An essential collection of Judaica that ably combines the known and the obscure.
The sixth book in an anthology series about Jewish history and culture that covers the years 1750 to 1880.
The latest volume, edited by Carlebach—a professor of Jewish history, culture, and society and director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University—contains a wide range of material by and about major Jewish figures of the era, including autobiographical excerpts, poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing. Authors include well-known figures, such as Karl Marx, and lesser-known ones, such as socialite and poet Rebecca Franks, known as the “Jewish Belle” of Philadelphia. Sections devoted to visual and material culture include images of finials on the rolls that hold Torah scrolls, a stylized topographic map of Israel by scribe and illustrator Moses Ganbash, and paintings such as one depicting a Jewish burial society from the late 1700s. Also included are excerpts from sheet music, such as that for Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Ancienne melodie de la synagogue from 1844. Even those who are well versed in the time period will learn much from these pages, which include a wide range of material, from an epistle that expresses opposition to Hasidism, penned by scholar Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, to a piece on bare-knuckle boxing by an Englishman known as “Mendoza the Jew.” The greatest takeaways from the work involve questions that readers may not have considered; for example, just how did a soldier go about celebrating Passover in the middle of the Civil War, as a Union Army private set out to do in 1862? An account from American Mordecai Sheftall, who was captured by the British in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, is brief but highly engaging. Other, more well-known sources don’t have the same enlightening appeal; for instance, excerpts from the work of Benjamin Disraeli prove relatively dry, with familiar statements, such as how “the fitness of a material object for a material purpose is a test of its utility.” Images of items such as an amulet made to protect pregnant women from Lilith, Adam’s first wife in biblical lore, create more lasting states of wonder.
An essential collection of Judaica that ably combines the known and the obscure.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-19000-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
