In this slim yet analytically sophisticated volume, Kartun-Blum, professor of Hebrew literature at Hebrew University, seeks to elucidate the “noisy existence” of the modern Hebrew poet who is forced to contend with the echoes of traditional texts and the multiple, diachronic registers of the revived Hebrew language. The work consists of three chapters, the first of which, “The Prophet's Tongue in Our Cheek,” serves as an introduction to the use made of the Bible in modern Hebrew poetry. Building on this framework, in the second and longest section of the book, she engages the motif of the Binding of Isaac, and in the last chapter she offers a reading of a poem by Yona Wallach. In her analysis, she incorporates the insights to be gleaned from the perspectives of intertextuality, deconstruction, and feminist criticism. This book is based on the Efroymson Lectures delivered by the author at Hebrew Union College in 1995, although the core of the thesis developed in the chapter on the Binding of Isaac motif appeared in Prooftexts (September 1988).

Pamela Nadell begins her history of “women who would have, if they could have, become rabbis” (p. x) with an acknowledgment “that uncovering women's history remains a political enterprise” (p. 13). Surprised to discover so many predecessors to today's female rabbis, Nadell enthusiastically traces the repetitive and discouraging history of arguments and efforts by diverse women to enter the rabbinate.

Four years ago, when I first read Bonnie Morris' Lubavitcher Women in America, the book was in manuscript form and I was directing a women's studies program at a regional university in Kentucky. As a Jewish feminist educator, I was asked by SUNY Press to review the book and make a recommendation about publication. The ultra-Orthodox represent a closed community: difficult to observe from the outside and rarely reported on from the inside, and I was fascinated by Morris' study of Lubavitcher women's postwar contributions to the spiritual life and growth of their Hasidic community. Along with another reviewer, I recommended publication, and the book came out in late 1998. Just under two years later, I again read Lubavitcher Women in America for the purpose of writing this review. What has changed is not my high regard for this skilled examination of the impact of American feminism on the lives and roles of women within this particular Hasidic community. Rather, it is my proximity to ultra-Orthodoxy.

Agnon studies are still with us. The great modern Hebrew prose writer has been gone for nearly three decades, but new studies in Hebrew and even in English have made it seem as if he were still in our midst. They continue to increase our understanding of his life and his oeuvre, obviously, but the immediacy of this Nobel prize laureate for his particular culture strikes me as unique among western literary figures. Speaking only of English, in this decade alone, Anne Golomb Hoffman and Nitzah Ben Dov have published full-length monographs, and scores of articles have appeared on subjects ranging from biography to intertextual exploration, and from language to folklore sources. All this is on top of an even more plentiful supply of materials from the '70s and '80s (some Israeli scholars, like Shaked, have even published in English), which followed on the heels of Arnold Band's indispensable Nostalgia and Nightmare. One has to assume that Dan Laor's comprehensive Agnon biography, Hayyei Agnon—which has just been published—will be translated into English and share its plentiful light with the purely English-speaking scholarly community. Laor's biography was not completed when Stephen Katz published The Centrifugal Novel, although several articles containing material intended for the eventual biography appeared over recent years.

Kremer's recent book is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship devoted to literary responses to the Holocaust. Women's Holocaust Writing joins studies such as Edward Alexander's The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature, Lawrence Langer's The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Alvin Rosenfeld's A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, Alan Berger's Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, his more recent Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, Sarah Horowitz's Voicing the Void, and Kremer's previous study Witness through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature.

This article describes a little noticed process among the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, in which an initially open response to modernity was replaced among some religious leaders by marked opposition to it. The result is a more nuanced view of the cultural/spiritual lives of these important communities.

In recent years there has been much interest in the place of Kadya Molodowsky in the canon of Yiddish literature. At the same time, the translation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yiddish literature has become an imperative—fueled by the Holocaust, the quality and quantity of writing that occurred prior to and even after it, and a heightened awareness of many women writers heretofore underrepresented in translation. Nor can one ignore the tremendous fluctuations in the perceived viability and legitimacy of Yiddish, as either a language or a literary vehicle, that have taken place and are still taking place into the twenty-first century. Into this tumultuous set of circumstances, Molodowsky's poetry has been reborn by virtue of an extensive translation.

