Lawrence Grossman

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When American Judaism Was Yiddish

By Lawrence Grossman

There was a time when American Jews of very different ideological perspectives would talk, and listen, to each other.Read More

Eliot’s Zionism Before Zionism

By Lawrence Grossman

In the recent speech he delivered in Cairo to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Is the legitimacy of Zionism based primarily on past Jewish suffering? Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb thinks not, and her new book brilliantly elucidates the intellectual origins of a far more positive justification: that Judaism can reach its full potential only in a sovereign Jewish state.Read More

Our God and God of our Children?

By Lawrence Grossman

Since the end of World War II, Dana Evan Kaplan argues in “Contemporary American Judaism,” “not only have the style and substance of the activities that we associate with American Judaism changed, but so has the way that American Jews understand their religious identity.” While all Jews, whatever their degree of observance, used to know pretty much what being Jewish was all about, today, in Kaplan’s words, “nothing is for certain and everything is possible.”Read More

Book Banned by Ultra-Orthodox Brings ‘Torah Personality’ To Life

By Lawrence Grossman

This path-breaking work, the product of 15 years of painstaking research, brings to pulsating life the world of pre-war “Lithuanian,” or non-chasidic, Orthodoxy, in particular its yeshivas, which have come to serve as educational models for contemporary Orthodoxy in the United States, Israel and elsewhere around the world. Yet the book hasRead More


     

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