Reviews

While not the first, Rubin’s book is among the very few that aim to address the history of the Chabad movement as a whole, placing its major figures in dialogue with one another. Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity does so not in a devotional or ahistorical manner, but by exploring the rebbes’ writings as conscious and strategic efforts to forge a distinct Lubavitch tradition, construct the legitimacy of their leadership, and respond to the complex challenges of modern times.

May 23, 2025

Dynner frames The Light of Learning’s sweeping historical narrative with a crucial theoretical intervention. To think about interwar Polish Hasidism is also to think about the ongoing construction of modern Jewish identity, and the fraught intersections of emancipation, acculturation, assimilation, and colonization.

Oct 14, 2024

Yitzhak Lewis shows how Reb Nachman initiated a new era of Jewish literature that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writing.

Mar 30, 2021

In his recent meticulously-researched and sensitively-written work, Ariel Evan Mayse brings to the attention of the contemporary reader a remarkable theology of language to be found in the teachings of Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezritsh (1704-1772).

Oct 28, 2020