Don't Call it a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM

 

Don't Call it a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman shows us the formula for creating a cult.  Sleep and food deprivation; complete surrender of personal possession and money; a cohesive atmosphere swaddled in a self-help and religious ethos; long group sessions involving confessions of flaws and traumas; forced detachment from friends and family. NXIVM did all this, and it is hardly surprising that toward the end Keith Raniere created a group of women he could personally emotionally, cognitively, and sexually manipulate.

Berman’s book is scary because of what happens, but also because of how it happens.  The indoctrination is gradual, and before the people in NXIVM know they are trapped it is too late.  It is amazing how our social impulses can be perverted by unscrupulous, immoral people.   

Nostalgia & Privilege

Alexandrian Summer, by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, and translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan, has a common enough theme for any group of people who are about to leave their homeland for another country: nostalgia. 

Goren is nostalgic about his fictional Jewish family and their last summer in Egypt.  And why not?  The family in this novel is well-off, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and relatively wealthy.

Israel would, and will, hold little value for them.  They were part of an Egyptian milieu that worked for them until it did not. Then all that was left was aching memory of those better days.

The HaLevi We All Know

 

Yehuda HaLevi was one of the great Jewish poets and thinkers, but he was all but forgotten until 1838.  Hillel Halkin, the author of this HaLevi biography, tells us that most HaLevi’s poems were discovered in a bookshop in 1838.

Halkin takes us through the various stages of HaLevi’s life, even the considerable gaps.  HaLevi’s distance from the Jewish philosophers who would follow him shortly after his death is fascinating:

“In the whole of The Guide, Maimonides never once introduces the idea of a redemptive scheme for history…. Whereas The Kuzari is concerned with the historical need to revitalize the Jewish people, The Guide openly expresses its preference for the single individual over ‘a thousand ignoramuses.’” 

If you know a great deal about HaLevi, this book will sound familiar.  If you are just learning, this is an excellent introductory work.