Allan Nadler
By Allan Nadler
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Culture Who Owns Leo Strauss?
Political philosopher Leo Strauss was born on this day in 1899. For his 120th birthday, we look back on this essay that the Forward published about Steven Smith’s 2006 book “Reading Leo Strauss.” During his lifetime, the German émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was barely noticed, except by students at the University of Chicago…
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Opinion Norman Lamm Deserves Better
Among the people who enter our lives, enrich our minds and inspire our hearts are at times those we barely, if at all, know personally. Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, who has just announced his retirement as chancellor of Yeshiva University after a remarkably distinguished career, has for decades played such a role in my life….
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Culture Jonathan Sacks Offers Strident Defense of Faith
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning By Jonathan Sacks Doubleday, 384 pages, $28.95 Jonathan Sacks, whose long tenure as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth expires in March, when he turns 65, has for decades been an inspiration to many Modern Orthodox Jews, who…
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The Schmooze Spinoza Para Bobos (Spinoza For Dummies)
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of Portuguese Marranos (or conversos, or crypto-Jews) who had fled the Inquisition. A prodigy at Amsterdam’s Etz Chaim Yeshiva, he was widely expected to become a rabbi. As rumors of his heretical ideas spread, he was denounced by his yeshiva teachers, and in 1656 he…
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Culture Our Favorite Heretic
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by…
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News Wide-Eyed Postcards From Lithuania
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust By Ellen Cassedy University of Nebraska Press, 288 pages, $19.95 This past May, the remains of the Nazi-quisling head of Lithuania?s wartime Provisional Government (PG), Juozas Brazaitis, were ceremoniously disinterred from Putnam, Conn., where he was buried in 1974, and reinterred a few days later in Kaunas,…
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Culture New Book Details Orthodox Response to 9/11 Attacks
A book, “Contending With Catastrophe: Jewish Perspectives on September 11th,” issued by the Beth Din of America records the halachic and philosophical responses of Orthodox rabbis to the devastating consequences of 9/11.
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Culture Chasidism Without Romanticism
Originally published in the Forward March 31, 2000. As the packed houses for the recent Israeli film “Kadosh” testify, the Chasidim these days are a big draw and an even bigger drag. The dark world and mysterious culture of the chasidim simultaneously fascinate and repel modern Jews. Unfortunately, both the fascination and repulsion are often…
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