#Irving (Yitz) Greenberg

[mariacallous]

Last December, in a column about the Jewish books of 2023, I predicted that “next year’s list will include a slew of books dealing with the crisis in Israel or will be read through the lens of the war.”

It was an easy call: If this year’s nonfiction Jewish authors didn’t focus directly on the tragedy or aftermath of Oct. 7 — Israeli journalist Lee Yaron in “10/7: 100 Human Stories,” massacre survivor Amir Tibon in “The Gates of Gaza” and Adam Kirsch in “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” to name a few — many added a chapter on the crisis to projects that had long been in the works. 

Joshua Leifer told me he had to rewrite “about 20,000 words” of “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” his autobiographical critique of the Jewish mainstream. Three books of Jewish theology intended for wide audiences — “To Be a Jew Today” by Noah Feldman, “The Triumph of Life” by Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg and “Judaism Is About Love” by Rabbi Shai Held — included additional chapters taking into account the fresh wounds and nascent implications of the attack and the war.

In a typical year, the books by Leifer, Feldman, Greenberg and Held — and perhaps “The Amen Effect,” an inspirational volume by Rabbi Sharon Brous — would have competed for the book that best captured the Jewish moment and discourse. It’s a category I’ve been thinking about lately, after asking JTA readers to suggest Jewish books that define 21st-century Jewry and that — here’s the key part — are likely to be found on the shelves of the Jewish readers they know. I was inspired by universally read, era-defining books like 1958’s “Exodus” by Leon Uris, which fed and presaged the Zionist fervor of the 1960s, and “World of Our Fathers” by Irving Howe, which in the 1970s remembered what the children and grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants were already starting to forget.

I’ll get to the readers’ nominees in a moment, but I want to start by suggesting that it is still too early to pick a book, or books, that best reflects where Jews have landed in the wake of Oct. 7. The war still grinds on, and the Jewish community remains uncertain how it will end or what it will ultimately mean. Some themes are emerging, including resurgent antisemitism, the international isolation of Israel, a rupture between Jews and the political left, and perhaps a return to Jewish religious practice and belonging. Any author will need some time and distance to make sense of the upheaval.

It may not be surprising then that the book most frequently suggested by the dozens of readers who responded to my callout, “People Love Dead Jews,” anticipated these upheavals and the Jews’ sense of abandonment. Novelist Dara Horn’s first nonfiction collection, published in 2021, posited that societies that are happy building memorials and museums to Jewish suffering are reluctant to show respect or understanding to actual living Jewish communities. The book “really helped me wrap my head around present-day antisemitism,” wrote reader Marianne Leloir Grange. 

For many readers, “People Love Dead Jews” serves as a skeleton key to understanding the worldwide backlash against Israel in a war that began when Hamas slaughtered 1,200 mostly Jews on Oct. 7. As Horn explained in an interview in April with the online European Jewish magazine K., “You’ll see that people love dead Jews, as long as they’re vulnerable and helpless. In fact, I found it remarkable how much people seemed to relish the idea of showing their support for murdered Jews, until Israel responded with force. That’s how people love the Jews: powerless to stop their own slaughter. As soon as the Jews show any capacity for action, it’s all over.”

(When I asked Horn this week what books spoke to her this year, she said she appreciated Kirsch’s book, the anthology “Young Zionist Voices” edited by David Hazony, and Benjamin Resnick’s dystopian novel “Next Stop.”) 

Another frequently mentioned book seemed almost to act as a balm to Horn’s thesis: “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride. Last year’s best-selling, prize-winning historical novel is set in a small Pennsylvania town at a moment when immigrant Jews and poor Black families found common cause. “‘The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store’ by James McBride is probably one of the most popular recent books likely to be on an American Jew’s bookshelf,” Galina Vromen wrote me. “I would argue that part of the attraction to Jews today is in light of antisemitism and nostalgia when Jews and Blacks saw themselves on the same side of just causes and Jews were not regarded as enemy white people.”

Vromen, a novelist, had a number of strong suggestions for the kinds of recent books likely to be on American Jewish bookshelves, including “The Netanyahus,” Joshua Cohen’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that serves as a cutting critique of present-day Israeli politics; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” Michael Chabon’s best-selling 2000 novel about the Jews who pioneered superhero comics; and “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. The last one, published in 2009, presented Israel as an incubator of high tech innovation (and coined an enduringly popular nickname for the country) and offers readers a comforting rebuke to the activists who see Israel as an oppressor and colonizer. 

