In 2001, Eckstein self-published a fictionalized autobiography; here, Chafets furthers the rabbi’s efforts to publicize and...
Celebrating a controversial rabbi’s life.
The problems with writing an authorized biography are glaringly evident in this life of Eckstein. Chafets (Roger Ailes: Off Camera, 2013, etc.) is forthcoming about his relationship to both his subject and this book. His advance was partly underwritten by the International Federation of Christians and Jews, an organization Eckstein founded and heads; and his royalties will go to that organization. Eckstein was the author’s major source, but, adds Chafets, “that is not the same as saying that this is an ‘as-told-to’ book,” noting that when Eckstein vetted the manuscript, he asked for only one change: the removal of “an unflattering remark he made about a relative.” Nevertheless, the book reads like an as-told-to biography, with Eckstein’s point of view and opinions dominating the narrative and with no attempt by Chafets to contextualize or analyze the man he so greatly admires. In the 1970s, Eckstein took a position with the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago, where he discovered, to his great surprise, that evangelical Christians harbored “unconditional love for God, Israel, and the Jewish people.” Like Eckstein, they believed that the “creation of a Jewish state in Israel (and its defense by the United States) was a sign of God acting in history and fulfilling biblical prophecy.” Eckstein immediately saw an opportunity for bridge building and, most crucially, fundraising. Supported by Pat Robertson, Jimmy Falwell, Pat Boone, and Billy Graham, Eckstein rose to prominence on televangelist programs and speaking tours. He founded the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which eventually became the IFCJ, funneling major contributions to Jewish and Israeli causes. The author portrays Eckstein’s many critics (including his first wife) as narrow-minded, and he echoes Eckstein’s views about Israeli politics and Christian Zionists.
In 2001, Eckstein self-published a fictionalized autobiography; here, Chafets furthers the rabbi’s efforts to publicize and burnish his image.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59184-678-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
