Allan Arkush

Senior Contributing Editor, The Jewish Review of Books at Jewish Review of Books

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Articles

Jewish Review of Books

Jan 14, 2025 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush |Akiva Schick |Jonathan Karp

Routledge 374 pp., $49.99 The 1870s began auspiciously for the Jews of Germany, when the unification of the German Empire culminated in the adoption of a constitution that finally granted them fully equal rights. The decade ended less happily, however, with the emergence of an antisemitic movement that posed a threat to all of the progress they had made in the previous century.
World of Their Children

Sep 1, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush |Akiva Schick

Dutton 416 pp., $32 Joshua Leifer’s much-anticipated new book made an even larger splash than originally expected when a Brooklyn bookstore employee cancelled a scheduled event at which Leifer would have been interviewed about his book by—a Zionist! The story went viral. A week later, the bookstore had apologized, its employee was out of a job, and Leifer was celebrating the sudden metastasis of his audience and his book sales.
Jewish Review of Books

Jul 15, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush |Akiva Schick

Alfred A. Knopf 592 pp., $35 Joseph Seligman left his home in Bavaria in 1837, when he was seventeen, and arrived alone in the United States with $100 in the lining of his trousers. America was in the midst of a financial panic brought on by bad loans and a bank run.
Legitimacy of Hope

Jul 9, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush |Akiva Schick |Ilan Troen

Palgrave Macmillan 267 pp., $37.99 “Israel’s legitimacy is a topic of dispute in the public square,” Ilan Troen notes, toward the conclusion of his new book, “and is likely to remain so.” In his own mind, however, this matter is certainly not up in the air. An American-born veteran Israeli, and one of the pioneers of Israel Studies, Troen has no personal need of a convincing justification for the existence of a Jewish state in the promised land.
Abba Hillel Silver, Former President of the ZOA, Man of the Zionist Hour » Mosaic - Zionist Organization of America

Mar 4, 2024 | zoa.org | Allan Arkush |Jackie Shafer

By Allan Arkush(December 11, 2013 / Mosaic) A scant two months before Israel’s declaration of independence, it seemed the U.S. might retreat from supporting the United Nations plan to partition Palestine into two states. American Zionist leaders were desperate to reach President Truman, who refused to meet with them. So they turned to Eddie Jacobson, the president’s old business partner from Missouri, for whom the door to the Oval Office was always open.
A Veteran Rabbi’s Vocal Defense of Religion, America, and Israel » Mosaic

Feb 21, 2024 | mosaicmagazine.com | Allan Arkush

He insists that human beings are spiritual creatures, and he berates “religion’s loudest critics today” for creating “a clay-pigeon model of religious life, which emphasizes its worst aspects and conveniently forgets other more compassionate and modest expressions of the spirit.” Religion, in the right, limited dose, can, he maintains, “actually be helpful in building community, inculcating kindness, helping people in pain, and helping us in our search for a modicum of happiness in this...
Atah Manhig: A Life in Reform Judaism

Feb 14, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush |Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda

Xlibris Publishing 614 pp., 39.99 “You don’t belong here, Lance. This place is too small for you. Atah manhig (you’re a leader)!” Around thirty years ago our visiting professor of Bible, a Russian-born and bred Brezhnev lookalike who came to us from Haifa, addressed these prophetic words to my friend and then-colleague, Lance Sussman.
Stuck in the Middle

Jan 22, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush

Columbia University Press 248 pp., $28 To many of those who have been alarmed over the past few months by all of the antisemitism emerging from the American Left, Pierre Birnbaum may seem inordinately worried about what is being said about the Jews out in right field. For in this new book, first published in French in 2022, the eye of France’s most distinguished Jewish historian is not focused on the ball that is actually heading our way.
Unfinished Rock - Jewish Review of Books

Dec 7, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Yitz Landes |Akiva Schick |Allan Arkush |Emil Fackenheim

Imagine a Hallmark movie called A Very Teaneck Hanukkah: a large, wholesome family dressed in their best sweaters huddles around a lit menorah singing “Ma’oz Tzur”—the most recognizable and ubiquitous of Hanukkah songs. Or, at least, they quickly sing the first stanza so that they can exchange gifts and sit down to eat the holiday’s traditional oil-fried cuisine.
Solidarity and Democracy

Jul 9, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Arkush

Indiana University Press272 pp., $35 Now, more than ever, it seems as if the lack of a constitution is a great flaw in the Israeli political system. When the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state, it required its future citizens to immediately form a constituent assembly that would draft a democratic constitution. The first Knesset, elected in 1949, took up the baton, but it didn’t follow through. Why not?