A cogent consideration of the place of religion in the modern world.
An Israeli scholar considers the future of Judaism.
In a thoughtful social, political, and philosophical examination of Judaism, Goodman—a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and author of the acclaimed and controversial 2018 book Catch-67, among other works—argues for the revitalization of Judaism that meets what he sees as an abiding hunger for connection and communion. Because Orthodox Judaism is the established religion in Israel, many Israeli Jews feel a “painful tension between modern values and ancient traditions. Religious Jews feel compelled to sacrifice their conscience for their faith,” and secular Jews feel compelled to reject orthodoxy’s cultural insularity and strictures. But in rejecting religion, Goodman asserts, secular Jews cut themselves off from strong communal ties and sustaining traditions. “Human beings need to feel that they are part of, and have a part in, a story that is bigger than themselves,” he writes. Religious traditions “instill a sense that the individual will is not the most important thing in life, and this feeling pushes people to make room in their lives for others.” Goodman brings to bear the thinking of myriad Jewish philosophers and theologians to support his view that all Jews, even atheists, can benefit from a connection to Jewish tradition, including seminal texts such as the Torah, and “that secularism at its most profound maintains a relationship with the past.” “In the Jewish tradition,” he adds, “the past is engaged in a dialogue with the future.” As a member of an Orthodox congregation, he is “well aware that the stricter Orthodox Judaism becomes, the more acute the paradoxes at its heart will be.” Yet he believes that maintaining an “intimate contact with the cultural assets of the past” enriches his, and his family’s, life. “Judaism,” he asserts, “is the Jews’ ongoing conversation. The conversation about Judaism is Judaism.”
A cogent consideration of the place of religion in the modern world.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25224-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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