Reviews

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

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

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

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