A self-consciously radical statement that is both astute and joyous.
A Talmudic scholar who is disenchanted with Israel’s current injustices against Palestinians vows to support Jewish identity and culture through diaspora.
Boyarin, who has authored many books about Judaism and comparative religion, believes that the Jewish identity is shaped less by ethnicity and nationality than by common narratives, languages, and practices. As a young man, the author was deeply engaged in the Zionist socialist youth movement, which imbued him with a deep sense of social justice for everyone. After serving in the Army Reserves in Israel, he lived and studied there for 20 years, raising a family. During that time, he began to realize that Israel was not committed to social justice. Living in the U.S. for the past 30 years, he is ever dedicated to Talmudic study and Jewish culture. In this “manifesto,” the author looks at how two ideals—a prosperous nation-state and commitment to social justice for all—can be achieved. Probing thorny issues with aplomb, Boyarin questions a variety of concepts of Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. Ultimately, he demonstrates the significance of what binds all Jews and makes them what they are: “shared trials and tribulations…shared practices, shared languages, and other cultural forms.” He emphasizes the importance of the Talmud and the lively dialogue that it has engendered across time and space. “Ideas are generated out of quotations, quotations contested, amended, emended, combined, and renewed.” The author draws insightful comparisons to Black learning, identity, and isolation. As jazz is to Black vernacular, so is Talmudic diaspora learning to Jewish sociality. Boyarin is clearly committed to eliminating labels about religion and state, and he will inspire like-minded readers with his focus on “just Jews, singing, dancing, speaking, and writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, Judezmo, learning the Talmud in all sorts of ways, fighting together for justice for Palestinians and Black Lives Matter.”
A self-consciously radical statement that is both astute and joyous.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780300251289
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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