The Head of an Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva and His Surprisingly Good Pseudonymous Novel

Oct. 16 2019

Set in New York in the late 1950s, The Idiom and the Oddity (2017) tells the story of a young man who decides to revolt against his parents’ drift away from Jewish tradition and observance, leaves his family home in suburban Long Island for the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up, and eventually finds himself studying in a rabbinical seminary in upstate New York. While the novel was written under the pseudonym Sam Benito, Henry Abramson recognizes the author as a certain prominent ḥaredi rabbi, and the story as highly autobiographical. Abramson does not reveal the author’s identity, but argues that the work is a rich, if imperfect, coming-of-age tale:

[T]here’s certainly no salacious or otherwise inappropriate content in the 300-page novel, but even a superficial reading alludes to youthful experimentation with activities that, in the ḥaredi world, range from the merely frowned upon to forbidden outright. . . . The [author] describes his quasi-heretical youth, from attenuated adherence to kashrut to a non-Jewish girlfriend who lives in, of all places, the Long Island community of Babylon.

Readers with an appreciation of yeshiva culture (and baseball culture) will appreciate this work, but the author clearly assumes that his readers also possess a basic working knowledge of the great canon of Western literature and philosophy. . . . The sheer breadth of his reading is sometimes a liability. I often found myself groaning at the excessive puns-per-page ratio, many of which involved several languages. [Take, for instance], this Steinbeck-inspired Yiddishism: when a character named Roth defuses a tense moment with an ear-splitting belch, the incident is referred to as “the greps of Roth” (greps being Yiddish for burp).

The book is an homage to Joyce above all: the trajectory of the plot borrows happily from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the style from Ulysses (the main character is even named Bloom), and even Joyce’s most enigmatic work gets a nod when an Irish character departs the story, leaving “Finnegan’s wake” in the aftermath.

Unfortunately, in contemporary yeshiva culture, fiction is strictly forbidden as bitul zman, “wasted time,” and the medium that might best express [its author’s] vision is off-limits under his own name.

Read more at Henry Abramson

More about: American Judaism, James Joyce, Jewish literature, Ultra-Orthodox

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023