Media Clippings

JBooks.com is an e-zine that deals with Jewish matters through the lens of culture, though from a purely secular viewpoint. The site is filled with book reviews, interviews, excerpts from current novels -- without a drop of religiosity in sight. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's rather refreshing. For no matter my deep love of, and commitment to, the Jewish religion, I was once a determined secularist and have always argued that some of Judaism's greatest advances, especially in the arts and sciences, were made under the banner of secularism.

The only thing that gets to me on the site is when writers become aggressively "in your face" about their atheism, as was the case with a two-part essay by Roi Ben-Yehuda called "Godless Jews: The Original Atheists With Attitude." The piece points out that, "For two centuries Jews have contributed a disproportionate creative role to the discourse of doubt, skepticism and atheism. Jewish intellectuals, the likes of Emma Goldman, Ernestine Rose, Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen and Ayn Rand have all brought to bear their considerable talents on the question of God's non-existence.

"It should come as no surprise that the same people that gave the world monotheism also played a significant role in its negation."

Secularism is one thing, but trumpeting atheism so determinedly seems a little too triumphalistic. And Ben-Yehuda's examples of great Jewish intellectuals -- in his second installment, he adds Karl Marx -- leave a lot to be desired (though Freud, outside of his anti-religion stance, far exceeds the others on that list). Like so many in literary and academic circles these days, Ben-Yehuda seems to overstate his case out of a need to counteract the seeming triumphs of the opposition.

When JBooks sticks to culture, I tend to like it a whole lot more. For example, Ken Gordon, the editor of the site, sent out an eNewsletter recently called "Haunted by the Ghost of Alfred Kazin," which I gobbled up.

Gordon began by admitting his fascination with the late New York Jewish intellectual, then wrote: "Those of you who've done time in the English Department know how this powerful critic shadows us as we scribble in the margins of a new novel, or browse the stacks at our favorite used bookstore. For those of you who have yet to make his acquaintance -- in the 20th-century literary world, Alfred Kazin was the man. No less an authority than Philip Roth called him, after Kazin died in 1998, 'America's best reader of American literature in the century.'

"The spirit of Kazin stares skeptically at the literary choices we make, at how well -- or poorly -- we respond to the text at hand. Kazin's shade is not impressed by how casually, how carelessly, we handle our literary materials. (Something tells me that Kazin wouldn't have appreciated the rise of the Internet.)"

There's lots more to this introduction and then, beneath it, you find numerous links to other passages that fill in Kazin's tale.

This is, distinctly, what JBooks does best.