JEWISH REVIEW of BOOKS CONFERENCE COMPANION SPECIAL EDITION NOVEMBER 2016 1 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Special Edition JEWISH REVIEW of BOOKS CONFERENCE COMPANION November 2016 JRB JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS Thank you to the JRB Society for helping support the only magazine dedicated to discussing Jewish books and ideas at the highest intellectual level. Chairman’s Council Blavatnik Family Foundation Publication Committee Marilyn and Michael Fedak • Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Susan and Roger Hertog • Roy J. Katsovicz The Lauder Foundation–Leonard & Judy Lauder Fund Tina & Steven Price Charitable Foundation • Pamela and George Rohr Dan Senor • Paul E. Singer Editors’ Circle Ann and Kenneth J. Bialkin/Bialkin Family Foundation Buzzy Geduld • Ben Heller • Paul Isaac • Jacobson Family Foundation Sandra Earl Mintz • Pam and Scott Schafler • Allen K. 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Siegel • Diane and Thomas Smith Judy and Michael Steinhardt • David P. Stone • Harvey Stone Sandra Stotsky • Ina and Jim Strauss • Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Daria and Eric Wallach • Sue Ann Weinberg • David Werber • Lawrence Zuriff To learn more about the JRB Society, please contact Lori Dorr at [email protected] or 212-796-1665 Malka Groden at [email protected] or 646-218-9026. As of October 31, 2016 JEWISH REVIEW November 2016 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com CONFERENCE COMPANION 4 Abraham Socher Welcome to Our 2nd Annual Conference 5 Allan Arkush A Mechitza, the Mufti, and the Beginnings of the Arab-Israeli Conflict In his latest book, Hillel Cohen offers an analysis of the Arab-Jewish violence of 1929 that goes very much against the grain of the usual Zionist narrative and even the non-partisan historical research concerning this period. 9 Eric Cohen The Jewish Turn of Norman Podhoretz Thomas L. Jeffers’ biography of Norman Podhoretz charts his rise from a young voice of the anti-Communist left to a leading neoconservative and American Zionist. 13 Moshe Halbertal At the Threshold of Forgiveness: A Study of Law and Narrative in the Talmud In the season of repentance, it is not only the laws of the rabbis, but their stories as well, that teach us how—and how not—to forgive. 16 Shai Held Wonder and Indignation: Abraham's Uneasy Faith A famous midrash describes Abraham’s encounter with an illuminated palace, or was it a burning palace? 19 Dara Horn The Vanishing Point An exhibit explores the vanished world and unseen photographs of Roman Vishniac. 26 Amy Newman Smith A Spy's Life Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy opens not with an intrepid secret agent about to pull off a bold maneuver, as books with such titles usually do, but with nine men gathered around a table in 1977, studying a picture of an Israeli agent. 29 Meir Soloveichik Irving Kristol, Edmund Burke, and the Rabbis Irving Kristol started off as a neo-Trotskyite and famously became the “godfather of neoconservatism.” But his idiosyncratic “neo-Orthodoxy” lasted a lifetime. 33 Joseph H.H. Weiler Discrimination and Identity in London: The Jewish Free School Case How Britain’s highest court misunderstands Judaism. 36 Leon Wieseltier The Argumentative Jew The Jewish tradition is a long and great challenge to the consensualist mentality. 39 Ruth R. Wisse Coming with a Lampoon Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—his novel J by a giant step. 43 Abraham Socher How the Baby Got Its Philtrum The idea of learning as a recovery of what we once possessed is what makes Bogart’s bubbe mayse, and ours, so memorable: We can all touch that little hollow and feel the impress of forgotten knowledge. On the cover: Simone Weil in the School of Yavne. Illustration by Mark Anderson. November 6, 2016 5 Cheshvan 5777 Dear Reader, Welcome to the Jewish Review of Books’ 2nd annual conference. As at our first conference last year, our aim today is to bring the pages of the JRB—its brilliant, accessible scholarship; trenchant criticism; and deep delight in the riches of Judaism and Jewish culture—to life today, here at the Yeshiva University Museum. Last year, we bound up 10 of our favorite articles from the first five years of the magazine to create readers for the conference participants—they were so