Fastidiously researched explanation for the emergence of Jewish women as radicals. In most Jewish histories, women are a footnote. Shepherd (Teddy Kollek—Mayor of Jerusalem, 1988, etc.) remedies this in her often dramatic depiction of the lives of some prominent Jewish women radicals from 1870 on—Anna Kuliscioff, Rosa Luxemburg, Esther Frumkin, Manya Shochat, Bertha Pappenheim, Rose Pesotta, Emma Goldman, et al. Showing how Judaism was traditionally a complex legal and social system as well as a religion, the author explains that Jewish scholarly tradition excluded women from the lifelong male responsibility of studying the Talmud. Segregated in the synagogue, without ceremonies to celebrate their birth or their lives, women were given the family to govern. (The Talmud describes Jewish women as ``a nation apart, bound to the community by marriage.'') In the 16th century, a book called T'sena Ure'ena (Come Out and See) gave women a way to learn, domesticating the Bible with accessible language. But it took until the late 19th century for life to really change for Jewish women—when ``the [Russian] revolution awakened among Jewish girls from comfortably off families a burning desire for higher education and independence and this shook the very foundations of Jewish life, far more seriously than the educational development of the male intelligentsia.'' The women portrayed here led exceptional lives as political figures in the Russian Revolution; in Zionist history (Shochat helped found the kibbutz movement); in psychoanalysis; in the Bund (the Jewish Socialist movement); and in the American work force. What binds them is an elusive Jewish component in their character and politics, as well as a shared reaction to a traditional community whose limits may have produced their remarkable actions. A dense, credible, scholarly portrait of a missing piece of Jewish history. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-674-70410-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
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
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