Allan Nadler
By Allan Nadler
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Opinion What the Baal Shem Tov Left Behind
The yahrzeit of a Hasidic rebbe — far from being a day devoted to mourning the dead — is a bona fide yontef. It is marked by feasting, singing and dancing, testifying to the supreme confidence of Hasidim that their departed leader is still actively interceding on their behalf in the heavens. This month, on…
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Culture A Rich Eastern European Dish
The Jews in Poland and Russia: Volume I, 1350-1881 By Antony Polonsky The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 568 pages, $59.50 The academic world has become, as of late, almost grotesquely distended by piles of books and articles on the narrowest and most obscure of subjects, written in increasingly opaque scholarly jargon. A mere glance…
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News Tariq Ramadan Gets a Hero’s Welcome, and Cold Shoulders, at Religion Scholars Confab
Swiss-born Muslim scholar and public intellectual Tariq Ramadan has for decades been a lightning rod for controversy. He was barred from entry to America by the Patriot Act’s “ideological exclusion provision,” and then on account of his financial contributions to two Hamas charities. Even so, he took center stage at the American Academy of Religion’s…
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Culture ‘Zion, Shall You Not Beseech’
The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage By Raymond P. Scheindlin Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $45.00. The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167 – 1900 By Adam Shear Cambridge University Press, 400 pages, $90.00. A heady era of student activism permeated my undergraduate years at McGill University in the early…
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Culture Fiery Pulpits On the Home Front
Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800-2001 By Marc Saperstein Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 640 pages, $69.95. In his semiautobiographical masterwork, “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” the late novelist Henry Roth recalled his Uncle Louie’s little kitchen-table “sermon” that, mainly to his mortified mother, justified his decision to join the American army in the…
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Culture Absence and Presence
Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah By David Weiss Halivni, edited and introduced by Peter Ochs Rowman & Littlefield, 144 pages, $21.95. When John McCain was finally forced to reject publicly Reverend John Hagee’s support, he explicitly condemned some of the Christian leader’s most provocative views. Among them was Hagee’s professed belief that…
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Culture A Sad, Searching Soul
The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust By Ben-Zion Gold University of Nebraska Press, 154 pages, $21.95. Among its many gifts, Ben-Zion Gold’s modest and moving chronicle of a Hasidic boy coming of age in pre-Holocaust Poland affords readers a bracing reprieve from the cynicism generated by a recent plague of phony, self-aggrandizing…
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Culture Haredi Life, Too Purely Rendered
The Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, don’t go to the movies. This is partly on account of the silver screen’s abundant displays of what is known among these communities as pritsus — that is, sex and general profanity — but it is also because any such frivolous entertainment is considered “bittul-Torah,” a prohibited waste of precious…
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