popular we had to print more of them after the conference. This reader goes to 11 favorite pieces, including essays from seven of today’s speakers, plus the editors and our publisher. In these pages, you’ll find some of the very finest Jewish writers, scholars, and thinkers illuminating everything from classical biblical and talmudic texts to American Jewish life, Israeli political history, and the latest novel. I know that you will enjoy them, but I also know that you will understand that they are about more than literary pleasure—they are the continuation of a great conversation that has been going on now for more than 3,000 years. Since our first issue in the spring of 2010, the Jewish Review of Books has become arguably the premier venue for accessible, serious (but often witty) discussion of Judaism, Jewish life, and Jewish culture in English. We’ve built both a sterling reputation and a substantial subscriber base of serious Jewish readers advertisers are eager to reach. Nonetheless, our work would not be possible without the generous support of readers like you. Speaking personally, these last six-plus years have been the greatest intellectual adventure of my life. Much more importantly, the contributors to this magazine have also contributed to the Jewish people, whose success, perhaps uniquely, depends upon historical self-awareness, great books, and great ideas. On behalf of the Jewish Review of Books and its great sponsor, The Tikvah Fund, I thank you for your support. Sincerely, Abraham Socher Editor 4 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Conference Companion A Mechitza, the Mufti, and the Beginnings of the Arab-Israeli Conflict BY ALLAN ARKUSH Spring 2016 children, and perhaps by both. We have, as Cohen tells us, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 two different and not necessarily mutually exclusive ac- by Hillel Cohen counts of what happened. Brandeis University Press, 312 pp., $29.95 In another book, these episodes might have served as unsettling reminders that the Jews were once at the mercy of anti-Semitic mobs not only in the diaspora but in the Land of Israel itself. They might have supplied evidence of n one of the more chilling testimonies cited in Hillel the necessity of a Jewish state as well as an explanation of Cohen’s account of the 1929 riots in Palestine, an el- derly Jewish survivor recalls how his mother had tried Ito shelter him when he was five years old from a rampaging Cohen’s penchant for highlighting the Arab mob in what looked like the safety of a friend’s home Jews’ major—if shared—culpability for in Safed. But then: what took place in 1929 raises questions The Arabs threw hundreds of stones at the house, at about his underlying convictions. the windows and shutters. They beat on the doors and shutters with huge clubs and cast blazing torches the emergence of Palestinian-born men capable of leading through the windows. The house began to burn. The the struggle to establish and preserve it. In Hillel Cohen’s ac- shutters, curtains, and even my mother’s and sister’s count, however, they represent the deplorable but inevitable nightgowns began to go up in flames. consequences of the intrusion of the Zionist movement into an area where it was unwelcome and where it had no clear The teller of this tale, Yisrael Tal, narrowly escaped the siege right to be: “As the Arabs saw it, in the summer of 1929 they (together with the other members of his family) and grew killed not their Jewish neighbors, but rather enemies who up to become first a British soldier and then a very distin- were seeking to conquer their land.” guished Israeli general. He was also, as Cohen points out, Cohen’s analysis of the situation in 1929 goes very much “the father of the Merkava tank.” against the grain of the usual Zionist narrative and even the “Talik” was by no means the only leading figure in the non-partisan historical research concerning this period. Israeli Army who had such a boyhood experience, or a worse There, the emphasis is usually on the way in which the ri- one, in August of 1929. The future general Rehavam (“Ghan- ots at the very end of the 1920s constituted a rather abrupt di”) Ze’evi, living in Jerusalem, saw his first corpse that year, departure from the peaceful conditions that had prevailed one of the victims of an attack in Bayit VeGan.