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| November 23, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Jezebel Letters
 Give Eleanor Ferris Beach credit. Ancient archeological research isn't exactly the most scintillating of subjects (though I admit to being quite the nerd in my own interest in the topic), so why not dress it up in novel-esque clothes? It's a noble effort, an attempt to show the intrigue and drama that so typified the lives of such epic figures as the Kings of Israel and she who has been immortalized as the ultimate corruptor: Jezebel.
A noble effort. One deserving of credit. But let's leave it at that.
The problem with Beach's well-informed piece of speculative fiction is that it reads less like a novel and more like the contents of an academic paper's appendix. Letter after fictional letter, too many written in the style of dull Biblical passages, unfold until you're literally numbed into submission. Your eyes will glaze over long before you can get wrapped up in the "assassination plot supported by the conniving Queen Jezebel." It sounds sexy. It isn't.
Which is perhaps why this realm of academic research is so confined to the dusty back rooms of universities or museums that draw too few visitors. It styles itself too much like its antiquated subject matter, and finds itself utterly incapable of telling the vivid stories it discovers. Archaeology is fascinating, and its stories are dramatic, sometimes even sexy.
But without a strong framework of well-crafted prose, these "letters" read like so many chapters in some obscure book of the Bible. Hebrew school was never so boring.
'Tis a shame, really. The rise of alternate histories, particularly those that revisit the viewpoints of women figures, is ripe for grand tales. If ever there was a character more deserving (and more appealing), Jezebel is she. This book, however, doesn't make the cut.
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| November 21, 2005 |
INTERVIEW: Rochelle Krich
 Rochelle Krich was an unlikely author. The Orthodox Jewish author was raising six children when she embarked on her writing career. A high school English teacher, she admitted to having fantasized about becoming a published author for years.
"I think my husband said stop kvetching about it and do it," Krich says during a recent phone interview. She admits, however, there were difficulties.
"Sometimes when I would be a way on a book tour and I would miss some of my children's events at school, I hated that. You make choices, and you don't know if it's the right one," says Krich, a hint of regret sneaking into her words. After a pause she adds, "My youngest, he was three or four when I started writing. I would sing lullabies to him on the phone, but it's not the same as being there."
Fifteen years and thirteen novels later, it's hard to argue that Krich made the wrong choices. Her first book, Where's Mommy Now? won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original, and she's gone on to win or be nominated for plenty more. Still one wonders why Krich took on crime novels.
"As a child, I was an avid reader of mysteries," remembers the author. "I'm a puzzle person, I love trying to figure out whodunit. More than that, I've come to appreciate the whodunit, the thought that justice is restored, that the world is set to order."
For Krich, and her readers, the crime novel becomes a form of therapy. As Krich describes it, in a world where "so often the bad guys even if they're caught aren't convicted" writing a mystery novel allows the author an opportunity to "put the bad guys away." As therapy goes, it's not bad, though maybe not as good as mah-jongg, which Krich has played weekly for thirty years.
This brings us to the Jewish side of Krich, who has increasingly worked Jewish characters and subject matter into her novels. As an educator prior to being an author, I ask her if she sees a chance to bring the Orthodox Jewish world to a larger audience of readers.
"I love telling stories, and in the framework of the story, if I can take the reader on a journey, and expose him or her to things that I am trying to become exposed to, thing that don't necessarily have answers, that's a bonus," says Krich.
She points to Angel of Death, "the second in my Jessie Drake series. She's a homicide detective, who finds out that she's Jewish, that her mother was a hidden child in the Holocaust. I wrote that book because I'm outraged and appalled by Holocaust deniers." Some reviews, including one from Publisher's Weekly, took umbrage and criticized the book as being to preachy.
"I didn't really care. It's my feeling there are many people, good people, not anti-Semitic people, who may not have the opportunity to come into contact with Jews, who might buy into Holocaust deniers. They may not pick up a non-fiction book, but they may pick up my book," argues Krich. She actually received a letter some time later from a woman in North Carolina who had exactly that reaction and promised to stamp out some bigotry in herself. "I was crying," says Krich.
