A worthwhile collection for scholars and readers interested in Jewish affairs.
An intellectual history of 20th-century Judaism.
An adept crew of editors and writers takes on the arduous task of documenting two difficult-to-define concepts: modernity and Judaism. The result is a hefty collection of 44 biographical essays of Jews born as early as the 1850s and as late as the 1950s. The editors identify a full range of individuals to profile, from poets to artists to scientists to politicians. The work begins with a somewhat cumbersome introduction authored by the four editors. “Modernity…can be understood, as we have seen, as a border- and contact-zone: as liminal spaces and liminal times, in which rituals of transformation and of renewal and conversion are believed and staged—and this is expressed in a great deal of critique.” Indeed, each contributor puts forth his or her own expression of what “modernity” is—at least in regards to their own particular subject matter. Various themes run throughout the book, perhaps chief among these being assimilation. Virtually every person profiled is or was, in one way or another, “assimilated” into another, non-Jewish culture. In some cases, that assimilation was muted, though quite real (Abraham Isaac Kook); in other cases, it was quite complete (Simone Weil). Socialism is another recurring theme, as various individuals promoted or at least confronted the new realities of socialist theory and practice in 20th-century Europe. Of course, also playing significant roles are such motifs as anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the inescapable reality of Hitler’s reign. Readers will find an impressive range of personalities from a wide variety of disciplines, including the arts (Mark Rothko), the sciences (Freud, Einstein), literature (Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Kafka, Bellow, Levi, Lispector), statecraft (David Ben-Gurion), philosophy (Buber, Derrida), and a host of others.
A worthwhile collection for scholars and readers interested in Jewish affairs.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-16423-6
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
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
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