Reviews

David Fried reviews a recent book that considers the divergence of Rabbis Yitz Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks from the teachings of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Howard Apfel reviews Sacred Training: A Halakhic Guidebook for Medical Students and Residents.

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.

Laurance Wieder's After Adam was named the Book of the Year in 2019 by First Thing's John Wilson, but has been largely overlooked in the Jewish community. The Jewish Review of Book's Michal Leibowitz seeks to remedy this in her review of Wieder's lyrical retelling of the Bible.

What theological language can we use to describe our current pandemic moment? In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Jeremy Brown takes scope of the ancient and modern notions of plague theodicy and reviews some ideas from the 2021 National Jewish Book Award Winner Torah in a Time of Plague.

In advance of Shavuot, Stuart Halpern reviews Reading Ruth, a succinct but poignant new literary commentary on the Book of Ruth, by Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum.

Chesky Kopel reviews Eli Rubin’s new book Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism.

Marina Zilbergerts presents the philosophical questions posed by Chaim Grade's “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” and compares his arguments to those of other major thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.

Alan Jotkowitz reviews Rav Lichtenstein’s Values in Halakha.

Steven Gotlib review Miri Freud-Kandel’s new book on the relevance of Louis Jacobs to contemporary Orthodox theology.