Ilana Kurshan on a Brilliant New Torah Commentary JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 9, Number 2 Summer 2018 $10.45 Allan Arkush In the Melting Pot Cecile E. Kuznitz The Book Smugglers of Vilna Jenna Weissman Joselit W. E. B. Du Bois at the Warsaw Ghetto Matt Goldish Isaac Newton and the Secrets of the Temple PLUS Allan Nadler The Most Important Rabbi You've Never Heard Of Abraham Socher Says Who? Editor Abraham Socher NEW FROM MAGGID BOOKS Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush Art Director Betsy Klarfeld Maggid Studies in Tanakh Managing Editor Amy Newman Smith Web Editor Rachel Scheinerman Rabbi Dr. Zvi Grumet Dr. Erica Brown Editorial Assistant GENESIS JONAH Kate Elinsky FROM CREATION THE RELUCTANT Editorial Board TO COVENANT PROPHET 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. 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REVIEWS 9 Shai Secunda Sacrificial Speech Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg 11 Matt Goldish Maimonides, Stonehenge, and Newton's Obsessions Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe 13 Yitzhak Y. Melamed No Empty Place Nefesh HaTzimtzum: Rabbi Chaim Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChaim with Translation and Commentary (Volume 1), translation and commentary by Avinoam Fraenkel • Nefesh HaTzimtzum: Understanding Nefesh HaChaim through the Key Concept of Tzimtzum and Related Writings (Volume2), translation and commentary by Avinoam Fraenkel 16 Michah Gottlieb The Founder of Jewish Studies Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity by Ismar Schorsch 19 Amy Newman Smith To Spy Out the Land Spies in Palestine: Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn by James Srodes • The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring by Gregory J. Wallance 22 Allis Radosh & Free Radicals The J. Abrams Book: The Life and Work of an Exceptional Personality by Jacob Abrams, edited Ronald Radosh by the Jewish Cultural Center in Mexico, translated by Ruth Murphy • Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoffby Anatole Dolgoff 25 Cecile E. Kuznitz A Book and a Sword in the Vilna Ghetto The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis by David E. Fishman 29 Catherine C. 33 Days and Four Years 33 Days by Léon Werth, translated by Austin D. Johnston • Deposition 1940–1944: Bock-Weiss A Secret Diary of Life in Vichy France by Léon Werth, edited and translated by David Ball 31 Tom Ginsburg You Shall Appoint for Yourself Judges The Purse and the Sword: The Trials of Israel’s Legal Revolution by Daniel Friedmann, translated by Haim Watzman 33 Ilana Kurshan Containing God's Presence The Heart of Torah, Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Genesis and Exodus by Rabbi Shai Held, foreword by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg • The Heart of Torah, Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy by Rabbi Shai Held, foreword by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg 36 Eitan Kensky Dress British, Think Yiddish Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams READINGS 38 Allan Nadler Maimonides in Ma’ale Adumim Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch has been working on his commentary to the Mishneh Torah for the last 41 years. It may be the greatest rabbinic work of the century. 41 Robert Zaretsky On Literary Brilliance and Moral Rot Why did the prestigious publishing house Gallimard want to publish three vilely anti-Semitic pamphlets by Louis-Ferdinand Céline? And is he still worth reading? 44 Jenna Weissman Joselit Du Bois, the Warsaw Ghetto, and a Priestly Blessing When the editors at Jewish Life asked the venerable civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois to speak about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, they had no idea that it would lead to a priestly blessing. LAST WORD 46 Abraham Socher Says Who? On the cover: The Melting Pot by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Poland and the Devil's Point of View the Jewish Psyche,” Spring 2018), but I am not sure pressed memory of the murder of Moses that gave I read Ruth Wisse’s brilliant portrait of Mendele that I am convinced by his, uh, analysis. The (short) rise to Jewish guilt. In the second story it was the Mokher Seforim directly after I read Jan Gross’s standard version of Freud’s theory is, as Kaplan initial appearance of Father Moses to his beloved blistering criticism of Poland’s new Holocaust law explains, that Moses was an Egyptian priest in the children, the “poor Jewish bondsmen,” that elicited (“The Jewish Critic and the Devil’s Point of View” monotheistic cult of the sun-god Aton, who led the that guilt. This leads Freud to change his story about and “Law, Justice, and Memory in Poland,” Spring Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, taught them monothe- the nature of Jewish chosenness. Oh—“just one 2018). The “wide aerial” perspective on Jewish suf- ism, and was murdered for his efforts. The Israel- more thing.” Unlike my teacher Yosef Yerushalmi fering that Mendele gets when the Devil takes him ites repressed the memory but then got a second and others, I never tried to put Freud “on the couch.” on a flight above tsarist Russia immediately re- Midianite Moses who they conflated with the first I am not a psychiatrist nor the son of a psychiatrist, minded me of the historical perspective Gross gives one in their guilty memories. But Kaplan, like some but one thing I have learned from studying Talmud in contextualizing the Law and Justice Party’s con- and Maimonides, reading Freud, and watching Co- temptible rhetoric and actions. On the other hand, lumbo: Pay close attention to detail. what is one to make of the fact that Poland is, unlike Lawrence Kaplan its liberal European neighbors, reliably supportive McGill University of Israel? Apparently, things are complicated even when you can see the whole picture. Who’s the Sabbatean? Peter Kahn Stuart Schoffman celebrates Shabbtai Zevi’s messianic Los Angeles, CA movement of the mid-1660s as a harbinger of future national consciousness and activism (“Shabbtai at Abraham’s Genome Seventy,” Spring 2018). But it strikes me that the failed In Richard Hidary’s review of Christine Hayes’s What’s messiah is as much a potent symbol and harbinger of Divine about Divine Law? (“God’s Law in Human modern diaspora Judaism and in particular its less Hands,” Spring 2018), he summarizes her position orthodox and more syncretic expressions. After con- as being that the Torah is “the expression of a divine verting to Islam to save his neck, Shabbtai spent the will that can change, and, in any case, must be inter- last decade of his life waffling between the Muslim and preted.” In other words, divine fiat and human (rab- Jewish worlds. While this could be seen as hypocrisy, binic) reason are the elements that continually inter- it was also, I think, a sign of a new Jewish identity that act to reshape Torah law. So far, so good, but another talmudic Columbo, walks carefully through Freud’s welcomed the influence of other traditions and tried factor is missing.