An engaging, challenging, and relevant commentary on an ancient source of wisdom.
In this spiritual work, an influential rabbi analyzes the book of Proverbs through the lens of social justice.
Yanklowitz is the founder and head of Shamayim: Jewish Animal Advocacy and YATOM: The Jewish Foster and Adoption Network, and he frequently appears on lists of America’s most inspirational rabbis. With advanced degrees from Harvard and Columbia and as the author of almost two dozen books, he has an undisputed grasp of ancient Jewish thought and its contemporary applications. But he readily admits that this work, a commentary on the book of Proverbs, was “my most difficult one to write to date.” Moving chapter by chapter through Proverbs, the volume follows the predictable pattern of most Torah commentaries. It offers the original text in Hebrew side by side with an English translation and followed by editorial commentary by the author. Yanklowitz’s analysis comes in the form of 57 essays that center on themes related to social justice and personal application. While the book has a firm command of the ancient understandings of Proverbs and is accompanied by an impressive body of research reflected in the endnotes, it excels at disrupting the traditionalist impulses of religion. Readers are challenged to rebel against unjust systems of oppression, to always question authority, and to seek wisdom that transcends blind obedience to religious dogmas. And while the volume does not eschew traditional Jewish interpretations of Proverbs, it reads the texts “critically, with intellectual skepticism.” As such, the work grapples with occasional passages that deal with, for instance, archaic ideas related to gender. Given Proverbs’ lack of direct references to God, Yanklowitz convincingly argues that the biblical book “is accessible to a broad readership, believers and non-believers alike.” This commentary, despite its distinctly Jewish outlook, likewise has a broad appeal and should interest readers of varied religious backgrounds. Written in an accessible style and with a useful glossary for those unacquainted with Jewish terminology, the volume will also entice scholars, religious leaders, and lay readers. And while the essays can be a bit repetitive at times, this work nevertheless delivers another excellent commentary by a contemporary Jewish luminary.
An engaging, challenging, and relevant commentary on an ancient source of wisdom.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-88123-376-6
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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