Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer (review)

Book Reviews 185 issue is connected and overshadowed by the identity cards Israeli citizens carry, on which a Jew is listed as "Yehudi," whereas a Christian, Muslim, or Bedouin will be listed as "Aravi" ("Arab"), while for the Druze the term is "Druzi." Yehoshua perceives the term "Israeli" as consisting of a two-pronged defmition, one citizenship, the other identity. Questions of affiliations and identity are at the heart of the study. Yehoshua is asked to state how he sees the literature of Arabs in Israel: to what extent is it a completely separate literature or a part of Israeli literature. Yehoshua sees Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli components in the literature ofthe Israeli-Arab community. To Sami Michael, an Iraqi Jew who was born in Baghdad, whose book Refuge portrays Jewish and Arab Israeli characters in major roles, the plight of the Arab writers is indeed a difficult one. However, Michael, who switched from Arabic to Hebrew like other Iraqi-Jewish writers who immigrated to Israel, fmds it difficultto give up elements of his own early culture. And yet, not without some hesitation, he adopts an Israel identity. Also noted is Yoram Kaniuk, who wrote just one novel with a central Arab character, The Confession ofa Good Arab, authored under an Arabic name. Ultimately, the inclusion of a writer such as David Grossman, whose books The Yellow Wind and The Smile ofthe Lamb address political and cultural issues, would have contributed greatly to the study. Grossman belongs to a younger generation and speaks and reads Arabic. The three Israeli writers interviewed here were born in the 1930s, whereas Grossman was born in the 1950s. Further, the voice of other Israeli writers like Yitchak Ben-Ne'er, and others, among them the young postrnodemists, would have given a more rounded picture ofthe poetic and political impasse. A quote from Elias Chacour seem fitting as a conclusion: This land, this Palestine, this Israel, does not belong to either Jews or Palestinians. Rather, we are compatriots who belong to the land and to each other. Ifwe cannot live together, we surely will be buried here together. We must choose life. Gila Rarnras-Rauch Department of Hebrew Literature Hebrew College, Boston Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer, by Jakob 1. Petuchowski, edited by ElizabethR. PetuchowskiandAaronM. Petuchowski. Philadelphia: JewishPublication Society,1998. 311 pp. $34.95. This is the fourth in the Jewish Publication Society's "Scholar of Distinction" series (following similar anthologies of the scholarly writings of Gerson D. Cohen, Moshe Greenberg, and Judah Goldin). It includes 21 papers by this rabbi-scholar, who served on the Faculty of the Hebrew Union College from 1956 to his death in 1991, and who played a decisive role in shaping American Reform ideology and practice in the second half of our century. 186 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 It is appropriate, in this context, to begin by expressing our gratitude to the Jewish Publication Society for the series as a whole. These collections, under one cover, ofthe scholarly output of our most notable teachers, until now scattered in various publications , are a gift to us all. The papers in this volume are divided into five broad categories: "Biblical and Rabbinic Thought," "On the Frontiers ofTheology," "Confrontation with Modernity," "Liturgy and Reform," and "History of Reform Judaism." An introductory essay by ProfessorDavid Ellensontraces Petuchowski'sbiography from the enlightened German Orthodoxy ofhis early years-he was born in Berlin in I925-through his gradual shift to a more "liberal" (his word) reading ofJewish beliefand practice in England after the outbreak of the War, to his mature years as a leading spokesperson for the more traditionalist wing ofcontemporary Reform. The volume concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of Petuchowski's writing, two indices of biblical and rabbinic passages cited, and a generous index of authors and topics. Taken as a whole, these papers reveal an inherent, albeit familiar, tension between Petuchowski's "liberal" theology and his ardent advocacy ofa more conservative (with a lower-case "c") approach to halakhic development for contemporary Reform. On theology, he acknowledges his debt to the German Jewish existentialist, Franz Rosenzweig. Following Rosenzweig, he understands revelation as an encounterbetween God and Israel. The "only...