Fifty-five years ago, a star was born: plucky, lucky Marjorie Morningstar, the "American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish." At least, that's how Time described her. Today, depending on whom you ask, Herman Wouk's 1955 novel, Marjorie Morningstar, is either the story of the romantic awakening of a blue-eyed Jewish beauty or a cautionary tale about what happens when you stray too far from your origins.
Michael Gold.
Comparisons between the Great Depression and current economic conditions "remain relevant," says the financial columnist Robert Samuelson—"and unsettling." Economic growth for this year's second quarter was a paltry 1.6 percent; unemployment hovers above 9.5 percent; sales of existing homes have fallen to their lowest rate in more than a decade; consumers show little sign of having recovered their confidence. At such a moment, American literature must surely be ripe for a revival of the Marxist-inspired "proletarian novel."
Sol Levitas, 1958.
After eighty-six years, eighty-two in print and the last few in cyberspace, the New Leader, a quintessential American "little magazine," is folding. Like all good publications, it both embodied and analyzed a world of its own, a world worth remembering.
When Jews the world over sit down next week to mark the birth of Jewish history, matzah will figure prominently at the table. Matzah baking is an exacting task; according to traditional law, the entire process, from first kneading to exit from the oven, must be accomplished in 18 minutes flat, with not a speck of leaven in sight. For thousands of years, these specifications and others were laboriously met by hand. Yet this most ancient food has a modern history, too.
The first matzah machine was invented in 1838 in France. With rabbinic approval, the technology moved steadily eastward. The first vigorous opposition arose in Galicia in the late 1850's, as questions about whether the technique met halakhic standards erupted into heated and often personal polemics. But the fight for and against did not always divide along predictable lines. Some moderate rabbis hoped that opposing the machines would help confirm their traditionalist bona fides, while some staunch traditionalists favored the machines precisely for their elimination of human error.
The socio-economic arguments cut both ways, too. To some, the machines harmed the unskilled laborers whose livelihood derived from matzah-baking. To others, the lower prices made possible by the machines eased the masses' economic burdens.
Meanwhile, in America, even those rabbis skeptical of machine matzot judged that they were better than nothing for the nation's many unlettered Jews. In 1888, Behr Manischewitz, an astute and pious immigrant from East Prussia, opened a matzah factory in Cincinnati. Soon facing local competition, he cut costs, improved quality, and burnished his image. His factory introduced the first square matzot, unmistakable products of industrial automation. Advertising his technology to English readers, he simultaneously won rabbinic endorsements in Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals.
Over time, Manischewitz and his competitors—Streit, Horowitz-Margareten, Goodman—created a distinctively American matzah for a a distinctively American Passover: a holiday coming to be seen less as the birth of a particular nation than as a celebration of freedom in general.
A different sort of book launch took place yesterday at New York's Park Avenue Synagogue, a flagship of the Conservative movement. Being celebrated was the release of a long-lost novel left unfinished at the time of the author's death 60 years ago. The author was Milton Steinberg, who once served as the synagogue's rabbi and was among the most influential American Jews of the 20th century.
Steinberg's early thought was molded by three teachers. At City College, the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen imbued in him a commitment to philosophical rationalism. Rabbi Jacob Kohn taught him that the life of the mind was inconceivable without faith in the very existence of truth. At the Jewish Theological Seminary, he became a disciple of Mordecai M. Kaplan.
Kaplan's monumental work, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), marked the summit of what a recent historian has called "sociological Jewishness." Rescuing non-Orthodox American Judaism from the tepid pieties of ethical universalism, this new dispensation recast Jewish identity and practice in functional terms as a way of maintaining and preserving such American values as pluralism, social justice, and civil society. Sidestepping the hard questions of theology, sociological Jewishness held sway over Conservative and Reform Judaism for decades.
Steinberg's The Making of the Modern Jew (1933) was written in the spirit of Kaplan's desire to combine critical and historical thinking about God and religion with an embrace of Jewish peoplehood, history, and moral concern. In his best-known and still popular work, the novel As a Driven Leaf (1939), the figure of Elisha ben Avuya, a talmudic sage whose mysterious persona has tantalized scholars and skeptics for centuries, dramatizes the tensions between reason and faith. By the novel's end, it is clear that reason cannot live without faith—albeit a faith couched in terms of "a pattern of behavior" for an ethical life, hardly the stuff of prophecy and martyrdom.
Steinberg was an eloquent and prolific writer and lecturer, and his mix of a reasonable deism with a commitment to Jewish life and ritual made him one of American Judaism's most popular expositors. But in his final years—he died at the age of just forty-six—his tone shifted. For him, as for others, the Holocaust shattered confidence in human reason and its ability to face evil. He found an echo to his questions in the Christian thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, began to study mystical texts, laid greater emphasis on prayer, and in a 1949 address called for a return to theology. His last, posthumous work was titled Anatomy of Faith.
Steinberg's lesson, wrote his friend Arthur A. Cohen, was that "any authentic Jewish theology must combine the wise innocence of the Jew, the intellectual rigor of the Greek, and the irresoluble ambiguity of the modern Christian." To this we might add another, central element: a commitment to the Jewish people, past, present, and future.
D.G. Myers
Third in a series on landmarks in American Jewish literature
In American literature, the critic Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothing succeeds like failure. But among American Jewish writers, something like the reverse is closer to the truth: for many of their fictional characters, nothing fails so miserably as success. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the first classic of Jewish fiction in America.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
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