Jerome A. Chanes
By Jerome A. Chanes
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Culture Moses and Anarchy
What are we to make of our biblical narratives? Jacques Derrida famously said that no comment on a text is ever innocent — that the act of exegesis means intervening in the text, asserting power over it and the reader. Such is the case with the legendary Judith Malina’s highly charged play, “Korach: The Biblical…
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Culture Lies and Provocation
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction By Ruth Franklin Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.95 Theodor Adorno famously declared that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” — and indeed impossible. Ruth Franklin, in her thoughtful work of literary history and analysis, “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,”…
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Culture Blackened by Filthy Lucre
Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype By Abraham H. Foxman Palgrave/Macmillan. 256 pages, $26 Capitalism and the Jews By Jerry Z. Muller Princeton University Press. 272 pages, $24.95 The nexus of Jews, capitalism and money became an unholy one early on. One side of this coin is the classic anti-Semitic myth of “Jewish…
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Culture If English Was Good Enough for Jesus Christ…
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible By Robert Alter Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 We are truly in a “biblical” era. The sheer volume of contemporary work translating, commenting on, interpreting and exegeting the Bible is astounding for what one would think would be a well-worked mine. But for Robert…
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Culture Why We Need Akkadian
An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew: Etymological- Semantic and Idiomatic Equivalents With Supplements on Biblical Aramaic By Hayim ben Yosef Tawil KTAV Publishing House, 456 pages, $125 Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For…
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Culture Commentary Quite Contrary
The Commentators’ Bible: The JPS Miqra’ot Gedolot — Leviticus Edited, translated and annotated by Michael Carasik Jewish Publication Society, 270 pages, $75 The act of exegesis is not an innocent or a neutral enterprise. Jacques Derrida taught us that exegesis means intervening in the text and asserting power over it, and thereby over the reader….
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Opinion What the Congress Gave American Jews
When the American Jewish Congress closes its doors — an outcome that increasingly appears imminent — there won’t be many mourners saying Kaddish. Instead, the prevailing communal sentiment will probably be: “We have too many agencies; one less will not matter!” The serious financial problems that had plagued the AJCongress over recent decades became a…
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Culture Communication Breakdown
For The Soul Of France: Culture Wars In The Age Of Dreyfus By Frederick Brown Knopf, 336 pages, $28.95 The Dreyfus case has never been out of season. A century and more has passed since the conviction by court-martial for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the subsequent legal campaign on his behalf, the ultimate reversal…
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