In her recent book, Now You See Me, the author continues her Molly Blume series and her dive into Jewish topics. The Jewish crime reporter, Blume is married to Rabbi Zack, and when a former teacher (and rabbi) shows up desperately seeking help in finding his runaway daughter, Hadassah, the heroine ends up with plenty of regrets and (obviously) plenty of mystery on her hands.
"One of the reasons I chose to make the runaway teen an Orthodox Jewish teenager is because I wanted to show that no community, no matter how sheltered, are invulnerable to the dangers that are lurking out there for teenagers," says Krich. Once again, the author is writing a message into her text. And once again, critics are mixed. Publisher's Weekly has once again taken aim, calling the book "lukewarm" and lamenting that "Krich's usual solid plotting suffers."
The book, which includes chapters written from the perspective of the runaway girl, isn't as tight as earlier releases. This much is true, but it still retains suspense and most of all becomes another example of Krich's greatest strength as an author: her ability to portray a world foreign to most American readers, the world of Orthodox Jewry.
Her early books didn't include Jewish themes, or at least Jewish characters. "My agent showed me a rejection letter from another publisher that said great book, great story, but is there really going to be a market for this overtly Jewish story," remembers Krich of her early experience. She nevertheless had a desire to write overtly Jewish stories.
"I wanted to write about my world. I wanted to share my Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, the very mainstream lifestyle that I have," says the author with a sense of passion in her voice. "I guess it took me a while to get comfortable enough. Lots of people are responding to it. I'm really gratified by that response."
Plus Krich sees the Jewish milieu of her books as an advantage. "I know when I read mysteries, I love reading about some exotic world that I would probably not come into contact with outside the pages of the book. I would hope readers who read my book would experience that as well," she argues.
Considering the quality of her writing, I could hardly disagree.
You can learn more about Rochelle Krich by visiting her website, RochelleKrich.com. She also blogs for your reading pleasure.
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| November 18, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Genesis Prayer: Discover the Ancient Secret to Modern Miracles
 Oh bother.
This is what I think of a particular genre of books (I won't deign to call it literature) that seeks to show us how we can be filty rich, find the most stunningly beautiful spouse, cure cancer, make peace in the Middle East, and be named supreme ruler of the world. No really, if you just buy this book and follow its advice you'll get all of that. You'll walk on water too.
When its self-help books for the business dreamers, I find them inoffensive if annoying. When it pops up in the realm of religion, it just becomes insidious. Spare us the absurdity.
So it was with a deep sigh that I picked up The Genesis Prayer by Jeffrey Meiliken. The inside flap was more than enough to spike my Nonsenso-meter (I trademarked that, really). "The Genesis Prayer," it reads with all candor, "the first and most powerful prayer in the Bible, is a source of untold riches."
I crap you not. According to this humble description, this one little prayer "creates miracles," "brings blessings, health, happiness, soul mates, or children," and "plugs us into the forces at play in the universe." You'll be a superhero after reading this book. Really.
The book, written by a mathemetician, and using some simple (ha!) formula that underpins the Bible sheds its immense light on our ability to get whatever we want! Those last four words should be enough to send any rational person running. Absurd enough, I admit, but what intrigued me (in a very bad way) was how the book ties in so many legitimate threads.
Gematria, for one gets is due. I don't know that this is actually gematria, but it gives the whiff. The numerical study of the Hebrew canon isn't intended to show us the doorway to the universe, some secret backdoor into the Matrix where we can make anything we want happen. It is intended to give us a deeper insight into the texts, and even when it veers into the mystical it still retains a sense of humility. No serious mystic makes the kind of grandiose promises that this load of tripe does.
Then there is the avenue of religious studies that seeks to find the commonality between religious faiths. At its most developed, this particular veign of philosophy argues that all religions are essentially the same message in different packaging. Think of it as a philosophical Rosetta Stone, showing us there one divine source can emanate into a variety of fractured religious denominations.
Underlying this book is the notion that all religious faiths tap into this underlying code in some respect, though the author focuses on the Hebrew texts. The problem is that this form of religious theory isn't a conspiracy theory but an honest intellectual attempt to show our commonality and lessen division. It's not a get rich quick scheme, for crying out loud.
Nevertheless, people will get this book. They will read this book. They will utter a prayer and something good will happen. They will think the two are linked. Post hoc ergo propter hoc!
