Jewish Review of Books

Hardly had Queen Victoria been laid to rest, some Englishmen started publishing a review of books at The Times. This was 1902. A few years later the publication became independent, as the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), though these days its Web presence is back at the Times. Along the way (1979, perhaps?) there was a fracas which gave birth to the London Review of Books. I don't dabble in all this enough to know which is the more important of the two.

Meanwhile, across the pond in New York, a group of rebels took advantage of a fracas of their own, and while the New York Times was temporarily shut down for strikers or some such, they launched a new review of their own: the New York Review of Books. This was in the early 1960s, and if you're into gossip about such matters it might tickle you to hear that the early editions of the LondonRB came out as a supplement to the NewYorkRB (I don't know how they justified calling it London, but perhaps literary types needn't be over-much bothered by earthly details.)

I sometimes read the NYRB and even cite articles here on Ruminations; I very rarely look at the London ones. I expect most all of them don't much like Israel and Zionism, but I'm not certain how much they like America, either, so I don't take much offense.

The Jews ("the Jews"?) have now decided they, too, need a Review of Books. I always thought the NYRB was a Jewish publication of course, but now there's an explicitly Jewish one; it's even called the Jewish Review of Books.

The first issue is just out, and online (I don't know how the publisher expects to make money), and has some interesting items. Yair Rosenberg, a student at Harvard who obviously gets all the insider jokes reviews Srugim, the popular Israeli non-response to Sex in the City. It's a different Harvard than it used to be. Shlomo Avineri, who could easily be the first reviewer's grandfather, reports on Dennis Ross and David Makovski's Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East. Avineri liked the book, but my synopsis of his synopsis is: There isn't much America can do about the Middle East, though it could make matters worse.

And then there's a review by one Azzan Yadin about a new English translation of the Bible, or rather, of the Mikraot Gedolot version of the Pentateuch. Yadin isn't gentle. He says the translation tries to make the texts simple and accessible to modern English readers, but they aren't: not simple, and not easily accessible. They need to be worked at to be appreciated. I recommend his review for the information it gives, but if you'd like to deal with the texts themselves, I'm sorry to report you'll have to read them in Hebrew, and you'll have to work at them.