Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan by mel scult wayne state university press, 433 pages, $34.95 Many of Mordecai M. Kaplan’s contemporaries and students—he had plenty of both over the 102 years of his life—considered him a brilliant religious . . . . Continue Reading »
A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America by jack wertheimer basic books, 267 pages, $25 The slogan of the United Jewish Appeal, the most successful of all of America’s philanthropies in terms of fund-raising, is “We Are One.” The UJA’s success is due to the deep emotional ties of . . . . Continue Reading »
Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism by david landau hill & wang/fsg, 334 pages, $27.50 In 1988, when the ultra-Orthodox parties won a telling percentage of the vote in the Israeli election, many secular Jews found themselves forced for the first time to reckon with an Orthodoxy that . . . . Continue Reading »
Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture edited by barbara b. oberg and harry s. stout oxford university press, 230 pages, $35 Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards have frequently been studied as competing character types in American culture: with Franklin . . . . Continue Reading »
Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America by william b. helmreich simon & schuster, 348 pages, $23 One of the more controversial events in our cultural life this year has been the opening of Washington’s Holocaust Museum. The Holocaust was not an American . . . . Continue Reading »
No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics edited by michael cromartie ethics and public policy center, 153 pages, $18.95 To list the participants in the discussions from which this book emergedis to recommend the book most highly: George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Robert Booth . . . . Continue Reading »
In North America, and increasingly in Europe, it has become a truism to say that the present situation is marked by pluralism, or multiculturalism. Some truisms happen to be true; this one certainly is. Nor is there any great mystery as to how this situation has come about. It is the result of . . . . Continue Reading »
Jewish Social Ethics by david novak oxford university press, 252 pages, $39.95 The renowned scholar of Talmudic Judaism, Jacob Neusner, once characterized the divergence between first-century Judaism and nascent Christianity as fundamentally a divergence of locale. That is, each . . . . Continue Reading »
Of late I have been reading John B. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus . I have enjoyed it, not least because the book is clearly and carefully written, even if the Jesus who emerges from these pages is not exactly the “startling” figure promised by the dust . . . . Continue Reading »
Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow by hans küng, translated by john bowden crossroad, 753 pages, $39.50 Readers of Catholic maverick Hans Küng’s works have come to expect of him encyclopedic volumes displaying both prodigious scholarship and sharp polemic. And in these respects, the . . . . Continue Reading »
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