Allan Nadler

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Fiery Pulpits On the Home Front

By Allan Nadler

In his semiautobiographical masterwork, “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” the late novelist Henry Roth recalled his Uncle Louie’s little kitchen-table “sermon” that, mainly to his mortified mother, justified his decision to join the American army in the First World War: “It’s natural for a child here in America to want to be a soldier. My two boys also want to be soldiers. It isn’t Galitzia where they cut off a boy’s toe so he won’t be conscripted… we Jews did that to a thousand, thousand infant boys to keep them out of the military, that they won’t have to eat pork, or most treife of all, to go into battle — and who knew? — at times against other Jews, fellow Jews in the opposing army. Why? We had no country, no?”Read More

Absence and Presence

By Allan Nadler

When John McCain was finally forced to reject publicly Reverend John Hagee’s support, he explicitly condemned some of the Christian leader’s most provocative views. Among them was Hagee’s professed belief that the prophet Jeremiah (of ancient Israel, not Chicago) warned of Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry, and that the Holocaust was a necessary prelude to the creation of Israel as well as a punishment to the Jews, for their deafness toward the Zionists’ exhortations from the late 19th century on, to abandon Europe for the Holy Land.Read More

A Sad, Searching Soul

By Allan Nadler

Among its many gifts, Ben-Zion Gold’s modest and moving chronicle of a Hasidic boy coming of age in pre-Holocaust Poland affords readers a bracing reprieve from the cynicism generated by a recent plague of phony, self-aggrandizing memoirs — from James Frey’s hair-raising tall tale of addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” with its “Marathon Man”-inspired nonsense of undergoing dental surgery without anesthesia in a Nazi-style rehab center, to Binjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust hoaxes.Read More

Haredi Life, Too Purely Rendered

By Allan Nadler

The Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, don’t go to the movies. This is partly on account of the silver screen’s abundant displays of what is known among these communities as pritsus — that is, sex and general profanity — but it is also because any such frivolous entertainment is considered “bittul-Torah,” a prohibited waste of precious time that ought to be devoted exclusively to sacred study. Moreover, since the destruction of the Temple, rabbinic law has banned all forms of nonreligious “celebration,” a prohibition whose strictest understanding includes both high and low entertainment, from opera and the theater to rock concerts and films. For these deeply pious Jews, fun is forbidden.Read More

Baruch on Broadway

By Allan Nadler

Although his philosophical masterpiece, “Ethics,” written in the notoriously exact and forbidding “geometrical mode,” is one of the least dramatic works in the history of modern philosophy, and despite the dryness of both his personality and his intensely private life, Baruch Spinoza has exercised the imagination of a long line of dramatists. The parched prose of his writing, the dry determinism of his thought and the solitude of his life are more than compensated for by the lure of his heretical ideas and especially by the salacious story of his excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656.Read More


 

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