An accomplishment for the academy. Readers seeking a less theoretical approach would do well to try Jon Entine’s Abraham’s...
Where did the Jews come from, and what does that question really mean?
Weitzman (Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Judaic Studies/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom, 2011, etc.) explores the question of Jewish origins in almost tortuous detail, demonstrating that what seems like a basic inquiry is in fact a tangle of theories, approaches, and prejudices. The author explains that three viewpoints prevail in the search for Jewish origins. The first is that simple “sleuthing” will lead to a single, obvious answer to the question, “where do Jews come from?” The second is constructivism, a view that origins must be seen as a story or narrative. The third is a postmodern view that is critical of the very search for origins at all. Weitzman begins with genealogy, which may seem an obvious tool but which the author soon discounts. From there, he explores linguistic and source document theories for the origin of Jews from Near Eastern ancestors. Alternatively, he looks at theories that emphasize the origin of Jews as a people distinct from the biblical Israelites. Weitzman goes on to explore ideas of Jewish origins as espoused by Darwinists and by Freud, the archaeological evidence for Jewish origins, and ideas on Hellenism’s effect on Jewish identity. Finally, he examines the role of DNA testing in understanding ethnic origins, a practice filled with promises and pitfalls. In the end, readers may be disappointed by Weitzman’s anticlimactic (though perhaps inevitable) conclusion: “The history of the Jews has to start somewhere, but it is not clear whether, after many centuries of trying and failing to establish that starting point, scholarship has developed or will ever develop the ability to do so.” The author is comprehensive, erudite, and honest, but the book is too academic and theoretical to assist general readers with questions about what it means to be Jewish.
An accomplishment for the academy. Readers seeking a less theoretical approach would do well to try Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children (2007).Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17460-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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