A number of readers recommended Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” which imagined an America run by the populist, isolationist, Nazi-sympathizing and antisemitic Charles Lindbergh in the early years of World War II. The book has had a number of lives: Roth said he wrote it as a rumination on Jewish security in America, but by 2016 it was seen by Donald Trump’s critics as an eerie prophecy of his rise and first election; HBO adapted it for a miniseries in 2020; and this year the New York Times named it one of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”

Beyond that, no other book was suggested by more than one reader, although the ones they did mention seem like strong contenders for the current Jewish book shelf: “Everything Is Illuminated,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 magical realist novel that anticipated the current vogue for works about Jewish roots tours in Eastern Europe; “My Promised Land” by Ari Shavit and “Like Dreamers” by Yossi Klein Halevi, two 2013 nonfiction works by Israeli authors attempting to explain the country’s heart and soul; and Deborah Lipstadt’s 2019 “Antisemitism: Here and Now” (although I am guessing her 2005 memoir “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” which became the motion picture “Denial,” is better known). 

Samuel Freedman’s “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry,” published in 2000, fell just short of the 21st century, but was a prescient look at the internal political and religious divides that would only yawn wider in the coming decades. 

I was also pleased to hear from readers who suggested cookbooks. “Jerusalem” by Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi (2011) not only kicked off a mania for high-end Middle Eastern cooking but presented a complex and even hopeful version of Jewish and Palestinian coexistence (which did not, over time, include the authors). Joan Nathan’s “Jewish Cooking in America” (1994) cemented her role as Jewish cuisine’s Julia Child. And it’s the rare kosher-keeping home cook who doesn’t own a volume in Susie Fishbein’s “Kosher By Design” series. Fishbein “single-handedly raised Jewish cooking to a gourmet level [and] opened the floodgates to a new sub-industry,” Barbara Kessel wrote me from Jerusalem.

What became clear from my unscientific survey is that in a polarized and media-saturated age, there are fewer books that American Jews might have in common than, say, 40 years ago. But maybe that’s OK. Each year sees a flood of new Jewish books, capturing voices beyond the ashkenormative assumptions of the 20th century and as diverse as the people who write and read them: Mizrachim, women, interfaith families, LGBT Jews, Jews of color, Jews by choice, the religious, the formerly religious.

“Today, my understanding of Jewish life is so much bigger (and richer),” the writer Erika Dreifus wrote me, remembering her own childhood among Ashkenazi Jews in the metro New York area. “I’m so much more aware of Jewish experience that differs from my own.”

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Hi! It's unavailable-username posting, I changed my URL! I've realized why so many of the so-called "leftists" on the internet seem to be keen on dehumanization: while they believe in human rights, they believe humanity itself to be a privilege. They also believe that since they are either of a marginalized status or standing up for the marginalized, that makes them "oppressed", and therefore gives them a right to revoke humanity from their oppressors. I think that this comes from their idolization of Magneto, who did very much the same thing. But what most "leftists" don't seem to realize (or try to whitewash) is that Magneto is a Zionist, and that he was based on two Zionist figures (Meir Kahane and Menachem Begin) who, ironically, were very similar in their rhetoric to these radical leftists. They seem willfully ignorant to the fact that Begin, Kahane, and their ilk dehumanized because they believed that no matter how much the Jews pandered to the gentiles, how much they assimilated, or how much they tried to be a model minority, their enemies would never truly see them as human. And if the Jews' enemies do not see them as human, then the Jews should not see their enemies as human in turn. Leftists fail to understand that Magneto is wrong for dehumanizing his oppressors, and they seem unwilling to realize that.

(I don't read comics, so sorry if I got anything wrong. I'm also sorry if this is a bit messy)

Dear Spacom

thank you for the essay!

"Hi! It's unavailable-username posting, I changed my URL!"

I like it! It's possible to spell and pronounce noW

"I've realized why so many of the so-called "leftists" on the internet seem to be keen on dehumanization: while they believe in human rights, they believe humanity itself to be a privilege."

Yep! It's fascism 101.

"They also believe that since they are either of a marginalized status or standing up for the marginalized, that makes them "oppressed", and therefore gives them a right to revoke humanity from their oppressors."

Exactly

"I think that this comes from their idolization of Magneto, who did very much the same thing."

You have it completely backwards. They idolize Magneto because he has the same ideology from already being radicalized, they are NOT getting radicalized into fascism by misunderstanding x-men comics

"But what most "leftists" don't seem to realize (or try to whitewash) is that Magneto is a Zionist, and that he was based on two Zionist figures (Meir Kahane and Menachem Begin) who, ironically, were very similar in their rhetoric to these radical leftists. They seem willfully ignorant to the fact that Begin, Kahane, and their ilk dehumanized because they believed that no matter how much the Jews pandered to the gentiles, how much they assimilated, or how much they tried to be a model minority, their enemies would never truly see them as human."

