Lawrence Grossman
By Lawrence Grossman
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Culture Grant’s Anti-Semitism—And Tolerance
When General Grant Expelled the Jews By Jonathan D. Sarna Schocken/Nextbook, 224 pages, $24.95 Only once since 1790, when newly elected President George Washington promised Jews that the new American nation would give “to bigotry no sanction,” has a prominent American official promulgated a discriminatory ruling explicitly targeting Jews. While some details remain murky, the…
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Culture Preaching to the Converters
Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policy-making in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Orthodox Responsa By David Ellenson and Daniel Gordis Stanford University Press, 216 pages, $30 In Herman Wouk’s autobiographical novel, “Inside, Outside,” Wouk’s alter ego falls in love with a gentile woman and is somewhat surprised to find that his grandfather, an Old World…
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Culture How Jews Became the People of the Talmud
Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures By Talya Fishman University of Pennsylvania Press, 424 pages, $65 Basic to Jewish religious teaching is the distinction between “written” Torah — Scripture, the Jewish Bible — and so-called “oral” Torah, a diffuse tradition of legal and homiletic rabbinic commentary…
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Culture Modern Orthodoxy’s Human Pillar
Rabbi in the New World: The Influence of Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik on Culture, Education and Jewish Thought Edited by Avinoam Rosenak and Naftali Rothenberg The Hebrew University Magnes Press Ltd., 556 pages, $35 No other major movement in American Jewish life has been as dependent on one person as Modern Orthodoxy was on Rabbi Joseph…
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Culture Love Me, Love Me Not
Philosemitism in History Edited by Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe Cambridge University Press, 344 pages, $85 No, cynical reader, “Philosemitism in History” is not a very short book. And no, hopeful reader, it will not calm Jewish fears of anti-Semitism by showing how much Jews have been esteemed and admired over the years. To the…
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Culture A House of Good Repute?
THE SYNAGOGUE IN AMERICA: A SHORT HISTORY By Marc Lee Raphael NYU Press, 259 pages, $35 No aspect of American Jewish life has been more vilified over the past 40 years than the synagogue. The attack began when the Havurah movement marshaled the antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s youth culture against the postwar synagogue, and…
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Culture Blue Jew, Gray Jew
Jews and the Civil War: A Reader Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn NYU Press, 448 pages, $45 Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction By Benjamin Ginsberg Johns Hopkins University Press, 240 pages, $50 This coming April marks 150 years since the outbreak of the American Civil War. The…
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Culture Modern Times
Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History By David B. Ruderman Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $35 When does modern Jewish history begin? The answer used to be simple. If your interests were social and political, the date was either 1782, when Emperor Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance granted a degree of emancipation to the…
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