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| November 17, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Truth (with Jokes)
 I should probably just admit it. I'm not an Al Franken fan. His radio show, which I tried to listen to, does nothing for me. His style is not engaging. His wit falls flatter than a warm Coca-Cola left out in the southern sun.
See that last sentence? See how badly it was written. That's kind of how I feel about Franken. That's kind of how I feel about his film work and his stand-up "routines."
But, and this is a big but, the man does something very well. He finds a way to lampoon the propoganda and fear-mongering of the right-wing punditry (and politicians) without getting so serious and depressing. He's an activist in the Jon Stewart mold, using humor and parody to show the utter ridiculousness of his political opponents.
He's no Jon Stewart, but he ain't shabby. Thankfully, he writes books. It is without a doubt true that his humor carries better on the page than in person (or over the airwaves). I don't doubt I'm in the minority here. I'm sure plenty find Al Franken to be absolutely hilarious, and that's fine. I find him to be fairly intelligent and possessed of a talent for satircal zingers, but he's not my cup of tea.
His latest book, The Truth (with Jokes) is perhaps one of his better forays onto the partisan battle field. He vivisects the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, which isn't particularly difficult but it is hard to do it with jokes, good ones in any event. Franken succeeds in doing just that.
Nevertheless, the real high points of the book are the utter absurdities it reveals to us. For example, when President Bush tried to sell his Social Security reform package, he tried to scare the bejesus out of everyone with news of an impending $11 trillion shortfall. Franken dutifully points out the lie of this figure: they stretched life expectancy out to 150 years with a retirement age of 67. Having to pay for an 83-year retirement can be expensive, but as Franken also writes, "They're never gonna get to that without stem cell research."
Frankly, if you can find it in your funnybone to vibe with Franken's humor than this book is a must read. I can't, but I did enjoy the book. What I (and all liberals) should enjoy more is that Franken will do what all the polemically-outraged pundits on the left have failed to do with a litany of books on this subject -- he'll draw an audience. People will read this who would never have picked up a book on the subject if it weren't... you guessed it, with jokes.
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| November 16, 2005 |
REVIEW: 700 Sundays
 Billy Crystal guesses he had about 700 Sundays to spend with his father. After that, his father died when Billy was just 15-years-old and immediately after an eternally unresolved argument between the two. There lies the weight that keeps Crystal's book version of his popular Broadway one-man show from being little more than a series of zingers and laughable riffs.
Indeed, 700 Sundays is just this side of unpredictable which makes it refreshing as opposed to other celebrity memories which are more, what's the word -- oppressive. For those who expect Billy to dwell on his Hollywood highlights (Harry met Sally once, did you know?) will be disappointed.
Or perhaps they won't. After all, the comedian chooses instead to focus his wit on the Long Island oddball roots that produced his genius, and that's far more entertaining than a rehash of old movies.
As for Crystal's father, he was a big-shot jazz promoter. His uncle, Milt Gabler, launched the Commodore music label and recorded Billy Holiday before she was Billy Holiday. Louis Armstrong even showed up at a family Seder, and the rough-voiced singer was asked why he didn't "cough it up." Amusing to be sure, anecdotal indeed, but the real magic of Crystal's tale is in the relationship he shared with his father.
It was his father that got him a tape recorder when he confessed his desire to do comedy and it was his father who didn't come down hard when the son showed up at the family dinner table doing off-color schtick lifted from the best of the Borscht Belt. We should all thank Billy's father, because we got Billy out of that deal.
We should all thank Mr. Crystal for this poignant and funny piece of literature (not to mention a little one-man play). Sure the early jokes don't translate nearly as well on the page as they do coming out of the comic's own mouth, but these are the warm-ups to the rest of the book. The rest of the book is priceless.
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| November 15, 2005 |
REVIEW: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
 We often take it as indisputably obvious that religious tolerance is good, that a pluralism of belief is a recipe for cooperation and prosperity. When people argue that religion is its own evil they are marginalized only slightly less than those who argue that science is the Devil's playground.
So it is certainly a tempting read when an author pipes up and pens an entire book on why religion really is bad, science really is better, and we should abandon our dogmatic faith in favor of an empirical rationalism. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Sam Harris gets kudos for his willingness to put his arguments out there in stark detail, utterly without sugar coating. Mary Poppins he ain't.
