Jewish New Year new books

Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish new year’s celebration—begins on September 22, so this is a good time to review four new Judaism-related books, starting with the entertaining Eminent Jews (Henry Holt, 2025). David Denby offers four long but readable chapters on Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein. 

The Brooks section is best with its specific detail of how the genius of aggressive comedy turned the terrible (even the Spanish Inquisition) into “ha-ha-ah,” a laugh followed by recognition of absurdity. Denby’s chapter is also a guide to diving into Brooks laugh-riot highlights on YouTube. The chapters on “Betty Friedan and the End of Subservience” and “Norman Mailer and the End of Shame” also show pushback against fitting in.

Denby’s title is a play on Lytton Strachey’s classic Eminent Victorians, which profiled Florence Nightingale and three other 19^th century British legends. They were proud but Leonard Bernstein was tormented. That’s evident in his conducting of Gustav Mahler symphonies and his biggest hit, West Side Story, originally envisioned as a Lower East Side Jewish battle and transformed into Midtown pushback against Puerto Rican immigrants. 

Mark Gerson’s God Was Right: How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah is True (BenBella Books, 2025) is 825 pages of intriguing insights. Joseph in Genesis may have had “ambiguous intentions.” God in Exodus emphasizes Pharoah’s heart and “considers the mind irrelevant.” God teaches Moses to focus on his capabilities, not his deficiencies.

I could go on. Gerson shows we can reframe experiences to derive meaning and purpose from suffering. A weekly 55 hours of work is the right amount. The judgment of charity means we should not attribute to malice what could be stupidity. Since we often look but do not see, riding motorcycles (sometimes called “donorcycles” because riders are more likely than others to be premature organ donors) is dangerous.

Sometimes, though, we look—and can tell a book by its cover. Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton University Press, 2025) reflects its glum cover photo of the secular Jewish thinker who was America’s most influential journalist during the half-century from World War I to the Vietnam War.

Lippmann grew up in Upper East Side Manhattan affluence and had an elite education including membership in the Harvard Socialist Club as anti-Semitic college social clubs excluded him. At The New Republic he became a prominent Woodrow Wilson fan, and later a syndicated columnist whom ambitious liberal politicians learned to coddle.

Lippmann was sometimes a court prophet through 1965. He initially defended Lyndon Johnson’s escalated Vietnam bomb-dropping: “I don’t think they kill anybody…. What we bomb is wooden sheds.” But as death tolls escalated Lippmann was “much troubled” and “spent his final years in despair” before dying of a heart attack in 1974.

Adam Silverstein’s Haman: A Biography (Princeton, 2025) shows how to be both scholarly and fascinating. Scrutinizing original sources from multiple languages, Silverstein shows how Jews worried that God was not explicitly present in the book of Esther, early Christians worried about themes of vengeance and ethnocentricity, and the Quran six times identifies Haman as an Egyptian and even a pharaoh. Nazis saw Haman as a hero and even (at their end) a martyr: On the way to the gallows, Julius Streicher shouted “Purimfest!”

The book of Esther entered Jewish and Christian canons because God’s sovereign hand shows up throughout the story. Rabbis and Christian theologians for centuries discussed whether and how Providence chained Haman’s hands. Some melded him with Roman or other oppressors. Fanciful writers called Haman a master-architect, beautician, military commander, or gambler. Others wondered whether he had grandchildren who later became pious. In England, Guy Fawkes Night became a Protestant Purim.

Briefly noted

Tony Kushner’s The Jewish Pedlar: An Untold Criminal History (Manchester University Press, 2025) is a tour-de-force of historical research concerning an 18^th century Jewish salesman hanged for murder. Jewish Roots of American Liberty by Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern (Encounter, 2025) is one part scholarship and three parts cheerleading, but its premise regarding the importance of the Old Testament is true.

Rebecca Wollenberg’s The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton, 2023) shows how Talmudic interpretation sometimes trumped Scripture. And sometimes illogic has trumped Talmud: Herbert Levine’s Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025) offers “non-theistic Jewish prayers.” To whom are they addressed?