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Jewish Law · History

Getting Along with the Gentiles

Summarizing Allan Arkush in Jewish Review of Books · Published Thursday, May 30, 2019
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JL;DR SUMMARY Allan Arkush reflects on the significance of a book he discovered at the Brandeis Book Stall in Brookline, Massachusetts: Jacob Katz's "The Shabbes Goy: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility." A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Sabbath Observance  Rabbinic Literature  Jewish Gentile Relations  Jacob Katz  Interfaith Interactions  Rabbinic Tradition  Shabbes Goy  Halakhic Flexibility  Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn  Historical Scholarship 

Places mentioned

Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
"One of my favorite used bookstores ever was the Brandeis Book Stall that used to be on Sewall Avenue in Brookline, Massachusetts, not far from the heart of Coolidge Corner."
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
"Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn conducting service. Jewish Memorial Service, Iwo Jima, 21 March 1945. Photo courtesy of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio."
Massachusetts, United States
"As a graduate student at Brandeis, and for years afterward, I visited it periodically expecting to find unusual bargains."
Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Japan
"Gittelsohn speak once or twice, but it wasnt until I read Deborah Dash Moores GI Jews that I learned that he had been a chaplain in the U.S. Marines and had been on the scene through the 36-day Battle of Iwo Jima."
Israel
"Six years older than Gittelsohn, the Hungarian-born Jacob Katz was teaching and doing historical research in Palestine during World War II, but his real academic career didnt begin until 1945, when he was 41. He more than made up for the late start t"
Hungary
"The subtitle of Katzs book is A Study in Halakhic Flexibility. His subject is the way in which leading rabbis over the centuries, from ancient Babylonia to 19th-century Russia and Hungary, endeavored both to maintain as much of the traditional law as"
Germany
"Katz, who had obtained his training in rabbinics in traditional yeshivas in Hungary and his PhD in sociology in Germany, had an unsurpassed ability to elucidate rabbinic deliberations of this sort for the layman and to situate them in their specific so"
Russian Federation
"The subtitle of Katzs book is A Study in Halakhic Flexibility. His subject is the way in which leading rabbis over the centuries, from ancient Babylonia to 19th-century Russia and Hungary, endeavored both to maintain as much of the traditional law as"
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