But kudos only go so far, and Harris perhaps could have used a dose of sugar somewhere in the process of writing this mess of overgeneralizations and uninformed libel against the believers of our world. It goes without saying, of course, that absolute belief that denies even what our rational senses tell us is a path towards disaster. Those who, in the words of one reviewer, "do not fear death for themselves, and who also revere ancient scriptures instructing them to mete it out generously to others" are a problem without question.
Harris falls down by imagining that all of religious belief either subscribes to such a worldview or tacitly endorses it by promoting supernatural dogma in the absence of proof. One wonders if the author wouldn't have been well served to read another book reviewed here, The Measure of God. Had he done so, he might have stumbled across the Gifford Lecture of one William James, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. That lecture took place in the first years of the 20th century, and one-hundred-plus years later its insights are as informative as ever.
Most significantly, James eloquently showed something that Jewish proponents of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) had articulated long before, that religion can do more than coexist with reason; religion often relies upon it.
Harris, on the other hand, is overly blunt and hyperbolic in his disdain for religious faith, so much so that he fails to fully understand that which he is denouncing. If he did, perhaps his prose would be better tempered and much more effective. As it is, he generalizes to the point of absurdity -- Publisher's Weekly cited the following line: "mysticism is a rational enterprise; religion is not" -- and that is a shame. The underlying question of how much mainstream religious faith excuses fundamentalist interpretations is one deeply in need of being addressed with seriousness and without polemics.
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| November 14, 2005 |
REVIEW: Radiant Days, Haunted Nights
 Yiddish, they say, is all the rage. People just love their Yiddish. Musicians insert Yiddish into their lyrics. Authors rewrite old Yiddish folk tales. Long dead authors who wrote in Yiddish are finding their work consumed by an audience of their great-grandchildren.
I'm not altogether sure why Yiddish is so popular, though I won't complain. There is a treasure of mirthful stories and wonderous folk tales buried in the stacks of Yiddish bibliophiles. The problem with this Yiddish revival is that the vast majority of people who are so interested don't read Yiddish. Which means a monumental translation job, and something of a overwhelming trickle of Yiddish publications.
All of this makes it a bit easier to survey the landscape of translated Yiddish literature and really savor the best bits. Radiant Days, Haunted Nights falls into that category. A sweeping survey of Yiddish literature, it begins with the 16th century writings of... well, we don't know. "The Song of Isaac" has Anonymous as an author. The book continues in more or less chronological order through the 17oos, into th elate 19th century and up through the end of World War II.
There are sermons, poems, and simple short stories. There are well known authors and the less well known. There is epic midrash and mundane narratives, and for some reason the last half of the book utterly abandons the chronological order already established. All in all, however, the breadth and quality of this volume is a notch above the rest of Yiddish translations.
If you're looking for a favorite, jump to the next to last story. "The Birth of Satan" by Sholom Asch tells of the intimacy between God and Lilith that produced the offspring Satan who would compete eternally with the Almighty for the will of humanity. That's epic.
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| November 11, 2005 |
REVIEW: Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
 It is -- we might as well stop fighting it -- possible to recognize the necessity of something while simultaneously recognizing the hardship it places on others, and our moral responsibility for that. It's never as simple as a reasonable justification excusing the need for further contemplation or attempts to alleviate the suffering caused by an action. And if you were at all having problems with that, you should read Isabel Kershner's latest book.
Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is... what's the word, good. Impressive even. An examplar of fine reporting work and lucid prose. All of that jazz that literary critics like to say.
What Kershner has accomplished here is to distill the whole issue of the security barrier being erected by Israel more or less along the boundaries of the West Bank. She's pulled it out of the cloudy rhetoric of partisans who look at the barrier and quite literally can't see the other side. Palestinians placed under incredible hardship, farmers cut off from their groves just for starters, find it difficult to impossible to see the Israeli need for security. It's a security that, for better or worse, is effectively provided by the wall, the fence, the whatever you want to call it.
Israelis, on the other hand, can't bring themselves to admit to the hardship the barrier places on ordinary Palestinians. To do so, perhaps, would undermine the barrier and force Israel to abandon it. I don't actually believe it need play out that way, but too many Israelis nevertheless refuse to give an inch more than the Palestinian militants.
