Word: leifer
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Partly because students want to save money, there is a renewed interest in communal living in dormitories as an alternative to more expensive off-campus apartments. Quite a few colleges have abolished most dormitory rules. At Berkeley, says Ben Leifer, 21, a graduate student in public health, "there are virtually no regulations except be discreet, mind your own business and don't bother anyone." Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., permits students in dormitory suites to choose their own roommates-of whatever...
...this last point, Leifer and I disagree, as you might expect. Gordon's nationalism is no different from that German madness against which Buber warned the Jews in 1933. Universalist Christians (I use the adjective to weed Hegel out) have always maintained that the nation-state is a necessary evil, and that one's higher loyalties are to God and mankind. Leifer swallows Gordon's odd Germanic idea that the nation is the locus of man's creativity, that there are "no human ideals which are not national ideals." Gordon, it must be said, did tend to think of Israel...
...editing could be better. There are moments, for example, in Daniel Leifer's otherwise absorbing critique of Aaron David Gordon, when one chokes on dusty, academic prose. Prose aside, I think this piece is the best of the lot. Leifer rightly ranks Gordon with Buber and Rosenzweig as the most influential of this century's unorthodox European Jews, and he insists persuasively that Gordon is not so much the famed ideologue of Zionism's "religion of labor," as a theologian who fused strains of European romanticism into a new definition of Judaism. Certainly Gordon had a romantic sense...
Much more relevant to this century is the antinomian facet of Gordon's thought, which Leifer rejects as being alien to the Jewish tradition. Maybe that's why I like it (some of my best friends work for Mosaic, don't forget.) The antinomian (existentialist is the current word, I suppose) bias of thinkers like Gordon and Buber clearly do clash with law-centered traditional Judaism. But the absence of an absolute ground for morality in these two writers is not, as Leifer says, evidence that Judaism today lacks vigor. Rather, it is a token that Gordon and Buber...
...slowly dripping its weaker relative, mapharsen, into the bloodstream for eight hours a day, Drs. Hyman and Leifer and the third associate, Dr. Louis Chargin, eliminate the "shock" of relatively large injections, build up blood tolerance to huge concentrations of the essential arsenic. During a five-day treatment, a patient absorbs about two and a half gallons of mapharsen solution...