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Jan 14, 2025 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jesse Tisch |Akiva Schick |Joseph Epstein |Abraham Socher
Free Press 304 pp., $29.99 Simon & Schuster 464 pp., $20.99 Memoir is risky business. Its reputation? Slightly dubious. Its vices? Vanity, indiscretion, omission. Don’t trust it, said Orwell, unless it reveals something shameful. Even then, you might wonder why someone probes their past, poking around in the attic of their psyche. Why not let demons rest? If anyone understands these hazards, it’s Joseph Epstein, a great practitioner and skeptic of personal writing.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda |Abraham Socher
In 2004, a Hasidic man with a long black beard came onto Jimmy Kimmel Live! to sing about praising God in a semi-Jamaican accent. Even now, it’s astonishing to watch Matisyahu—bespectacled, black-hatted, and confident—perform his set on late-night television. His reggae beatboxing, dm-da-da-btt-te-taa-tikt, quickly shifts into the yibbio-bo-bums of a Hasidic niggun before he sings, “No matter where I am, bless me with all your light. . . . Let me stop praise your name. . . .
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Abraham Socher |Akiva Schick |Jesse Tisch
One day when I was young and easy under the red-roof tiles and as happy with my growing family as the Hollywood Hills were green (when you could see them through the smog), I walked up to the corner of Sherbourne and Pico on some small errand and ran into a guy I’ll call Charles. We weren’t exactly friends, but we’d met the previous year in Jerusalem.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Eli Rubin |Akiva Schick |Avinoam J. Stillman |Abraham Socher
University of Pennsylvania Press 424 pp., $64.95 Kabbalistic literature presents its teachings as simultaneously original and ancient—milin hadatin atikin, in the Zohar’s memorable idiom. Those who embrace Kabbalah often do so in the belief that all contemporary mysteries and problems can be resolved, or at least understood, through the ancient wisdom it conveys.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Leah Sarna |Akiva Schick |Abraham Socher |Tal Keinan
De Gruyter 803 pp., $152.99 A few summers ago, I came across a student crying in the beit midrash. This isn’t terribly unusual—I run summer programs for teenage girls. But this time was different. The sobbing student had been introduced to Talmud study in her Jewish day school, but only on that day did she learn that the Tosafot, a commentary penned by Rashi’s students and their medieval disciples and printed on the pages of the standard Vilna edition of the Talmud, was written by men.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Shai Secunda |Akiva Schick |Abraham Socher |Stuart Schoffman
Scala Arts Publishers 340 pp., $60 William Davidson Permanent Exhibition Gallery The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem On October 18, 1899, on the front page of the Warsaw Hebrew daily, Hatzfirah, a physician and book collector named Joseph Chasanowich published a lengthy call to erect a library in Jerusalem:I say that in Jerusalem there will be built a grand house . . .
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Yosef Lindell |Michael Weingrad |Abraham Socher
Some days are goslin days. At least that’s the conceit of “Goslin Day,” a 1970 horror story by the fantasy and science fiction writer Avram Davidson, who would have been one hundred in 2023. Solomon Faroly awakens one morning to a “hotsticky feeling in the air, the swimmy looks in the dusty corners of windows, mirrors; something a tension, here a twitch and there a twitch. Notgood notgood.
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Abraham Socher
Both Jonathan Karp’s and Reviel Netz’s essays are written in the shadow of October 8—not the day of the unthinkably brutal Hamas massacre in southern Israel, but the day after. Or even, as Netz remarks, the very afternoon of that terrible day itself. For that was when college student activists, their off-campus allies, and more than a few of their professors commenced their furious reaction—against Israel.
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Nov 21, 2023 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Elli Fischer |Akiva Schick |Abraham Socher |Richard Wolin
When Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was asked whether one could exchange hostages for imprisoned terrorists in the midst of the Entebbe crisis, he began by arguing that to do so would not violate the prohibition on sacrificing one person in order to save another. We read that even if the released terrorists went on commit further acts of violence, the exchange itself would be an act of rescue, not an act of collaboration with evildoers.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Cole Aronson |Malka Simkovich |Abraham Socher
Four decades ago, some law students hosted a conference at Yale that spawned the Federalist Society, membership in which is now an informal requirement for success as a conservative lawyer. FedSoc (as it’s known) might be the most important professional association in America. In return for tolerating Donald Trump, its vice president was invited to vet nominees to numerous federal judgeships and three seats on the Supreme Court.
