Book Notes

American Jewish Life

Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures—A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl, by Carmit Delman. New York: Ballantine, 2002. 261 pp. $22.95. ISBN 0-345-44593-7.

The author’s mother is a direct descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny, ancient community of Jews thriving amid the rich culture of western India. Her father is an American Jew of Eastern European descent. Their daughter, growing up in America, was well aware of her uncommon heritage. Her memories of her adolescence are juxtaposed with mythic tales of her female ancestors living in the Indian Jewish community.

The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation: Jews and Judaism in America, edited by Richard John Neuhaus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. 218 pp. $24.00. ISBN 0-8028-4929-6.

Culled from the pages of the journal First Things and written by authors with diverse viewpoints, this book examines the way in which American Jews are at once “a people apart” and exemplars of the American success story. The contrib utors address a range of questions pertaining to American Judaism, from religious observance and church-state relations to the prospects for a more deeply religious engagement between Jews and Christians.

Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y, by Naomi M. Jackson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 288 pp. $19.95. ISBN 0-8195-6420-6.

The Y located in New York City at 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue is the largest and oldest continuously operating Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in the United States. Many of the most important figures in modern dance premiered on its stage. As Naomi Jackson shows, the Y’s particular conception of Jewishness laid the groundwork for the establishment of a center for dance in the 1930s.

The New Rabbi: A Congregation Searches for its Leader, by Stephen Fried. New York: Bantam, 2002. 357 pp. $ 25.95. ISBN 0-553-80103-1.

Journalist Stephen Fried explores the life of the clergy and the private world of American Jews by following a nationally known congregation as it searches to replace its renowned rabbi of 30 years.

Ancient World and Archaeology

Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources Joachim Braun. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. 368 pp. $30.00. ISBN 0-8028- 4477-4.

In this study of the musical culture of ancient Israel/Palestine based primarily on the archaeological record, Joachim Braun explores the music of the Holy Land, tracing its form and development from its beginnings in the twelfth millennium BCE to the fourth century CE.

Understanding Biblical Israel, by Stanley Ned Rosenbaum. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002. 338 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-86554-702-5.

This book is an attempt to fill in the gaps in the historical record of the Bible. The author argues that Israel’s religion was not a clean break with humanity’s past, that early Israel was not “one man’s family” but rather a collection of individuals and groups, mainly outcasts, who coalesced into a nation and developed a religion of ethical monotheism and principles of democratic government and social justice.

Biblical and Rabbinic Literature

Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics and Divine Imagery, by David H. Aaron. Leiden: Brill, 2001. 221 pp. $89.00. ISBN 90-04-12032-7.

This book poses as its central question: When we read a passage in the Hebrew Bible, how do we know whether the passage was meant literally or metaphorically? This study argues that our assumptions as to how language works influences the way we interpret biblical texts. Drawing upon contemporary linguistic theory, Aaron seeks to place before the reader a strategy for deciphering biblical idioms within a theory of semantics, using divine imagery in the Hebrew Bible as the primary focal point.

Development and Discontinuity in Jewish Law, by Ruth N. Sandberg. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 282 pp. $59.00 (c); $37.00 (p). ISBN 0-7618-2165-1 (c); 0-7618-2166-X (p).

Ruth Sandberg analyzes ten biblical commandments and their interpretations in classical and medieval rabbinic sources. These texts reveal that the...