Allan Nadler
By Allan Nadler
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Letters July 28, 2006
Include Federations As Philanthropic Partners When well-regarded professionals like Jeffrey Solomon and Mark Charendoff suggest the power of philanthropic partnerships, we ought to listen carefully not only to what they say, but to what they don’t (“Harness the Potential of Philanthropic Partnerships,” July 14). They provide us with suggested ersatz legal structures for philanthropic partnerships,…
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News Haman’s Swaying Power: Purim and the Image of the Gallows
Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence By Elliott Horowitz Princeton University Press, 356 pages, $35. * * *| For most Jews, Purim is simply the most riotous of the Jewish holidays: It’s the innocent, if irreverent, celebration of Jewish survival in the face of an ancient threat of genocide. The rituals of…
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Culture A New Book Examines How Yiddish Became the Language of Aggravation
Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods By Michael Wex St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $24.95. * * *| If you asked me whether I enjoyed Michael Wex’s hilarious and learned book, “Born To Kvetch,” I would find myself in an impossible quandary. To admit the rare pleasure I derived…
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Culture The Work of a Worthy Diarist
The Journals of Yaacov Zipper, 1950-1982: The Struggle for Yiddishkayt Translated from the Yiddish and edited by Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle McGill/Queens University Press, 192 pages, $39.95. * * *| The appearance of the random, private journals of the obscure principal of a Canadian Yiddish school does not suggest an auspicious literary event. But…
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Culture False Messiahs and Whirling Dervishes: A Scholar’s Fresh Take on an Old Topic
The Sabbatean Prophets By Matt Goldish Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $39.95. ——- The following dire, revolutionary proclamation issues forth from a charismatic provocateur in Gaza: “None will be saved from these tribulations except those dwelling in this place. The [very] name of the place [connoting strength] expresses her nature. And with the advent of…
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News The Other Preacher From the Galilee
Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship By Lawrence Fine Stanford University Press, 504 pages, $25.95. * * *| He was a charismatic preacher from the Galilee whose teachings challenged the regnant Jewish doctrines of his day and undermined rabbinical authority. He communed with the spirits of the…
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News Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book
Leaders of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox yeshiva are scrambling to distance themselves from a book by one of their disciples, which argues that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species. Written by Rabbi Saadya Grama — an alumnus of Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J. —…
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Israel News A New Take on Old Ethics
In one of the more unsettling lines in modern Yiddish literature — a genre hardly lacking in disturbing sentiments — a young man who has left the yeshiva for a secular life is rebuked by his former classmate: Don’t you remember what our rabbi taught? He who has studied in the Mussar yeshiva will never…
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