Book Description

"I became an American by refusing to assimilate," writes Arthur Hertzberg in this long-awaited memoir. Throughout his life this world-renowned rabbi, activist, author, historian, public servant, and confidante to the powerful has advocated that a true Jew is not an ethnic Jew who makes central his support for Israel or his fight against anti-Semitism, but rather a person deeply tied to the religion and its principles. Hertzberg traces his own self-discovery, confronting the choices he has made and offering a history of American Jews and their struggle for identity.

Undaunted by controversy, Hertzberg has been the moral conscience of American Jews, taking a stand on all the great issues of our time, from the creation of Israel through the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War and the highly fractious world of Jews today both here and abroad. Hertzberg is not willing to cede the great tradition either to religious fundamentalists or to the completely secularized. His life is a window onto the forces that have buffeted and strengthened Jews in our times, and his compelling story is an important portrait of the history and culture of the twentieth century, including his dealings with such luminaries as Golda Meir, Martin Luther King Jr., and Henry Kissinger.

From Publishers Weekly

This engrossing memoir by a leading American rabbi, an activist and historian, now in his 80s, who has been central to American political life, is a testament to the power of joining faith and political vision. "[T]he saving grace of times gone mad is the lonely person who keeps his sanity," Hertzberg (The Jews in America, etc.) was told as a child by his Orthodox father. Hertzberg's life was not a typical immigrant search for America ("My experience points away from assimilation and the melting pot," he writes). Charting his acute sense of difference from others because of his Orthodox life as a boy in Youngstown, Ohio, Hertzberg also speaks of this as liberation-"I never identified... the ghetto with backwardness." He uses this lens to view his life of thinking, action and resistance-his years studying to become a rabbi, his work to help Jewish war refugees relocate to Israel, his years in the civil rights movement and as a chaplain in the air force, and his continued work as a political critic and public intellectual. One wishes, at times, that Hertzberg might supply more context and less personal detail. When he is at his best, he maintains his steady political vision of faith tempered by tolerance ("The lasting danger to humanity is the uncompromising defender of the faith-any faith") and criticizes the Jewish urge to assimilate into "self-indulgent" consumerist U.S. culture. Readers may find much to disagree with here, but there is also much that will enlighten them. B&w photos. (Nov.) Forecast: This seems a bit steeply priced, but that may not deter Hertzberg's many admirers in the Jewish community.

From Library Journal

The son and grandson of Hasidic rabbis, Hertzberg immigrated from Poland to the United States with his parents at the age of five. He grew up to become a rabbi (in Englewood, NJ), a professor (at Dartmouth), and the author of a number of notable books, including The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter. Although, as he states in this memoir, he considers his "most serious act as a Jew" to be his ongoing study of Jewish literature, he has also been active in the World Zionist Organization and the American Jewish Congress, a strident advocate of the Civil Rights Movement, and an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam. He believes that "the future of America will be made by those who will hold fast to their traditions and their memories...but who will understand that the old wars of religion and the old ethnic angers are redundant and dangerous." His has been a lively and fascinating journey indeed, and here it is not only well examined but also brilliantly told. Highly recommended.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Marcia Welsh, formerly with Guilford Free Lib., CT

About Author

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, author of The Zionist Idea, Jewish Polemics, The Jews in America, Jews, and A Jew in America, is the Bronfman Visiting Professor of Humanities at New York University and Professor Emeritus of Religion at Dartmouth. A world-renowned Jewish scholar, he has served as president of the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress and as vice-president of the World Jewish Congress.

Book Dimension:

length: (cm)20.8 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)13.8