by Tal Keinan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018
A thoughtful and relevant assessment of the current state of Judaism.
A meaningful attempt to answer a significant question: How can Judaism survive?
In his first book, financier and former Israeli combat pilot Keinan reflects on a lifetime of varied experiences with his Jewish identity, providing a heartfelt, well-reasoned reflection on the Jewish people. Raised in a thoroughly secularized Jewish family, the author first engaged with Judaism as a source of identity as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in the mid-1980s. Later, he moved to Israel and joined the elite Israeli Air Force. After experiencing both American and Israeli Jewish communities, Keinan was led to reflect on the existential issues facing the global Jewish population and to search for answers to the problems facing it. The author deftly describes unsustainable splits in the Jewish communities of Israel; as he terms them, these include Secularists, Theocrats, Territorialists, and the Fourth Israel (often poor and undereducated citizens with little connection to religious and political controversies). According to Keinan, these groups live as separate populations that fundamentally disagree on everything from what it means to be Jewish to the very purpose or legitimacy of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, in America, intermarriage and ambiguity regarding the identity of Judaism continue to lead to a decrease in the Jewish population, a decrease that the author believes will be catastrophic in scope within a few decades. Keinan goes on to search out answers for Jewish viability, drawing on crowd wisdom theory to determine what has kept Judaism alive through diaspora and exploring such intriguing options as a Jewish World Endowment or a strengthened Israeli presidency. As a secular Jew, the author mostly discounts the religious aspects of Jewish identity, and his scorn for ultra-Orthodox Judaism, one of the only growing segments of Judaism, is often evident. But Keinan never promises a perfectly balanced book. Instead, he provides an impassioned yet well-reasoned and definitively well-written reflection on an imperiled people.
A thoughtful and relevant assessment of the current state of Judaism.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-51116-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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