THE LEGACY OF MAURICE PEKARSKY

Maurice Pekarsky was an American rabbi who served as a director for the B'nai B'rith's Hillel Foundation at the universities of Cornell, Northwestern, and Chicago, and who established the Hillel program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Despite the probability that his name and work are not known among non-Jews, this little collection of Pekarsky's speeches, lectures, and jotted notes has a great deal to offer anyone, regardless of religious persuasion, who is interested in the basic purposes of humanistic education, or in the conflict between tradition and modernity. Pekarsky was not a writer, he was a teacher; in contrast to Moses Mendelssohn, ""the Jewish Plato,"" to whom he has been compared, his particular interest was not theology or philosophy but psychology. Always his deepest concerns were those of the ""human-being-born-Jew"" in his quest for meaning and identity. The volume is divided into four sections: ""On Being Jewish Today,"" ""On Israel and American Jewry,"" ""Aspects of Jewish Student Life,"" and miscellany. The personality of a rare, good man informs every page.