David Patterson's Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary adds to the ever-growing collection of analyses of Holocaust literature by focussing specifically on diaries. Two obvious goals of a study such as this would be to give the diarists a voice (or, to put it another way, to give readers an introduction to a variety of diaries) and to develop a theory about the place of diaries in Holocaust literature. In the first matter, Patterson bases his study on more than fifty diaries written during the Holocaust by Jewish victims. The reader need only consult the primary sources in the bibliography for a listing of diaries available to be read in their entirety. (I will say more about this later.)

It has been a quarter century since the last collections of Yiddish plays were published in America: Joseph Landis' Great Jewish Plays and David Lifson's Epic and Folk Plays of the Yiddish Theater. As Sandrow informs us in the “Appendixes,” translations of a few individual plays are found in scholarly journals or mostly out-of-print books. For this reason alone, the beautiful new volume from Syracuse is a welcome arrival. Another reason is Sandrow's insightful introductions to the five plays featured: Jacob Gordin, God, Man, and Devil; Peretz Hirshbein, Green Fields; H. Levick, Shop; David Pinsky, The Treasure; and Osip Dimov, Bronx Express. Her remarks touch on the works' stage history detailing who played what role, and how the plays fared on various European and American stages.

If good scholarship is supposed to be disciplined, detached, and objective, the study of the Holocaust has taught us that mental, emotional, and physical reactions—even when experienced from a temporal and spatial distance, and consciously or not—condition our conceptualized or poetic responses to the Shoah. This unarticulated psychic involvement in our recent past is perhaps the place that generates intellectual, political, ideological, and imaginative expressions. Moreover, this location signifies the meeting point of ethics and aesthetics that makes any verbal or visual attempt to convey the unspeakable and unimaginable possible, while at the same time being the very site that causes the collapse of the boundaries between objective and subjective response. How can it be otherwise? The impact of this recognition is such that even general literary, cultural, and philosophic writing, mostly influenced by Holocaust studies, has begun to consider ethics as an analytic category.1. See, for example, Howard Marchitello, ed. What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Daniel Schwarz's Imagining the Holocaust is positioned at the core of this ethical-aesthetic matrix.

Allison Coudert is not the first historian to underscore the importance of the seventeenth century as a critical moment in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Western civilization. Scholars engaged in Spinoza's thought have focused for some time now on the rich converso culture of Amsterdam and its mediating role between Judaism and Christianity.1. I refer here generally to the many volumes edited and written by Richard Popkin, Yosef Kaplan, David Katz, E. G. E. Van der Wall, and many others. More recently, the messiahship of Shabbetai Zevi and the crisis his apostasy precipitated in the Jewish world have been scrutinized within the broader context of Jewish-Christian interactions.2. See, for example, the work of Yosef Kaplan, Jacob Barnai, and Elishevah Carlebach. Coudert is the first, however, to study closely the circle of Christian thinkers and their fascination with the Kabbalah at the court of Sulzbach, especially Francis Mercury Van Helmont, the son of a famous Paracelsian physician, and his close colleague, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the compiler of the greatest Latin collection of Kabbalist writings ever published, the Kabbala denudata.

For half a century the Buber-Scholem debate over the essence of Hasidic teachings and literature defined the parameters of scholarly discussion of Hasidism. A new generation of scholars has taken the discussion of Hasidism in new and fruitful directions in recent years. One result of this new research has been an interest in making the theological literature of Hasidism available to English readers. This volume is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature. Relying only on Hasidic stories instead of the theological writings of Hasidism, particularly as they were selected and edited by Martin Buber, has led to a distorted and reductionist understanding of Hasidism and its place in the Jewish mystical tradition. The theologically and intellectually sophisticated aspects of Hasidism were not taken into account in popular descriptions of the movement. On the contrary, Hasidism was seen as an anti-intellectual populist folk movement and even a break with the rabbinic tradition in some respects. Correcting this misconception and acquainting the reader with the intellectual and spiritual foundations of Hasidism is a primary goal for Norman Lamm, the editor of this volume.

While each of these three books is about Jewish ethics, they take very different approaches to the topic, serve different purposes, and speak to different audiences. If nothing else, they—and a number of other books about Jewish ethics published in recent years—collectively demonstrate that Jews are paying serious attention not only to the theological, legal, historical, social, and cultural aspects of Jewish identity, but also to the Jewish tradition's moral import.

