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
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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