His Life with Hebrew

Alan Mintz, one of America’s foremost scholars of modern Hebrew literature, died on Saturday at the age of sixty-nine. Last month, he published in Mosaic a personal essay on his career studying, teaching, and speaking the language that, as “the portable component of the Jewish national idea,” was to him a constant and sustaining “source of nourishment and delight”:

In my third year as a graduate student in English at Columbia University, I came to a life-changing conclusion: as much as I enjoyed studying Victorian literature, I couldn’t see myself devoting my life to it. My real passion lay instead with the study of Jewish and Hebraic culture. After finishing my Columbia doctorate in the late 1970s and sampling different sub-specialties in Jewish studies—midrash, medieval Hebrew poetry, and others—I settled on modern Hebrew literature.

By that time, my Hebrew was quite good, at least for someone who had never previously aspired to be a scholar in the field. In fact, it was a source of some pride. The Conservative movement’s Hebrew school I had attended as a child in Worcester, MA had been staffed by committed Hebraists; entering college, I saw my future role in life as a rabbi or a Jewish educator, and at the summer camp where I served as a counselor during my college years, Hebrew was the semi-official language. By then, I could not only read texts in Hebrew but speak the language confidently—or so I thought. But once I decided to profess Hebrew, the rules of the game changed demonstrably. The glass that had been half-full now seemed, in my own eyes, half-empty.

I say “in my own eyes” because much of the anxiety I would experience as an American Hebrew speaker, and to some degree still experience as a long-time professor of Hebrew literature, has come from my sense of exposure to the judgment of others. . . .

Read more at Mosaic

More about: Hebrew, History & Ideas, Jewish education, Jewish studies, Modern Hebrew literature

The Demonic Impulse Behind Tucker Carlson’s Holocaust Denier

Nov. 12 2024

Meir Soloveichik sees in the so-called “revisionist” view of World War II an inversion of good and evil best explored by C.S. Lewis:

In 1942, with the world at war, an Oxford tutor wrote a book about traditional faith unlike any other ever published. It consists of missives from a senior devil in a demonic bureaucracy who is guiding a junior devil tasked with tempting one specific soul to achieve that man’s damnation. The senior devil is named Screwtape, and his letters are addressed to his nephew, Wormwood. . . . Screwtape refers to God as “our Enemy above,” and to Satan as “our father below.” For this bureaucratic demon, Hell is a source of admiration, Heaven an object of horror. Damnation is desired, and eternal life with God is disdained. By experiencing an instinctive horror at these moral reversals, the reader is to intuit the right and the good.

Indeed, as Soloveichik explains, Lewis may have been inspired to write The Screwtape Letters after listening to a speech of Hitler’s and pondering how the Führer “utilized his rhetorical gifts to frame the most horrific position imaginable as something entirely reasonable.”

For those who have watched the course of Carlson’s career, the recent showcasing of a Nazi defender and Holocaust denier is not a surprise, but it is, unquestionably, a new low. And it is a reminder that one does not need to adopt the Christian approach to Satan . . . to understand that today, in the United States, genuine demons walk, and podcast, amongst us. They may use microphones instead of missives to advance their morally inverted cause, but what they still seek is to sway souls to embrace evil.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, C.S. Lewis, Holocaust denial, World War II