The first part of a two-volume, comprehensive biography of one of the leading Jewish theologians of this century. This volume covers the influential Eastern European thinker’s formative years until his arrival in the US. From the subtitle onward Kaplan (French and Comparative Literature/Brandeis Univ.) and Dresner (retired professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary) are irritatingly fond of calling Abraham Joshua Heschel (d.1972) a “prophet.” Furthermore, they reduce Heschel’s own traditional religious observance to liberation theology and politics. Rabbi Heschel did march with Martin Luther King in Selma and actively opposed the Vietnam War, but if anything, this biography documents in its most compelling chapters the traditionalist Heschel’s battle with the secularized Jewish Enlightenment’s major ideas and scholars. It was this conflict that made him write, after his emigration from Europe at age 33, such classics of Jewish thought as Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and The Sabbath. Most significantly, Heschel opposed his mentor, Martin Buber—though he did so with characteristic humility and charm. Against the grain of the Kantian atheists who dominated intellectual discussion at the University of Berlin (where he just managed his doctorate under a Nazi rector), Heschel’s main concern was not secularism as much as reductionism, the tendency to explain away religious phenomena (such as prophetic inspiration) in human or scientific terms. Heschel insisted that “divine revelation validated Jewish law” and his “life’s mission [was] to maintain a Jewish way of thinking.” In an otherwise dry and academic book, the described clashes between this descendant of Hasidic masters and secular humanists like Berlin’s David Koigen liven things up. Despite its flaws, this is the first half of a solid biography of one the most important defenders of faith and ethics in modern theology. (34 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07186-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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