Before Central Park, by Sara Cedar Miller answers, in great detail, what many people visiting Central Park will ask: what was here before the park? This book is an impeccably researched work that answers this question in abundance. New York’s natural treasure was by no means destined to be created – and it came with a great cost to those already living in the confines of the park. This worthy book tells that story.
Thinking about the Torah: A Philosopher Reads the Bible by Kenneth Seeskin is an interesting excursion into reading Torah Jewishly and philosophically. Seeskin wants us to think deeply about the issue the Torah and he kindly helps us by enlisting some of the great thinkers in the Jewish tradition: Maimonides, Buber, and Levinas, to name a few. Thinking through Torah has its limitations, and you will see this if you read this book. But it is a very fruitful limitation: knowing what we can know and what we can’t is a gift few people accept.
I actually put down The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War by Paul Hendrickson, wondering if it was worth devoting so much time to McNamara and the damage he did to both America and Vietnam. I left the book, thinking it was too much, but returned, as something about this work called to me. I’m glad I did; Hendrickson’s book is long, and not for everyone, but how it is written and what it accomplishes is hard to deny. This is an excellent book because of how it is written, not necessarily what it is about. This is a testimony to the author’s skill!
The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim is a deeply moving and intelligent account of the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacres, and its lasting impact on China. In fact, Lim makes a compelling case that Tiananmen was the pivot point around which modern Chinese history hinges. After the massacre, the state increasingly turned toward its own people as a threat, spending more on surveillance than defense. Lim believes that a Tiananmen moment is on China’s horizon. We can only hope, so the genius of the Chinses people can shine forth in every enterprise.
Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire by Rabbi Marc D. Angel provides a fascinating look at the Jews of Spain after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, and their lives in the Ottoman Empire. In many surveys of Jewish history, the decline of the Sephardic community after their exile from Spain is stated, but not contextualized. Rabbi Angel walks us through the context, erasing the stigma of the so-called Sephardic decline. Rabbi Angel also explains how Sephardic communities remained orthodox in modern times while not embracing denominations. While most Sephardic communities were orthodox, the lacked the dogmatism of the Ashkenazi versions. Sephardic religious practice was always less strident; it was always more worldly and accepting of difference, to their credit and our edification.
Rabbi Pini Dunner is the Senior Rabbi at Beverly Hills Synagogue. This book, Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, is an interesting view of some of the figures in (more or less) modern Judaism who have inhabited the “margins” of the Jewish experience, and yet had some kind of impact on the center. There isn’t an overall theme or frame of reference to these examples; Rabbi Dunner appears to pick them because they are interesting. All in all, this is an informative and even (at times) humorous read.
The Documentary Hypothesis by Umberto Cassuto as it is a relatively early attempt to dismantle the theory that dominated biblical studies for a century. And certainly, the DH has deep flaws – some of them nearly fatal. There is a certainty to the theory which the evidence does not and will never hold. But the arguments that Cassuto brings forward to create his own hypothesis are equally shaky – or plausible, depending how we view the idea of ‘evidence’ and ‘plausibility’ about the biblical texts.
At this point in the history of biblical study, who would not claim that the bible is a composite text? It is not the work of one person, or two, but many. So what is it, how was it created, and what is the history of its composition? What can we really know with certainty?
We really need to embrace more post-modern versions of biblical criticism. Grand theories are over; we should have many theories that both compete and compliment each other. Grand theories simply no longer hold.
