Allan Nadler

New Book Details Orthodox Response to 9/11 Attacks

By Allan Nadler

A new book details how Orthodox rabbis dealt with questions stemming from 9/11. One major project involved permitting wives of victims to remarry.Read More

---

Chasidism Without Romanticism

By Allan Nadler

The chasidim are not easy to understand. Chasidic mystical theology is extremely difficult to master. Moreover, aside from the Lubavitch sect, chasidic society is almost hermetically sealed, and chasidic writings — composed in an arcane rabbinic Hebrew, laced with talmudic Aramaic and obscure kabbalistic references — are comprehensible only to serious students of both rabbinic literature and the kabbala. If only for these reasons, Rabbi Norman Lamm’s new English anthology of chasidic texts is a truly important contribution to Jewish learning.Read More

---

A Mournful Reminder of Bialik

By Allan Nadler

Chaim Nachman Bialik was not simply the bard of the modern Jewish national awakening. He was more than just the poetic voice of Zionism. He wrote of the Jews’ yearning for Zion, but also of the yearning for love; the awe of nature, the universal, desperate human search for transcendence. Above all else, Bialik captured exquisitely the pains and joys, the terror and excitement, of being a Jew in modern times.Read More

---

The Portrait of a Renegade British Rabbi Struggling To Maintain Faith and Intellect

By Allan Nadler

“Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” an elaborate sequel to “We Have Reason To Believe,” is a learned and compelling argument for an enlightened form of traditional Judaism that Rabbi Jacobs has dubbed “liberal supernaturalism.” The liberal supernaturalist is a Jew who adheres faithfully to Jewish law and tradition in the belief that it is divinely inspired, but who at the same time cannot blithely ignore the findings of historians.Read More

---

Cities of Jewish Success, Crushed

By Allan Nadler

A vast, heartbreaking and, to English readers, inaccessible Yiddish and Hebrew library — of some 1,000 volumes, studded with unique memoirs and rare photographs — known as yizker-bikher, or memorial books, is devoted to eternalizing the legacies of the myriad cities and towns of Jewish Eastern Europe destroyed by the Holocaust. These books were collaboratively produced, mostly in the late 1950s through the early ’70s, by the survivors of those Jewish communities. But with the exception of a half-dozen or so, they are not the product of critical historical scholarship, and only three have been fully translated into English.Read More

---