Israel, Syria, & the New Middle East Elliott Abrams, Itamar Rabinovich, Amos Yadlin JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 6, Number 2 Summer 2015 $7.95 Elliott Horowitz Berenson in the Details Robert Alter Harshav’s Last Book Peter L. Berger Walzer’s Secular Paradox Dara Horn Stalin’s Jews Marci Shore Putin’s Russia Ethan B. Katz & Maud S. Mandel Exchange Views with Shmuel Trigano On Anti-Semitic Violence in France FASCINATING SUMMER READING Editor Abraham Socher From The Toby Press Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush JOHN LENNON OPEN UP Art Director Betsy Klarfeld AND THE JEWS THE IRON DOOR A Philosophical Rampage Memoirs of a Soviet Associate Editor Jewry Activist Amy Newman Smith Zeev Maghen Avi Weiss Editorial Assistant “[Maghen] shows Jews how Kate Elinsky awesome it is to be Jewish” “Should be mandatory - Times of Israel reading for anyone working on social justice issues” -Huffington Post Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri NEW Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison MENACHEM EDITION THE BRIDAL Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson BEGIN’S ZIONIST CANOPY Anita Shapira Michael Walzer LEGACY SY Agnon J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Collected Essays Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. 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FORTHCOMING JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Available online and at your www.korenpub.com local Jewish bookstore. www.jewishreviewofbooks.com MAGGID JEWISH REVIEW Volume 6, Number 2 Summer 2015 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Otherwise than J, Internalized Guilt, Were Arendt and Herzl Wrong About France? & More FEATURE 5 Elliott Abrams, Israel’s Northern Border and the Chaos in Syria: A Symposium In the four-plus years since the Arab Spring, Itamar Rabinovich, regimes have fallen, alliances have shifted and re-shifted, and new (and terrifying) actors have appeared on the Amos Yadlin scene. The diplomatic and strategic assumptions of several decades seem to have been upended. Nowhere is this more dramatically apparent than across Israel’s northern border. What, if anything, should Israel do about the Syrian crisis? REVIEWS 9 Dara Horn Playing the Fool The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin by Ala Zuskin Perelman 13 Peter L. Berger Paradox or Pluralism? The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer 16 Allan Arkush Do You Want to Know a Secret? Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer • Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings edited by Kenneth Hart Green • Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides by Kenneth Hart Green 19 Alan Mintz The Life of the Flying Aperçu Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education by Morris Dickstein 21 Robert Alter Give Ear O Ye Heavens Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versification: Essays in Comparative Prosody by Benjamin Harshav 25 Deborah Hertz Fanny and Hilde Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment by Hilde Spiel, translated by Christine Shuttleworth 27 Sharon Hart-Green Tested Loyalties The Betrayers: A Novel by David Bezmozgis 28 Marci Shore Everything Is PR Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev 33 Rafael Medoff Desk Pounding and Jewish Leadership The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel by Ofer Shiff READINGS & REFLECTIONS 36 Elli Fischer New Gleanings from an Old Book A new study of the book of Ruth by Yael Ziegler is an occasion for assessing the influential school of Orthodox biblical studies that began at Yeshivat Gush Etzion a generation ago. 38 Daniel Cotzin Burg A View from Reservoir Hill A shul that never left the Old Jewish Neighborhood lives, volunteers, and prays through the recent crisis in Baltimore. THE Arts 40 Elliott Horowitz The Great Gaon of Italian Art Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade by Rachel Cohen • Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman 45 Steven Pressfield An Al Schwimmer Production Above and Beyond produced by Nancy Spielberg, directed by Roberta Grossman EXCHANGE 47 Ethan B. Katz & Strange Journey: A Response to Shmuel Trigano Maud S. Mandel 49 Shmuel Trigano The View from Paris: A Rejoinder to Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel LAST WORD 51 Abraham Socher How the Baby Got Its Philtrum On the cover: Authentication by Mark Anderson. LETTERS Otherwise than J Were Arendt and Herzl Wrong About France? sources and think more critically about his evidence. As soon as I started reading Ruth R. Wisse’s review of I carefully read and reread Steven Englund’s essay The point I tried to make in my review is not J: A Novel (“Coming with a Lampoon,” Spring 2015), on the Dreyfus affair (“An Affair as We Don’t Know that Drumont and Barrès are not appalling anti- I put it down to read the novel first. In both Jacobson’s It,” Spring 2015), and, while there is to admire in his Semites—this is very old news—but rather that when earlier The Finkler Question and Kalooki Nights, as I re- review of the new novel about Dreyfus, I felt a you put them into perspective by considering the call them, there is scant awareness by his characters of sense of letdown by his revisionist thesis. Professor whole of the Dreyfus Affair and what energized it, Judaism or the Jewish people; in J this state of affairs Englund says: “Édouard Drumont, the only impor- their importance is far less than is constantly rehearsed reaches its apogee as the name of the religion or the tant French anti-Semite, was certainly a rhetorical in old-fashioned treatments such as Frederick Brown’s. people cannot even be uttered, let alone recalled. force to be reckoned with at home throughout the To repeat: The Dreyfus Affair turned on other I found myself reading from the perspective of years of the Affair, with his incendiary denunciations matters than just “the Jewish Question,” and French an oleh. Jacobson’s world is bleak; the larger world of the ‘big Jews and their accomplices’ who ought to political anti-Semitism was not a major movement is brutish, unmoored, something less than human. be court-martialed and executed.” even in the Third Republic, let alone in Europe. I cit- The Js, those to whom “IT HAPPENED, IF IT HAP- Has Englund not heard of Maurice Barrès, who, ed a good deal of evidence, much of it new, whereas PENED” are merely reflections of those to whom according to Frederick Brown in his important Mr. Arnon’s points are wearily familiar. I strongly they themselves are, literally, not. urge him to read Grégoire Kauffmann’s biography Frankly, Kevern’s decision not to participate in of Drumont, Laurent Joly’s study of the Action Fran- the renewal of the Js just so they could be annihilated çaise, and, above all, Bertrand Joly’s revisiting of the again makes some sense to me. The state of a people political history of the Dreyfus Affair. If he does so, whose self-awareness is merely a reflection of oth- Mr. Arnon will not come to believe that the France of ers is probably not worth sustaining. The answer, it the belle époque loved Jews (though French Jews very seems to me, lies in true self-renewal and national re- much loved France, as German Jews loved the Kai- newal, which, of course, is the Zionist project. Jacob- serreich, and Austrian Jews adored “der alte Kaiser”), son is sardonically funny, internally consistent, and at nor that there were no virulent anti-Semites there, as the end of the day, the frog in increasingly hot water elsewhere. He may, however, come to see that these that he allegorizes. That might be the way he wants it, questions did not drive either the Affair or French his- but to me it is a clarion call to be otherwise. tory to the degree he has been led to believe. Douglas Altabef Rosh Pina, Israel La Juive I am grateful for Mitchell Cohen’s wide-ranging article Internalized Guilt (“Going Under with Klinghoffer,” Spring 2015). How- Clearly a major element in the passion motivating ever, it missed the valuable opportunity to compare Americans to support BDS is the simple frustration Klinghoffer with the 1835 opera La Juive (The Jewess) of having no realistic alternatives to concretely in- by Jacques Fromental Halévy, which had a place in fluence Israeli policies toward the Palestinians (“Cli- book The Embrace of Unreason, said “That Dreyfus the standard repertoire until the ascent of Nazism a mate of Opinion,” Spring 2015).