In this breach, or seam as she aptly describes it, goes Isabel Kershner. Her reporting conveys the myriad realities that find their intersection along the barrier route. The bureaucracy imposed on Palestinians caught on the wrong side of the wall -- The fence? Again, call it whatever you want -- is discussed in detail. One wonders if Kershner's legs ever got tired chasing down so many protagonists who help tell of the real life hurdles presented by the barrier.
No biased apologist, Kershner then jumps over the fence -- The wall? Politicized speech can be the worst kind -- to show us Israeli planners, academic opinion-makers, disillusioned activists too close to the action, etc. If ever there were a physical crystallization of the conflict, it lies in this monstrosity of a barrier that nobody wants and nobody has an alternative to. Kershner's empathetic depiction and massive on-the-ground investigating yields a moving and deeply informative look at that symbol, and at the reality it disrupts.
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| November 10, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Promise of Politics
 Yet another piece of previously-unpublished material from Hanna Arendt was released under the tender care of editor Jerome Kohn. As opposed to Responsibility and Judgment, this latest volume (published in July of this year - a hardback edition of Responsibility and Judgment was originally published in 2003) entitled The Promise of Politics isn't nearly as, what's the word for it... good.
This is not Hannah Arendt's fault. She is, after all, long dead and this was an unfinished and unpublished manuscript. One imagines if she'd lived long enough, she'd have taken a healthy dose of editting to the thing. Jerome Kohn, much as he might try, fails to make this more readable. Non-philosophers beware.
All of which is a shame. For a "philosopher" (Arendt didn't think of herself that way) the controversial woman was accessible to wide audiences. She spoke in heady terms, reminded us of what democratic discourse was ideally meant to be, and served as an examplar of the responsibility we share to think for ourselves. And in all of that, she managed to produce something you'd actually want to read.
This volume is harder to sink your teeth into, mainly because it's hard to get a hold of it long enough to take a bite. Once you finally get some semblance of bearings, there's simply not enough to sustain a reader. Nevertheless, for those who are willing to waid into the muck, there's plenty of substantive stuff here about the overarching course of Western political development and how it intertwines with our personal philosophies.
Just don't take it to the beach with you.
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| November 09, 2005 |
REVIEW: Responsibility and Judgment
 Hannah Arendt, it would be fair to say, was a particularly controversial and considerably misunderstood "political theorist" (she eschewed the term philosopher). The daughter of secular Jews in Hanover, she was raised in the hometown of Immanuel Kant and had a long-standing love affair with Martin Heidegger (both of whom caught flack for his Nazi sympathies). The rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II forced her to flee first Germany and then France, before ending up in the United States.
None of which even begins to address the denigration she received for her arguments on totalitarianism and anti-Semitism or her most notable work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she critiqued the Israeli government's theatrics at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and surmised that evil was less a radical aberration and more a function of banal conformity.
Arendt died before she could complete her final work, but much of her unpublished writings are now being gathered together and published. Responsibility and Judgment is the first of a series of collections of Arendt's work, and it helps to address some of the controversial mischaracterizations of the thinker's views.
Partially autobiographical, it contains in the first half of the book a series of essays on the responsibility of citizens in politics. Focused as she was on collective political action, it is interesting to read the opening essay which directly addresses the controversy over her coverage of the Eichmann trial and speaks to personal responsibility in dictatorships.
The last half of the book is devoted to the issue of judgment, and she speaks both in opposition to Brown v. Board of Education and simultaneously (this was the 1950s) arguing for greater equality in marriage. In other words, Arendt consistently defied standard norms of political ideology, choosing instead to argue only one thing consistently: that it is a duty of all citizens to think freely and critically and then to act in the political sphere, rather than defer responsibility.
This latest volume of her writings is an illuminating entry into her views, and a wonderful way to revisit the controversies of her life anew.
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| November 08, 2005 |
The Jewish History Reader
 As the 350th year of American Jewry's existence comes to a close, we thought we'd take the opportunity to add a few history books to our Chanukah wish list. Below you'll find four of the more engaging reads on the subject of Jewish history, and they all have the added bonus of being certified AJL Educationally Kosher. If that means anything to you.
