Allan Nadler
By Allan Nadler
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Culture Baruch on Broadway
Although his philosophical masterpiece, “Ethics,” written in the notoriously exact and forbidding “geometrical mode,” is one of the least dramatic works in the history of modern philosophy, and despite the dryness of both his personality and his intensely private life, Baruch Spinoza has exercised the imagination of a long line of dramatists. The parched prose…
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Culture Righteous Indignation: How Are We To Understand the Alleged Spinka Scandal?
The Hasidic Rebbe, or “Grand Rabbi,” is no ordinary Jewish spiritual leader. Unlike rabbis in other denominations, from Reform to the fervently Orthodox, the Rebbe in Hasidic communities is much more than a teacher, adjudicator of Jewish law and community leader. He is nothing less than a conduit between his followers and the Heavens; a…
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Culture Rabbis and Chickens
Rabbis & Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896-1930 By Ira Robinson University of Calgary Press, 200 pages, $34.95. On a wintry Friday afternoon, at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, I was taking leave of my father, who, in the last year of his life, was recovering from a severe bout…
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Culture The Death of Genuine Dissent
Last month, noted legal scholar Noah Feldman set off a firestorm of controversy with his screed against Modern Orthodox Judaism in the New York Times Magazine. The story has by now been hashed and rehashed in other newspapers, on blogs, in heated conversations: Feldman discovers, to his dismay, that he and his non-Jewish girlfriend were…
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Culture Law and Order: Special Galitsianer Unit
**A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History* By Michael Stanislawski Princeton University Press, 160 pages, $21.95. On September 6, 1848, a young Orthodox Jew with the very inauspicious name of A.B. Pilpel (Hebrew for pepper), bearded with sidelocks and dressed in a black hat and a long caftan, entered the…
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Culture The Radical Rationalism of Maimonides
Maimonides’ Confrontation With Mysticism By Menachem Kellner *Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 320 pages, $49.50. * Moses Maimonides (Rambam, in traditional parlance) has been widely lionized as the greatest mind in Jewish history. Even before his death in 1204, the Jews of Yemen went so far as to include his name in their version of…
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Culture Springtime for Spinoza
In April 1655, the year before Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated him, Baruch Spinoza was the victim of a failed assassination. According to French encyclopedist Pierre Bayle, Spinoza was attacked “on leaving the theatre by a Jew who attacked him with a knife. The wound was slight, but Spinoza believed that it was the assassin’s intention…
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Culture New Book Reveals Darker Chapters In Hasidic History
Of all the literary genres to emerge from the 19th-century Haskala, or Hebrew Enlightenment, one of the most popular was anti-Hasidic satire. And the most notorious of these parodies was “Megaleh Temirin” (“Revealer of Secrets,” Vienna 1819), a ribald lampoon written by Joseph Perl that recounts a series of desperate, bungled attempts by fanatic Hasidim…
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