NOTABLE BOOKS
NOTABLE BOOKS American Judaism: A History Jonathan D. Sarna. Yale University Press, April 2004, 512 pp., $35. On the 350th anniversary of Judaism in North America, Jonathan Sarna, a professor of...
...The narrator tries to do both, and finds each difficult...
...Like other religions, Judaism was shaped by the unprecedented freedoms of the New World, then experienced dramatic changes in the aftermath of World War II when American Jews began to lose their strong Jewish identity...
...But this time it's without his best friend Dov, who has died in battle, and without the optimism and faith with which he greeted the moon just a month before...
...He and his best friend, Dov, join with the Hasidic followers of the Amshinov Rebbe in reciting the prayer that welcoming the moon of Tishrei on a clear, bright night...
...as other Jews did in colonial times, and in the era of the American Revolution, and in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century—that Judaism in America is doomed, that assimilation and intermarriage are inevitable...
...He and the other soldiers celebrate a Sabbath meal, even though they have to interrupt the meal several times to go out and fight...
...And, like the central character in this novel, he served in the tank corps in the 1973 war...
...The second takes place one month later, a month that feels like a decade or more to him...
...In a sweeping history that commences with the arrival of 23 Jewish refugees from Recife, Brazil to New Amsterdam in 1654, Sarna works his way up through time to modern Judaism, America's third faith alongside Protestantism and Catholicism...
...Eventually, he says, "people lost their sense of Jewishness— it was no longer something you could absorb like sunshine in your surroundings...
...Debra Bruno Adjusting Sights Haim Sabato and Hillel Halkin, The Toby Press, 168 pp., April 2003, $19.95...
...Sabato writes with literate simplicity...
...But it also refers to the spiritual task of getting into focus, of achieving kavanah before praying...
...Sabato came to Israel in 1957 after spending his childhood years in Egypt...
...He's confident that that "American Jews will find creative ways to maintain and revitalize American Judaism...
...Once upon a time in America, even if you didn't go to synagogue, you knew it was the Sabbath...
...Haim Sabato is the descendent of a long line of Sephardic rabbis...
...He builds a sukkah over the roof of a tank, and finds something clean and presentable to wear for the Sabbath...
...these accompany him through the hell of batde and give him hope...
...The first occurs on die night after Yom Kippur...
...The story takes place between two Kiddush Halevanah ceremonies...
...On almost every page he cites passages from the Bible, the Siddur, the writings of the sages of the Talmud and the wisdom of the Hasidic rabbis...
...Today's challenge says Sarna, is to remember the resiliency of American Judaism...
...Sarna doesn't agree with the doomsayers, he finds American Judaism to be a glass halffull, thriving and growing...
...NOTABLE BOOKS American Judaism: A History Jonathan D. Sarna...
...On the 350th anniversary of Judaism in North America, Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis, shows us why American Judaism is so different from Judaism in the rest of the world...
...His great great grandfather was the chief rabbi of Aleppo, Syria...
...It refers to the task of aligning one's eye with a gun at different levels in the tank, one of the first things that a gunner has to learn to do...
...With the help of visionary leaders, committed followers, and generous philanthropists, it may still be possible for the current 'vanishing' generation of American Jews to be succeeded by another 'vanishing' generation, and then still another...
...This time, alone on a cloudy night with his body aching and his soul scarred, he recites the same words of welcome to the moon...
...This remarkable novel enables us to see into the Israeli soul, or at least into the inner life of one group within Israeli society...
...While struggling to adjust the sights of his gun, he injures his eye and comes out of the war with his faith injured and in need of adjustment too.—Jack Riemer...
...Regularly, American Jews hear...
...The title of this book has two meanings...
...With the move out to the suburbs, Jews were no longer living among other Jews...
Vol. 29 • August 2004 • No. 4
