Book Notes

Book Notes ':~""',' Book Notes 175 Annotations written by Dean Bell ofSpertus Institute ofJewish Studies are followed by the initials D.B. American Jewish Life Jews and the American Slave Trade, by Saul S. Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 326 pp. $34.95. ISBN 1-56000-337-5. Saul Friedman provides a rebuttal to the claim that Jews played a large part in the slave trade in the Americas. Torah and Constitution: Essays in American Jewish Thought, by Milton R. Konvitz. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. 356 pp. $44.95 (c); $18.95 (P). ISBN 0-8156-2755-6 (c); 0-8156-2762-9 (p). In this work, Milton R. Konvitz combines the Jewish and the liberal tradition. He analyzes topics that are vital to contemporary debate-how fanaticism and blind religious zeal, unanchored to informed historical tradition, lead to chaos. He elaborates on the centrality oflaw in both America and Judaism: the fIrst bound to the Constitution and the Framers, the second bound to Revelation, expanding to a legal system fashioned and refashioned by human interpretation. The author analyzes the intercorrelation of the Torah and the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the ideologies of Thomas Jefferson, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville. Ancient World and Archaeology The Book ofGiantsfrom Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary, by Loren T. Stuckenbruck. Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997. 289 pp. DM 190. ISBN 3-16-1467205 . A detailed analysis of the pertinent fragments from Qumran that examines their relation to the Book of Giants and explores their theological emphases. Stuckenbruck argues that the Book of Giants, influenced by the Genesis narrative and the Enoch Book of Watchers, may have been composed during the early second century B.C.E. (D.B.) 176 SHOFAR Fa1l1998 Vol. 17, No.1 Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention ofJewish Tradition, by Erich S. Gruen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 393 pp. $38.00. ISBN 0-520-21052-2. Erich Gruen draws on a variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore the question of how the Jews accommodated themselves to the larger cultural world ofthe Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it. The Image ofthe Jew in Flavius Josephus' Paraphrases ofthe Bible, by Paul Spilsbury. Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998. 300 pp. DM 160. ISBN 3-16-146869-4. An assessment ofJosephus' presentation ofJews and Judaism in the fIrst half ofthe Jewish Antiquities, arguing that the rewriting of the sacred account of the author's national history reflects his own apologetic agenda for both how non-Jews should view the Jews and for how Jews should view themselves in the wake of the failure of the Jewish war and the destruction ofJerusalem. (D.B.) Art, Music, and Film Exil: Flucht und Emigration europtiische Kiinstler 1933-45 (Exile: Flight and Emigration of European Artists 1933--45), edited by Stephanie Barron. Munich: Prestel, 1997. 432 pp., with 393 illustrations (123 in color). DM 118. ISBN 3-79131837 -3. Barron researches the themes of exile in art and art in exile after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Twenty-three artists, architects, and photographers are surveyed for the effects of exile on their respective works and the different ways in which they approached foreign culture. (German) (D.B.) Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, by Richard I. Cohen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 382 pp. $50.00 (c). ISBN 0-520-20545-6. Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. The interaction of Jews with the visual arts takes place in prints, portraits, books, synagogue architecture, ceremonial art, modem Jewish painting and scupture, political broadsides, monuments, medals, and memorabilia. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people ofthe text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows that the coming of the modem period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. Musik im "Dritten Reich" und im Exil, Band 1: NS-verfolgte Musiker in England: Spuren deutscher und osterreicher Fliichtlinge in der britischen Musikkultur (Music in the "Third Reich" and...