Allan Nadler
By Allan Nadler
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Culture A Mournful Reminder of Bialik
Originally published in the Forward February 14, 2003. The first words intoned at last week’s memorial in Houston for the fallen astronauts of the Columbia space shuttle were in Hebrew: “Acharei moti sifdu kacha li” After my death, thus mourn for me: There was a man, and see — he is no more. This man…
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Culture The Portrait of a Renegade British Rabbi Struggling To Maintain Faith and Intellect
Originally published in the Forward October 29, 1999. BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT By Louis Jacobs Littman, 272 pages, $39.50 My first encounter with the complexities and occasional hypocrisies of Orthodox Jewish politics took place in London 26 years ago. I was then a pious and rather naive rabbinical student at Jews’ College, England’s establishment Orthodox seminary….
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Books Cities of Jewish Success, Crushed
JEWISH BIALYSTOK AND ITS DIASPORA By Rebecca Kobrin Indiana University Press, 380 pages, $24.95 GERMAN CITY, JEWISH MEMORY: THE STORY OF WORMS By Nils Roemer Brandeis University Press, 328 pages, $35 A vast, heartbreaking and, to English readers, inaccessible Yiddish and Hebrew library — of some 1,000 volumes, studded with unique memoirs and rare photographs…
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Culture Kiev Jewry’s Temporary Triumph Over Adversity
Kiev: Jewish Metropolis. A History, 1859-1914 By Natan M. Meir Indiana University Press, 424 pages, $27.95 Natan Meir’s meticulous new history of Kiev Jewry in the modern period, is an assiduous work of conventional scholarship. Meir provides a thorough, lucid and ultimately heartrending account of the noble successes of Kiev’s Jews in building a solid…
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Culture A Down to Earth Philosophy
Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought By David Biale Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $35 There is a charming Jewish tradition of taking delight in the discovery of the hidden Jewishness of celebrities. This childishly ethnocentric, but perfectly innocuous, enchantment with uncovering the Jewish origins of the famous and fabulous was…
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Culture What Modern Orthodoxy Thinks of Its Neighbors
The Relationship of Orthodox Jews With Believing Jews of Other Religious Ideologies and Non-Believing Jews Edited by Adam Mintz KTAV, 401 pages, $30 Like a picture, a title is occasionally worth a thousand words. Such is the case in the most recent publication of the Orthodox Forum, an intellectual think-tank of centrist Orthodox rabbis and…
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Culture The Life (and Death and Life) Of the Rebbe
The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson By Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman Princeton University Press, 382 Pages, 29.95 Most Jewish New Yorkers vividly remember the Crown Heights riots of August 1991, four horrendous days of attacks on Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jews that resulted in the brutal murder of Yaakov Rosenbaum, a young…
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News A Historian’s Polemic Against ‘The Madness of False Messianism’
This article was originally published in the October 19, 2001 issue of the Forward. The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference By David Berger Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 195 pages, $29.50 For the past two millennia, Jews have powerfully resisted — often with their very lives — the Christian notion that…
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