Lawrence Grossman
By Lawrence Grossman
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Culture The Right Man in the Wrong Job
Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first Century By Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Schocken Books, 304 pages, $26.95 Another Way, Another Time: Religious Inclusivism and the Sacks Chief Rabbinate By Meir Persoff Academic Studies Press, 450 pages, $65 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, is…
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Books No Biblical Bodice-Ripper
The Prophet’s Wife By Milton Steinberg Behrman House, 384 pages, $24.95 One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and…
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Culture The End of Days?
Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson By Elliot R. Wolfson Columbia University Press, 472 pages, $35.00. The Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, known also as Chabad, is the most successful and most controversial movement in American Jewish life. Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, born in 1902, ascended to the leadership after…
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Culture Talmud for Today
The Talmud: A Selection Selected, translated and edited by Norman Solomon Penguin Classics, 896 pages, $16.00 By Lawrence Grossman The distinguished Penguin Classics imprint began in 1946 with a translation of “The Odyssey,” and it has published more than 1,300 titles since, under the motto: “The best books ever written.” The inclusion of a volume…
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Culture When American Judaism Was Yiddish
Yiddish Drashos and Writings By Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, edited by David E. Fishman Ktav Publishing House, 355 pages, $29.50. There was a time when American Jews of very different ideological perspectives would talk, and listen, to each other. One Sunday in 1949, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the leading Orthodox Talmudic scholar in America, addressed…
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Culture Eliot’s Zionism Before Zionism
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot By Gertrude Himmelfarb Encounter Books, 180 pages, $25.95. In the recent speech he delivered in Cairo to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Is the legitimacy of Zionism based primarily on past…
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Culture Our God and God of our Children?
Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal By Dana Evan Kaplan Columbia University Press, 480 pages, $34.50. Orthodox Jews in America By Jeffrey S. Gurock Indiana University Press, 400 pages, $65.00 (hardcover), $24.95 (paperback). Since the end of World War II, Dana Evan Kaplan argues in “Contemporary American Judaism,” “not only have the style and substance…
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News Book Banned by Ultra-Orthodox Brings ‘Torah Personality’ To Life
This path-breaking work, the product of 15 years of painstaking research, brings to pulsating life the world of pre-war “Lithuanian,” or non-chasidic, Orthodoxy, in particular its yeshivas, which have come to serve as educational models for contemporary Orthodoxy in the United States, Israel and elsewhere around the world. Yet the book has been banned by…
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