A History of the Jews in the Modern World, by Howard Sachar, is everything you expect from a history book. Clocking in at 848 pages, it manages to cover Jewish history from the 18th century to the present but somehow keeps it easy for the lay reader. It does give Israel short shrift, but Sachar has covered that exhaustively in other books.
Jonathan Sarna is arguably the foremost historian of American Jewry, and in honor of our 350th birthday, he's compiled American Judaism. It's selling briskly (especially for a history book), and will likely be the standard text on the experience and evolution of America's Jewish communities for years to come. It being so well written, that's fine with us.
To go along with his comprehensive history of America's Jews, Sarna has edited (along with Ellen Smith and Scott-Martin Kosofsky) The Jews of Boston. This new updated version includes an essay on Jewish-Christian relations. Along with the 13 other essays and 100+ photographs, it's an engrossing look at one of America's most impressive Jewish communities.
Schocken and Nextbook.org have combined to publish a series of books on Jewish figures and ideas. The first looked at King David, and their latest is a biography of Maimonides by Sherwin Nuland. Written in a lively style, the series is shaping up to be a must have for any Jewish library. Future titles include looks at Jewish boxer Barney Ross as well as Spinoza.
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| November 07, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy
 That the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out on TV newscasts and in the pages of international newspapers just as much as on the streets of Gaza and Tel Aviv is not news to anybody following the conflict. For partisans on both sides, massive quantities of money have been used to fund "watchdog" groups that comb through major media's coverage and deluge them with phone calls and letters when they see any evidence of bias. More often than not, the bias in question lies as much (if not more) with the watchdogs than with the press.
But nevertheless, it would be impossible to deny that underlying viewpoints, professional and economic priorities, partisan sympathies, and what a journalist ate for lunch gets very much in the way of a full, accurate coverage. To explore those pressures, those biases, and how the coverage you read and see ends up in the form it does, would be a valuable contribution to our understanding of that troubled region, to say nothing of our interests in the fight.
Stephanie Gutmann's The Other War certainly contributes much to our understanding of the subject. Her journalistic work has been featured in major papers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Post, and her nonfiction writing has been hailed for its in-depth research and readable quality. Her latest book is in keeping with that trend.
You'll get a breakdown of the way video is constructed, the way translations get skewed, the way reporters drop in with little understanding of the larger context to report for a week before heading to the next region. Gutmann has taken pains to examine the highest profile moments in the media war. She's deconstructed them, then reconstructed them. It's a gripping look at how the media images are shaped.
If there is a failing to the book it lies in Gutmann's own bias. Though she begs us to be more critical across the board, her writing is rooted in an attempt to see why Israel gets such bad press rather than a deconstruction of why Palestinians get so ignored or conflated with terrorism. The result is a well researched book that only gets to half of the problem. Still the issues she illuminates are relevant beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, and perhaps in reading it you'll be inclined to think more about the story you get on the evening news.
And that's the way it is... or isn't.
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| November 03, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion
 Odds are you've heard of at least one of the following: Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution, or the Scopes Monkey Trial. Perhaps you've also heard of the theory of intelligent design, or seen a piece on the news regarding the latest lawsuit or school board decision about teaching evolution in schools. If you're really savvy (and Jewish), you might also have followed the controversy of Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who managed to get his books banned by ultra-Orthodox rabbis for talking about evolutionary theory.
Still you probably haven't heard of the Gifford Lectures. They're not exactly the Oscars, but they've quietly been passing the last century in vigorous discussion about God, science, and how the two can co-exist (or not, depending on who was giving the lecture). In 1887, a Scottish judge by the name of Adam Gifford bequeathed his money to endow a series of annual lectures on "all questions about man's conception of God or the Infinite."
Since then, the lectures have attracted eight Nobel Prize winners and the likes of Hannah Arendt, Carl Sagan, and Albert Schweizer. Niels Bohr, a physicist, even got to tell off Albert Einstein once. No matter the caliber or celebrity of the respective lecturer, each year has brought a robust discussion aimed at arguing whether or not God exists and how we know.
