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Rav Soloveitchik’s Greatest Hits, in Yiddish

Guest post by Dr. Arnold Lustiger

I have published two books containing English summaries of the Rav’s oral discourses, drashos that were originally presented in Yiddish. My goal was not only to transmit the substance, but the form as well - to do my best to reproduce the Rav’s cadences. To a large extent, I did not succeed. One reason is that a pure transcription of any oral lecture is choppy and reads terribly – of necessity any oral lecture has to be rewritten to be readable. Secondly, English is not Yiddish – nuances of language are not readily transmitted.

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Welcome to JBN 1:3

Welcome to the third issue of Jewish Book News. Lots of reviews, including books about recent great figures in Jewish learning such as Rav Soloveitchik and Nehama Leibowitz. There is also a review of a controversial book about “curing” homosexuality and much more.

Here is the roundup for this issue:

Halakhic Philosophies

When I first opened R. Ira Bedzow’s recent book, Halakhic Man, Authentic Jew: Modern Expressions of Orthodox Thought from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, I was surprised. I had expected to find summaries of each thinkers’ approach and then a constructive comparison and contrast of their views. That’s not what I saw at all. Instead, I found something much bolder and more original.

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Foundations of Charity

I. An Unusual Book

Yesodei Ha-Tzedakah by R. Menachem Kasdan is a unique book, although I think I have this impression mainly because I have limited exposure to this genre. When I opened the book, I expected to find a typical collection of laws, divided into chapters and with extensive footnotes documenting the literature and theoretical issues. This is standard in contemporary studies of legal topics. (more…)

Post-Denominational Outreach

I recently read Dr. Jonathan Sarna’s outreach book, A Time to Every Purpose, and I saw something brilliant there that I have not seen in any other outreach book. Dr. Sarna is a leading scholar of American Jewish history and a professor at Brandeis. This book is written as letters to his daughter but that is clearly just a literary device for letters intended for uncommitted Jews.

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Was Nehama Leibowitz Too Traditional?

The final chapter in Yaul Unterman’s Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar discusses the next generation(s) of scholarship after Nehama. It lists approaches and techniques that Nehama did not use but many of her students developed and adopted. This theme also comes up in some other chapters. It seems to me that the author was too sympathetic with these new approaches and failed to adequately defend Nehama. (more…)

Was Nehama Leibowitz A Feminist?

The recent biography by Yael Unterman, Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar is fascinating, exhaustive and thought-provoking. The book is divided into three parts: Nehama’s life, her beliefs and her methodology. In each section, Unterman provides extensive background and then takes you through the subject with copious references to published materials and the seemingly endless interviews that she conducted. (more…)

The Bible In Brief

When I was young, I received as a gift a book called “The Children’s Bible” that was some thousand-page condensed version of the Bible. I found it fascinating and read it twice. The key is that it was written in simple language. The closest you can find to that is The Living Nach, but even that is a word-by-word translation so it contains all of the — forgive me for writing this — boring parts as well.

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Is Homosexuality Curable?

When I mentioned in an early post (link) that I had received a copy of Light In The Closet: Torah, Homosexuality and the Power to Change by Arthur Goldberg, there was an almost immediate negative reaction to the book by some commenters who had not even read it. I attributed this closure of so many minds to the politically correct atmosphere in which we live. However, after going through the book, I understand better why they so strongly oppose the approach advocated by the author.

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