number 3, Fall 2010 $6.95 OF BOOKS Paul Reitter Abraham Socher Misreading The Chabad Kafka Paradox Alan Mintz Adam Kirsch David Grossman’s Reading Trilling New Novel Itamar Rabinovich 1948 • Anthony Grafton The Bible Scholar Who Didn’t Know Hebrew Allan Arkush Israel and South Africa • Ruth Franklin Schwarz-Bart’s Last Novel Daniel Landes Arthur Green’s Radical Judaism • Yehudah Mirsky Saving Soviet Jewry Plus: Sukkah City, Hip-Hop Hapax, When Eve Ate the Etrog, and More Editor Abraham Socher Publisher Eric Cohen Sr. Contributing Editor Allan Arkush 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. 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Visit us in person 6 days per week or online at www.cjh.org center for jewish history 15 West 16th Street, NYC | tel: (212) 294 8301 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS CJH_AD.indd 1 8/18/10 1:49:56 PM JEWISH REVIEW Fall 2010 OF BOOKS LETTERS 4 Defending Steinberg, Spy Stories, and Rashi & Richard the Lionheart FEATURES 5 Abraham Socher The Chabad Paradox Two new books raise provocative questions about Chabad. 9 Alan Mintz Love and War David Grossman’s new novel is an emotional journey, and an education. REviewS 12 Itamar Rabinovich Palestine Portrayed Palestine Betrayed by Efraim Karsh 15 Paul Reitter Misreading Kafka Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Lifeby James Hawes • Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafkaby Rodger Kamenetz • Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith • The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head—Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley • Kafka: Die Jahre Der Entscheidung (Kafka: The Decisive Years) by Reiner Stach • Kafka: Di Jahre Der Erkenntnis (Kafka: The Years of Knowledge)by Reiner Stach 19 Jon D. Levenson The One and the Many God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matterby Stephen Prothero 20 Daniel Landes Hidden Master Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition by Arthur Green 23 Yehudah Mirsky Let My People Go When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewryby Gal Beckerman 26 Allan Arkush Dirty Hands in Difficult Times The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky 29 Moshe Rosman Early Modern Mingling Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History by David B. Ruderman 32 Ruth Franklin Lamed-Vovnik The Morning Starby André Schwarz-Bart 37 Anthony Grafton The Bible Scholar Who Didn’t Know Hebrew Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale by Albert Baumgarten In bRief 39 Hirsch’s Poems, Illions’ Lions, Short Prayers, Tommy Lapid, and More Readings 40 Adam Kirsch Trilling, Babel, and the Rabbis Proverbs 8:22-31: A New Translation 43 Robert Alter ThE Arts 44 Azzan Yadin-Israel A Measure of Beauty: Hadag Nahash 46 Shari Saiman Temporary Measures: Sukkah City Lost AnD FoUnD 49 Morris M. Faierstein When Eve Ate the Etrog: A Passage from Tsena-Urena Last word 50 Shlomo Avineri Prague Summer: The Altneuschul, Pan Am, and Herbert Marcuse On the cover: “Kaffeeklatsch,” by Hadley Hooper. From left: David Grossman, Franz Kafka, The Lubavitcher Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson), and Lionel Trilling. Inside back page: “Altneuschul,” by JT Waldman. LETTERS Defending Steinberg his novel, the theological daring of it, or why Steinberg Rashi & Richard the Lionheart ne of the many extreme opinions Ben Birnbaum struggled on his deathbed to complete it. He grants it n “Rashi and the Crusader: A Legend” (Summer Oshared in “Posthumous Prophecy” (Summer nothing at all. Possibly he dislikes fiction, the neces- I2010), Professor Matt Goldish reproduces a ver- 2010) is his belief that Steinberg was not a storytell- sary coarseness, compared with the clean abstractions sion of the Rashi-Godfrey legend from R. Gedaliah er. This is startling. Steinberg’s first novel, As a Driv- of the essay. He insults the novel and its commentary, ibn Yahya’s The Chain of Tradition. For those who en Leaf, is required reading on course lists for many the Steinberg family, and the publisher by cynically wish to find more about this fascinating story, please day schools, confirmation classes, adult education seeing The Prophet’s Wife as a ploy to exploit the en- see our article “Rashi and The First Crusade: Com- programs, and rabbinical schools. Milton Steinberg’s during success of As a Driven Leaf. mentary, Liturgy and Legend” (Judaism, Spring 1999). consummate storytelling has enabled contemporary Birnbaum jeers down the rabbi novel-writer who The version you printed is an abridgement of the readers to link our religious dilemmas with those of tried to make us see what he imagined: Gomer—the original with several inaccuracies, including the name our rabbinic sages. Those same storytelling talents and blundering Jewish people—worthy of mercy and love. “Gottfried in the Greek Tongue,” the Greek part being skills were the ones Steinberg, the preacher, used to de- The forties was not a time to accept the notion that evil an inept “correction” of the text by a scribe ignorant of liver his sermons and build his pulpit. inflicted on Jews was the fault of their own sinning— the city of Bouillon. Gedaliah’s full-length version of- There is a long tradition of bringing out the un- nor, post-Holocaust, can it ever be again. To shift the fers rich historical detail. It appears a composite of a finished works of writers we greatly respect (Agnon’s balance in the dialectic of justice and mercy is, I be- plausible connection with Rashi in Spring 1096 joined Shira, Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, Heine’s Rabbi lieve, the triumph of Steinberg’s novel. to the failed campaign of Richard the Lionheart nearly of Bacharach, and Kafka’s works, to name a few). Yet The Prophet’s Wife is radical new thinking a hundred years later. (It contains a verbal map of God- the publishing of an unfinished work is often a con- poised against traditional reading. Milton Stein- frey’s route to Palestine that is actually a very accurate troversial act, and rightly so. It should never be taken berg, the esteemed rabbi, polished writer of theo- depiction of Richard’s!) History tells us that Richard lightly or with solely commercial interests in mind. logical tomes, had the humility to step away from returned to Europe accompanied by only a few body- We don’t know what The Prophet’s Wife would have his exalted image and write a novel that would il- guards after losing his army. A “great warrior” was thus looked like had Steinberg taken it through all the luminate, as only fiction can, the daring ideas humiliated, as Rashi predicts, but it was not Godfrey. steps to completion. He was, as a writer, brilliantly he passionately held. He had the brains and Gedaliah may have gotten the legend through his able to infuse philosophical and theological ideas spirit and courage—the guts—to do it, and that father, a disciple of Rabbi Yehuda Mintz (d. 1508), into his fiction. According to Steinberg’s son Jona- is why, as a novelist, I honor the novelist in him. Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Padua, Italy, whose name in- than (writing in the Jewish Quarterly Review), at the Norma Rosen dicates his family’s origin in the Rhineland. The com- time he was writing The Prophet’s Wife, the author New York, NY posite legend itself probably dates to the 1190s. was in the process of formulating a modern system- Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D. atic theology. We can only guess at what interplay of Ben Birnbaum Responds: Gilad J. Gevaryahu ideas and emotion Steinberg might have been trying Contrary to Ms. Lieberman’s contention, I do not ob- Lower Merion, PA to create with this not yet completed work. ject on principle to the publication of posthumous and All we have are uncertain clues. Even so, I have no unfinished works, but her comparison of Milton Stein- Matt Goldish Responds: doubt in my mind that publishing Steinberg’s novel- berg with Agnon, Nabokov, Heine, and Kafka is hard to Many thanks to Dr.