“Socher is one of the sharpest observers of Jewish America in our times. These essays, tracing a journey from a yeshiva to Oberlin College and from Franz Kafka to Rabbi Kook, are a loving, cutting, whimsical, and wise look at a Jewish moment that he senses might be ending.”—Matti Friedman, author of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
“A lively gathering of essays . . . Socher’s mode of close reading demonstrates the interpretive power that resides in deep Jewish learning.”—Jewish Book Council
"A true reckoning of Jewish ideas and Western thought and culture—both classic and popular—and its discontents, especially as played out on the contemporary university campus.”—Tradition
How did Humphrey
Bogart end up telling Lauren Bacall a Talmudic story in the film Key Largo,
and what does that have to do with Plato’s theory of recollection—or American
Jewish assimilation? Precisely what poem of Robert Frost’s inspired Nabokov’s Pale
Fire, and how did Walter Benjamin learn about the remarkable stones of
Sinai? Abraham Socher wears his learning lightly. These witty and original
essays embody the spirit of the liberal arts, but the highlight of this
collection may be his devastating account of the illiberal arts at work in Oberlin
College, where he taught for eighteen years.
Introduction
I Getting Culture
1. How the Baby Got Its Philtrum
2. Take Your Son . . .
3. Books vs. Children
4. Salsa and Sociology
5. Exit, Loyalty . . . Crowdsource?
6. Hebrew School Days
7. Hello, I Must Be Going
II Liberal and Illiberal Arts
8. Party in Boisk
9. Solomon Schechter and the Saint in the Drawing Room
10. The Chabad Paradox
11. Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem and the Stones of Sinai
12. Live Wire: Saul Bellow’s Life in Literature
13. Shades of Frost: a Hidden Source for Nabokov’s Pale Fire
14. Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation
15. Its Spring Again: Don Delillo on Resurrection
16. Says Who? The Sociologist’s Secret
17. Oberlin and the Illiberal Arts
18. Nonsense is Nonsense, but the History of Nonsense . . .
III Life and Afterlife
19. Accounting for the Soul
20. Is Repentance Possible?
21. No Game for Old Men
22. Light Reading
23. Something Antigonos Said
24. The Digression
25. Kaddish and Eternity