L'SHLEIMUT

Our health is “inseparable from our ecology.”

At a time when institutionalized medicine competes with what one can find on Google, some have sought solace in traditional healing and ideals of social wholeness. Katz, an assistant professor of American culture and digital studies at the University of Michigan, finds his journey to wellness in the traditions of Jewish radicalism. (The title of his book means “to wholeness” in Hebrew.) Jewish radicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries advocated a communitarian life, in which resources were evenly distributed and in which care would be available to all. These radicals, writes Katz, “challenged capitalist science and medicine in profound ways.” In the words of the 19th-century socialist Aaron Shmuel Lieberman, the goal was “to unite the people around wholeness for everyone and create a kingdom of labor, fraternity, and integrity.” But this is not a book of calm and healing; it’s a work of righteous anger and resistance. The author makes the sweeping argument that diseases are caused by capitalism itself, by the profit motives of Big Pharma and big science: “The understanding of ‘public health’ we get is impoverished, incapable of addressing, for example, the infectious diseases that periodically and unevenly ravage us.” Medicine, he adds, “isn’t concerned with how daily life under capitalism produces a complex tangle of illnesses for certain people. Instead, scientists and doctors are trained to be reductionists, to focus on ‘causes’ of disease that can be isolated in the lab (and ideally, made into patentable products).” Katz seeks to synthesize a powerful anti-institutional argument with Jewish traditions of radical political action and herbalism. In the end, though, this analysis loses strength when stretched into an even broader critique of the state of Israel itself as a threat to political health.

A fiery polemic against “capitalist science” that is fascinating if not always persuasive.