Word: jewes
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...Editor Daniel Callahan of Commonweal suggests that Catholicism today may be undergoing the kind of transformation that Judaism suffered through in the 19th century. As dogmatic and cohesive a community then as Catholicism was before the council, Judaism offered its adherents a choice between Orthodoxy or apostasy. Now the Jew has a range of choice from secular indifference to Reform permissiveness to the strict Halakic observance of the Hasidim. Jews-and Protestants too-are aware that pluralism offers risks as well as rewards: indifferentism, sectarian quarrels, doctrinal anarchy. Yet just as Catholicism accepted the precedent of other faiths in adopting...
...misses by very little, however. Malamud's novel is a fictional version of the Beiliss Case in Kiev, 1911, in which a Jew was wrongly accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and of milking his blood for the purpose of making Passover matzos. The incident, followed by an obscene wave of antiSemitism, was documented in a bleak narrative by Maurice Samuel in Blood Accusation, published this year. Malamud coincidentally worked on the same gruesome subject, but he has gone beyond journalistic intention...
Surrounded by Russia. He aims to pose the universal question of innocent man put to nothing by guilty authority. His hero is a Jew whose complaint against Gentiles is not that they are not Jews but that they are not Christians. He is called Yakov Bok (a name that suggests scapegoat), a Russian who is a stranger to Russia, who makes himself a stranger to his own Jewish tradition, and who is finally a stranger to everyone but the reader...
...history and men betray him. His cart breaks down, so he rides bareback to his fate. He cannot leave himself behind; the horse "looks like an old Jew," and as he canters, ambles, trots and staggers across the black plain, Yakov can only be seen as a Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of "good fortune and a comfortable house," in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation...
...LAST JEW IN AMERICA, by Leslie Fiedler. In three comic novellas, a puckish critic-novelist plays conjuring treks with cards of racial identity. Fiedler's comedy is directed toward painful points of friction in U.S. life. He only laughs when it hurts...