A fascinating, impeccably written, personal tour of the great books of Judaism.
How to read the Jewish past.
Poet and critic Kirsch (Director, Jewish Studies Master’s Program/Columbia Univ.; Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, 2014, etc.) takes a reflective look at what his Jewish religion has been and can be via some of its greatest books. His ambitious survey spans more than 2,500 years and offers a “panoramic portrait of Jewish thought and experience.” The books focus on four central topics: God, the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people. Kirsch begins pretty much at the beginning with the book of Deuteronomy. Devoted to law and history, it’s concerned with the major subject of the Israelites’ relationship to the Land of Israel. He next turns to the book of Esther, which is best read as “historical fiction.” Kirsch is fascinated with its “paradox of Jewish power in a condition of Diaspora.” Jump ahead some 500 hundred years to the Jewish general captured by the Romans, Flavius Josephus, and his The Jewish War, a firsthand account of “perhaps the greatest calamity in Jewish history.” After an account of the Zohar, a 2,400-page compendium that “enchants the universe like no other Jewish book,” comes Glückel of Hameln’s transformative Tsenerene from the 1590s, “one of the most popular Yiddish books of all time.” It did the most to “connect Jewish women to Judaism’s traditional sources,” while her Memoirs is the first autobiography by a Jewish woman. From the 1890s, Kirsch singles out the visionary Viennese writer Theodor Herzl as one of the “most important figures in Jewish history.” The Jewish State, a nonfiction pamphlet, “laid out a detailed plan for the relocation of Europe’s Jews to Palestine,” while his novel Old New Land helped to create Zionism. Kirsch ends his list in 1914 with the Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem. Although a mere 120 pages long, “no work of Yiddish literature has been more influential or more widely loved.”
A fascinating, impeccably written, personal tour of the great books of Judaism.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24176-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dispassionate, intelligent introduction to the civil war that has destroyed the former Yugoslavia. A useful first book by Bennett, a British journalist who has the good fortune to speak both Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian, a skill that has enabled him to draw heavily on literature of the region that would be unavailable to most American or British journalists. Unlike many recent histories of the conflict, this volume dwells neither on the ancient ethnic squabbles of the Middle Ages nor on the appalling atrocities committed against the Bosnians. Instead, it traces political developments from the middle of the last century through the present, showing how the cynical manipulation of nationalist fervor for political gain has been a theme running throughout the region's recent history. Bennett's thesis is that there is little truth to the claims by some journalists that ``events which took place half a century earlier'' caused the current civil war. Rather, he places much of the blame on the local media for fanning the flames of ethnic hatred, in concert with politicians like Serbian leader Slobodan Miloevi. While there is no denying the pernicious role played by the media in the former Yugoslavia, Bennett may be just a little too quick to downplay the role of ethnic strife in the turmoil of the period between the world wars. On the other hand, it is helpful (and painful) to be reminded that Yugoslavia was once the great success story of the Eastern bloc. He is also concise and to the point in his treatment of the WW II period, reminding readers that the Croatian fascists were in fact a minority whose power was handed to them by Hitler and was not the expression of the will of the Croatian people, as some pro-Serb writers have alleged. A good, coolly analytical review of the Yugoslavian conflict.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-8147-1234-7
Page Count: 253
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Though chilling, this unfocused narrative fails to illuminate the purported relationship between Nelson Rockefeller, missionaries in South America, and the modern genocide of Amazonian Indians. Colby (DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, not reviewed) and investigative journalist Dennett detail Rockefeller's rise to power (both unofficial power through his family's oil interests and official power in government); this is coupled with a description of William Cameron Townsend's creation of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a network of evangelical missionaries working under the auspices of the elusively named Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). The authors describe the links between the SIL's in-depth knowledge of indigenous people and their languages and the creation of a sophisticated communications and intelligence-gathering network serving the business interests of multinational corporations and the anti-communist policies of the US government. Also important is the documenting of Rockefeller's powerful role in the development of US policy toward Latin America and his early vision of a ``peaceful conquest of the world'' through economic aid and political manipulation. But beyond this, it is unclear how Rockefeller fits into the devastation of the Amazon's indigenous people. In seeking to document global changes of epic proportions, Colby and Dennett present themselves with an impossible descriptive task, with virtually no opportunity to either analyze their voluminous historical data or focus on any one of the many interesting issues they raise. Only three-quarters of the way into the book do the authors actually discuss the conquest of the Amazon, and the description of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Amazonian Indians is insubstantial; at one point, the authors simply list a series of decimated Indian groups, providing the dates of SIL ``occupation.'' Only in the case of the deaths of striking Bolivian miners is it clear who is responsible and why. This falls considerably short of its potential as a major study of the tragic destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous people. (24 pages b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016764-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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