All of which is why a history of the lectures by Larry Witham, The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion, is about more than academic arguments that happen every year in Scotland. It serves as a history that unfolds not in chronological order, but through ideological strains, of the ongoing debate on the role of science in a world of religious belief. As a step beyond the polemical, political arguments over schoolrooms and evolution texts, Witham has provided an engaging public service that illuminates the larger issues we're all struggling with.
It also serves as a reminder that even our greatest minds in science and theology have struggled with it for longer than our politicians have been alive.
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| November 02, 2005 |
REVIEW: Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
 An admitted favorite sub-genre of literature, at least the non-fiction variety, is histories that take as their point of departure some singular event. Elsewhere in our November/December issue we discuss a book that uses a single recording session of Bob Dylan's to discuss a larger cultural context. It's a trick that is often used, and often used poorly.
But when it is used well, say by contributing editor to Vanity Fair David Margolick, it is a magical way to read history. The book in question is Margolick's latest, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink. It uses the famous boxing match between American Louis and German Schmeling on the eve of World War II as an entry point for discussing a tumultuous time in the history of Europe, the United States, and the rest of the globe.
This is the stuff of high drama, really. Boxing as a sport is often mirred in the muck, but when it rises out of the ghettos and urban decay that supplies so many of its competitors, it can really capture the currents of historical greatness. The 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title is arguably the best example of that.
Take Joe Louis, the African-American was unbeatable, right up until the friendly Schmeling beat him. The Nazi propaganda machine ate it up, and forced Schmeling into the role of "Nazi Max." When the two boxers fought initially, Schmeling's wife spent the evening waiting for the bout to end at the home of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister.
But hardly the arch-villain, Schmeling was an unfortunate victim of the nation he hailed from. He had a Jewish manager. He liked FDR, and on Kristallnacht, he protected two German Jews from the terror. Or at least that is how he is often portrayed. Margolick is a better storyteller, and he manages to find the reality in the nuance of Schmeling, who is depicted as an opportunist who nodded in the Nazi direction while using his Jewish connections to deflect criticism.
Louis is depicted as realistically as possible. But the fact remains that he is notable as a symbol, more for his uniting effect on a nation that would soon be dragged into a much more serious battle with German fighters. Before the Civil Rights Movement, the dignified Louis hoisted an entire race on his shoulders and then gave a black eye to Nazi ideology, rallying a nation in his wake.
High drama indeed, and it's captured with excellence by Margolick's deftly written prose.
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| November 01, 2005 |
REVIEW: The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide
 Susan Nathan is a bold woman, not a stranger to political and cultural divides. At the age of 16, as a British Jew residing in South Africa she slept with a black servant of her aunt's. One must imagine that is a bold act in a nation gripped by apartheid. Nathan certainly did.
So it is hardly surprising that years later, after immigrating to Israel under the Right of Return, she would make another bold political act in the simplest of ways. She moved from Tel Aviv to Tamra, a small town of 25,000 Arab Muslims that, as it turns out, doesn't even exist in the country's official registry. Nathan's account of her journey "across the Jewish/Arab divide" is a poignant and simple discussion of her own personal and political life as a lone Jew amidst thousands of the other.
It certainly qualifies as intriguing reading, and the little stories about how hard it is to do the simplest things in a town that literally doesn't exist in the eyes of the state make for a moving account of an ignored population. Some might be turned off by Nathan's parallels not only between apartheid South Africa and Israel, but also the Holocaust and Israeli policy towards its Arab citizens. Such comparisons have long since been reduced to the stuff of shrill political screeds, instantly ignored by the supporters of Israel, too quickly and too blithely invoked by the supporters of Palestinian nationalism.
This is, perhaps, why Nathan's use of such parallels is so powerful. She does it with understatement, couched between tales of everyday life in an extraordinary circumstance that she argues, quite persuasively, is shared by Israeli Arabs and Jews. It's this moral plea, almost prophetic really, that cries out from the page: that Israeli Jews, and all those who support them, risk losing their moral legacy by ignoring the realities of their nation state.
Arguably Nathan's greatest insight is not just this moral call from the wilderness, but the way in which she makes irrefutable the truth that Arabs and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, are more alike than they would care to admit. Both wanderers and the displaced, they must in Nathan's eyes, begin to see in each other some part of themselves. Only then can they transcend their mutual injustices.
This is a book, an argument, and a reality, that utterly defines "must read."
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