Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken ed. by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steve Bayme (review)

Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken is the most recent book, both academic and popular, on the Greenbergs, Blu and Rabbi Dr. Irving, a scholarly and activist married couple who have profoundly impacted American Judaism for over half a century. The growing list of titles about one or the other of the Greenbergs includes Steven T. Katz and Stephen Bayme's edited collection Continuity and Change: A Festschrift in Honor of Irving Greenberg's 75th Birthday (2011); Darren Kleinberg's Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity (2016); and Devorah Zlochower's edited collection You Arose, A Mother in Israel, A Festschrift in Honor of Blu Greenberg (2017). Moreover, both have been the subject of numerous articles in a wide variety of academic and intellectual publications despite the fact, as Greenberg himself states, "Modern Orthodoxy has not taken the road I advocated" (7). Hence the Robert Frost-alluding subtitle of this anthology of scholarly articles.

Essentially, Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy is the published record of a 2014 conference attended by "sixteen scholars around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism" (1). The book includes twelve articles from the 2014 conference as well as an insightful autobiographical "Retrospective View" by Greenberg. The contributors, some of whom previously contributed to the 2011 festschrift, represent a broad spectrum of scholars, including historians, philosophers, and sociologists.

This new study of Greenberg is divided into two parts: "Law and Theology," which mostly focuses on his thought, and "Past and Present," which expands to include a variety of studies on Modern Orthodoxy in general. The editors' forward succinctly explains that "the current volume offers readers the opportunity to examine in-depth the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times" (5).

Greenberg's opening autobiographical statement, one of several he has shared throughout his long career, is helpful to a scholarly assessment of his self-understanding at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically, it also provides a taxonomy of many the leading issues he has confronted over the decades including, in part, "Growing up in Modern Orthodoxy," "Rabbi Soloveitchik's Influence," "The Holocaust Transforms My Thinking," "The 1960s and Their Impact," "Recoil from the '60s and the Rise of Ultra-Orthodoxy," "Working for CLAL Yisrael as a Modern Orthodox Jew; Losing Ground in Modern Orthodoxy," and "The Decline and Rebirth of (Post) Modern Orthodoxy."

The fork in the road in Greenberg's life clearly came in the 1960s and was profoundly conditioned both by the general upheavals of that decade as well as, in academic religious circles, a particular interest in theology that later faded from mainstream American religious discourse. In her insightful contribution to the anthology, Sylvia Barak Fishman places special emphasis on the now well-known April 28, 1966, interview in The Commentator, the Yeshiva University student newspaper, written by Hillel Goldberg and entitled, "Orthodoxy, YU, Viet Nam & Sex" as a turning point in Greenberg's career. However, Greenberg himself points to a 1965 exchange with a Reform theologian, Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski, about the place of women in Jewish law as having "crystallized my nascent pluralism" (18).

The 1966 Commentator interview also gave rise to a lengthy response to Greenberg by Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein which is analyzed in the book's final chapter, "'The Road Not Taken' and 'The One Less Traveled': The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange and Contemporary Orthodoxy" by Adam S. Ferziger, one of the book's three editors and author of Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (2015). Correctly...