A decade ago, an intense debate came to a head within American Modern Orthodoxy over the ordination of female rabbis. Forty years earlier, the same controversy played out within Conservative Judaism, with very different results. The decision to ordain women was championed by Gerson Cohen, an eminent historian of medieval Jewry and then the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary—the movement’s flagship institution. Zvi Leshem examines an unfinished draft of a letter about the controversy composed by Cohen’s main opponent at the time, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni (1927–2022), a highly original talmudist raised in the same Romanian shtetl as Elie Wiesel.

In the letter, Halivni wrote of the dispute, “An emotional frenzy was whipped up against those who stand firm in their opposition [to the ordination of women]. Such individuals have been branded ‘immoral,’ . . . narrow-minded, as possessing a STETL-mentality [sic] and non-native ignorance.” Leshem comments:

The last point—“non-native ignorance”—is deserving of a bit more analysis. As we have pointed out, the strongest opposition to women’s ordination came from the senior faculty members of the Talmud Department. . . . In addition to [the seniormost scholar Saul] Lieberman himself, Professors Halivni, Israel Francus, and Dov Zlotnick were European; Professor Chaim Zalman Dimitrovsky was Israeli; and Professor Jose Faur was from Argentina. All had been yeshiva trained before turning to academic Talmud study. Thus, they were in fact a soft target for the charge of possessing a “shtetl-mentality and non-native ignorance.”

Halivni, turning the tables, views these very qualities as positive in the context of the debate: “We reject with disgust these accusations, proudly proclaiming that we who are clinging to Jewish tradition are the true moralists; that thanks to the stetl and non-native religious and cultural influence the American Jewish scene turned in the last few decades from a spiritual desert into a blooming community.”

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.