Jewish continuity in America

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Max I. Dimont

A wondrous tale of American Judaism as the world's greatest success story, by the flamboyantly upbeat author of Jews, God and History (1964) and The Indestructible Jews (1971). According to Dimont, the first Jews to arrive--in search of safety and opportunity, not a haven for orthodoxy--had it made before they landed, thanks to the Old Testament hold on Colonial life (the Mosaic commandments, the Promised Land, the Puritan ethic); and thereafter, unhampered either by prejudice or by tyrannical rabbis, they dispersed along the frontier, instituted secular reforms (anticipating the German Reform movement), and prospered as merchants and bankers. This German-Jewish ""crowd"" also, says Dimont, ""'invented' modern philanthropy"" and, to tame their unruly Russian co-religionists, sponsored Conservative Judaism, more American than orthodoxy, more traditional than Reform. Subsequently, ""all the dissident elements of American Jewish society. . . coalesced to give birth to the first 'American Jews.'"" None of this--told with an emphasis on commanding personalities--is either wholly unfounded or totally novel, but it is so highly colored, so feeble as social history, and so full of holes that one can't treat it seriously. American Jewish socialism and American Yiddish culture are disposed of in two pages; the one time American anti-Semitism rears its ugly head (apropos of the 1862 Grant affair), it's explained away; and American Zionism--without even a psychological stake in Israel--can then be altogether ""altruistic."" Neither do American Jews have an identity problem: a strong organizational life compensates for a weak religious life. Dimont, as he's demonstrated before, has no use for the ghetto image of the Jew or for Jewish history as a ""dirge of oppression,"" and those who share his antipathies will find here the American dream come true.

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Benjamin Lazier

Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interrupted also provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.

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Sandra Macpherson

In this unconventional study of the 18th century novel, Macpherson (English, the Ohio State University) argues that accident and injury, rather than volition and intention, are key elements in the early realist novel's view of personhood and belonging. She offers fresh readings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, demonstrating that the liberal counter-tradition which she explores emerges from 18th century novels based on questions about agency and from contemporary developments in laws of 'strict liability.'

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Stuart Peterfreund

"Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin discusses important changes that took place in the argument from design, the staple rhetorical formation of natural theology, during the period from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Charles Darwin (1809-82). After a discussion of the circumstances under which Bacon came to be the first to use the term natural theology in English, the book shows that the object of design undergoes a shift. For Bacon, the object of design is the creature. For Robert Boyle and those following his lead, the object of design is the mechanism. For Isaac Newton and those following him, the object of design is the nested system. For William Paley and the writers of the Bridgewater Treatises, the object of design is the system more generally. And for Darwin, the object of design is interactive systems"--