A reasoned but too narrowly argued historical brief against Jewish assimilation into Western culture. Rubin (Foreign Policy Institute/Johns Hopkins, Politics and History/Tel Aviv Univ.) states in his introduction that there is a spectrum of assimilation, but his text barely acknowledges that fact. Rubin's history focuses on the extreme end: on converts, from Heinrich Heine to Arnold Schoenberg; on anti-Semitic Jews, from Isaac Asimov to Vladimir Zhirinovsky; and on radical assimilationists, from Rosa Luxemburg to Walter Benjamin. Rubin focuses almost exclusively on the intellectual and economic elite, and his analysis relies heavily on literary citations and secondary sources (with few statistics to support broad statements), especially in chapters on Austria/Germany and America. The chapter on America is the book's strongest, analyzing the Jewish and assimilationist content of Woody Allen's films and effectively portraying the paradoxes faced by American Jews: atavistic fears of persecution contrasting with the security and comfort they actually experience. Assimilation, argues Rubin, has been a no-win situation for Jews; those who abandon their history and their people can reap only guilt, bitterness, and a sense of alienation—though, Rubin adds, this last became a badge of honor for American Jewish intellectuals in the 1950s and '60s. ``Making themselves hate figures or apparently dangerous iconoclasts could be a good career move,'' Rubin sarcastically notes. (Similar repeated comments ironically reinforce stereotypes of Jews as mercenary social climbers.) The author advocates that Jews who have abandoned religion retain a commitment to Jewish culture and knowledge as a source of identity and pride—but his history offers no evidence that such a middle road is possible. Nor, in discussing the impact of the state of Israel on Jewish identity, does he acknowledge that it poses new conundrums not only for Jews outside its borders, but for those who live there as well. A first—but woefully incomplete—stab at understanding the main threat to Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2293-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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