Publisher's Synopsis
"Socher is one of the sharpest observers of Jewish America in our times. These essays, tracing a journey from a yeshiva to Oberlin College and from Franz Kafka to Rabbi Kook, are a loving, cutting, whimsical, and wise look at a Jewish moment that he senses might be ending."-Matti Friedman, author of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
"A lively gathering of essays . . . Socher's mode of close reading demonstrates the interpretive power that resides in deep Jewish learning."-Jewish Book Council
"A true reckoning of Jewish ideas and Western thought and culture-both classic and popular-and its discontents, especially as played out on the contemporary university campus."-Tradition
How did Humphrey
Bogart end up telling Lauren Bacall a Talmudic story in the film Key Largo,
and what does that have to do with Plato's theory of recollection-or American
Jewish assimilation? Precisely what poem of Robert Frost's inspired Nabokov's Pale
Fire, and how did Walter Benjamin learn about the remarkable stones of
Sinai? Abraham Socher wears his learning lightly. These witty and original
essays embody the spirit of the liberal arts, but the highlight of this
collection may be his devastating account of the illiberal arts at work in Oberlin
College, where he taught for eighteen years.