Yeah the Begin parallels are darker post Lebanon war as Claremont made the comparison before that happened as merely "a man who when from terrorism to winning the peace prize" but honestly that makes the comparison more apt to me

as for Kahane that wasn't intentional but it's also a parallel to be drawn

In our May 23 issue, Ami Eden argued that the opposing forces in the blockbuster film, “X2: X-Men United,” could be interpreted as metaphor for two radical theological responses to the Holocaust — one belonging to Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, the other to the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. The good-guy mutants, Eden noted, are led by the wheelchair-bound Professor X (played by Patrick Stewart), a powerful psychic with an ideological — and physical — resemblance to Greenberg. Professor X remains dedicated to coexistence between mutants and non-mutants, while his nemesis and lifelong friend Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Ian McKellen), is convinced that a war between the two groups is inevitable. Apparently, the analogy was closer than we thought.

Ami Eden’s article was creative, insightful, clever and funny. I enjoyed and agreed with it even before he made me as handsome as Patrick Stewart. Readers might be interested to learn that the article cut much closer to the bone than even Eden may have realized.

-By Irving Greenberg ,June 13, 2003

"And if the Jews' enemies do not see them as human, then the Jews should not see their enemies as human in turn. Leftists fail to understand that Magneto is wrong for dehumanizing his oppressors, and they seem unwilling to realize that."

So actually it's weirder for Magento. Because Magneto dehumanizes HIMSELF and places himself as higher than humaninty and humanity as vermin. I always interpreted it as his way of coping with years of dehumanization by internalizing it and then inverting it. Regardless dehumanization is always wrong and kahanism is righfully mocked as inverting the paradigm to islamophobia.

(I don't read comics, so sorry if I got anything wrong. I'm also sorry if this is a bit messy)

If you read the comics you'd see that Xavier meets Magneto at a mental asylum where Magneto is a volunteer orderly and it's heavily implied that Magneto was a former patient. Magneto is very much explicitly mentally ill. His trauma is also never used to justify his actions or discredit his very real fears. At least most of the time. We don't talk about the times when comics about got ableist.

thanks for letting me talk about this again,

Cecil

[jewishbookworld]

A Torah Giant: The Intellectual Legacy of Rabbi Dr. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, edited by Shmuly Yanklowitz Discover the breadth of wisdom provided by this generation’s giant of Torah: Rabbi Irving “Yitz" Greenberg. Rabbi Yitz is one of the most renowned leaders in contemporary Jewish communal life.

[yidquotes]

Judaism is founded on human faith and divine promise that the world can be perfected. 

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg

[merrikstryfe]

I don’t care what denomination you belong to, as long as you’re embarrassed by it.

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg

[jewsome]

Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken

Edited by Adam Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steven Bayme

Sixteen scholars from around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside in June 2014, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism. The current volume is the fruit of this encounter. The goal of the event was to facilitate in-depth engagement with the thought of Rabbi Dr. Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, concentrating particularly on the historical ramifications of his theological and public stances. Consideration was given to his lifelong and complex encounter with the Modern Orthodox stream of American Judaism and the extent to which his teachings functioned as “the road not taken.”

This auspicious gathering was most certainly characterized by deep appreciation for Greenberg’s original outlook, which is predicated on his profound dedication to God, Torah, the Jewish people, and humanity. But this was by no means gratuitous homage or naive esteem. On the contrary, those in attendance understood that the most genuine form of admiration for a thinker and leader of his stature―especially one who continues to produce path-breaking writings and speak out publicly―is to examine rigorously and critically his ideas and legacy. We are confident that the creative process that was nurtured has resulted in a substantive contribution to research on the religious, historical, and social trajectories of contemporary Judaism, and, similarly will engender fresh thinking on crucial theological and ideological postures that will ultimately enrich Jewish life.

This volume offers readers a critical engagement with the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times.

The post Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken appeared first on Jewish Book World.

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[collegenewsupdates-blog]

How the Six Day War changed American Jews

Brandeis University News NEW YORK (JTA) — On the morning of June 5, 1967, as Arab armies and Israel clashed following weeks of tension, Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg sat anxiously amid his congregants at daily prayers — fearful that the Jewish people would face extinction for the second time in 25 years. “One of the…

How the Six Day War changed American Jews

[merrikstryfe]

I don't care what denomination [of Judaism] you belong to, as long as you're ashamed of it.

Rabbi Dr Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, as related by Joseph Telushkin