An entertaining overview likely to inspire debate.
A spirited examination of the essence of Jewishness.
Acknowledging that Jews “don’t know if we are a religion, a civilization, an ethnic group, a race, all or none of the above,” librarian and journalist Maxwell (Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship, 2006, etc.) maintains, nevertheless, that Jews share definable traits. Drawing on abundant sources, including the Talmud, Judaic scholars and historians, rabbis, a cadre of friends that make up her own “Jewish Jury,” and assorted figures from popular culture (Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, and Joan Rivers, among many more), the author brings a lively curiosity to her lighthearted investigation. Describing herself as a “spiritual-but-not-religious Jew” who married a non-Jew and has raised her daughter as a Jew, she feels an “unshakable loyalty” to her Jewish identity and sets out to discover what makes Jewishness distinctive. Worrying, she asserts, is a special Jewish trait, perhaps inspired by ancient disasters (the Ten Plagues, for example) or persecution. Other shared behaviors include taking pride in achievements attained by Jews; an affinity for joining social and charitable groups; and particular food choices, such as cheesecake, bagels and lox, and gefilte fish. Her assertion, though, that Jews have a “unique relationship” with food might surprise “an Italian Catholic momma” whose “religion doesn’t even esteem food as much as mine.” Comedy seems to Maxwell also particularly Jewish. “Over the past forty years,” she writes, “an estimated 80 percent of America’s leading comedians and writers have been Jews.” The search for typical traits leads, not surprisingly, to the stereotypical: Maxwell debunks the derogatory image of a “Jewish nose” but not the notion that Jews talk faster and louder than others. She asserts that verbal sparring results from Jews’ tendency “to trust that with enough talking, arguing, debating, and analyzing, the truth will emerge.” Besides examining traits, Maxwell considers her own apparently uncanny “Jewdar” that enables her to recognize other Jews. Urging Jews to talk about her book with others, she provides a 30-page appendix of hints to structure discussion.
An entertaining overview likely to inspire debate.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8276-1302-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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