The Banality of Good and Evil, by David R. Blumenthal, a scholar/rabbi of Judaic Studies at Emory University, is a welcome addition to the understanding of good and evil. What makes this work unique is that Professor Blumenthal has been able to combine the research from social and experimental psychology, philosophy, education, literature on the Holocaust and rescuers during the Nazi era, and religious teachings from the Jewish tradition.

It is arduous to review an anthology that has the ambition of presenting the large spectrum of movements and schools of contemporary Jewish religious thought. Limits of space prevent us from discussing individually the many authors selected in it. Instead, we must consider the criteria by which the authors have been chosen and how the editors have organized the anthologized materials. Such criteria are reducible to the idea that is expressed by the editors in the brief preface. In these last decades of the twentieth century, the Jewish world has experienced an extraordinary flourishing of thought that produced an enormous quantity of works of theological, philosophical, and ethical reflection, whose development was unthinkable right after World War II. This production was especially widespread in the Anglo-American area, where the English-speaking Jewish communities emerged as the most learned, wealthy, and pluralistic communities in the diaspora. Nobody can deny this sociological fact, which is also a cultural phenomenon. This anthology objectively reflects this situation. Nonetheless, it also shows the great open-mindedness and the vivacity with which the Jewish thinkers of this century have tried to answer the questions posed by history.

While The Star of Redemption is widely recognized as a great work, if not the single greatest work of modern Jewish thought, it has persistently had difficulty finding its readers. Written in an almost private language for a circle of friends and relations, it has taken almost a century to gain an audience that can find a way into its imposing architecture. The situation began to change in 1982 with Stéphane Mosès' System and Revelation, which offered a detailed reading of the whole text. I, for my part, tried to offer a philosophical interpretation of the methodology of each of the three parts in 1992, in Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas; Richard Cohen's Elevations offered a set of readings that linked Levinas and Rosenzweig in 1994. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg contributed a reading that emphasized the relation to the Kabbalah in her Better Than Wine, in 1996. The decade ended, however, with the two books under review here—both impressive, novel, and complex readings of The Star. Norbert Samuelson has given us a paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrase—or perhaps we need a new term, for Samuelson's book is a real commentary, leading us through the text and offering insight continuously, as well as pausing at key moments to guide us into richer connections. Ernest Rubinstein, for his part, has offered a demanding and challenging book that interrogates The Star, reading it not once but twice, and each time not only introducing the various key concepts and developments, but also measuring Rosenzweig against a rich theoretical framework.

When Hannah Arendt wrote, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), that “the holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible,” she was referring to the survivors of the Holocaust who would live to tell the Shoah's many “forgotten” stories. Nearly forty years after, there are fewer survivors to do the job. And scholars have taken up the burden of witness to help us fill in the gaps.

The study of art in Judaism now takes center stage, as works of considerable intellectual ambition appear from year to year. The ones before us, a topical anthology and a coherent collection of essays, some of them groundbreaking, and all of them remarkably fresh and interesting, signal the advent of a new field within Jewish studies. The books complement one another, the one illuminating, the other argumentative, and both of them exceedingly interesting.

As one century, not to mention one millennium, passes into the next, the past obsesses us. We are beset by fears of forgetting it or twisting it out of recognition. Polemics about what to remember and what to forget divide societies all over the world. One of the most fruitful academic perspectives on this anxiety was initiated in the 1980s with the work of the French historian Pierre Nora. Nora formulated a “fundamental opposition” between memory (“the remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral”) and the “problematic and incomplete . . . reconstruction” that is history.1. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7–8. The essay was first published in 1984. He then launched the encyclopedic project of documenting the “memory sites” (lieux de mémoire) of French consciousness, those sites, both material and symbolic, located “between memory and history,” which had become invested with historical meaning in modern France. His original purpose had been to deconstruct such sites, in modern scholarly fashion to reveal their mythic nature, but, as the reviewer of an English translation of part of the resulting 5,600-page collective work points out, at its completion Nora conceded, that as a consequence of the speed with which even these constructed sites were passing out of popular memory, “commemoration ha[d] overtaken” his project and it had become “a sort of scholarly lieu de mémoire in its own right.”Tony Judt, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998, 54. Les Lieux de mémoire was first published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992.