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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strong book with strange lapses, December 8, 2000
This is a lyrical look at a world that is not accessible to most people on a daily basis. Lis Harris felt a strong attraction to the Hasidic Jews she saw around her from time to time, so she found a way to learn more about the people who live this life. Her book is respectful and informative. A weakness of the book is that her level of personal involvement in the writing seems uneven. This book is an unabashed memoir, where she describes how she got involved with the project (a longing to know more about what she saw in her own family pictures and felt drawn to, in the face of a quite secular upbringing). However, having described how she got involved in this project, she then fails to tell us how she resolved her longing. What did she learn about these people that enables her to look at the photographs without feeling the same drawing-in? I say this despite the fact that the individual parts of the book are highly personal -- her descriptions of the mikveh and of the lives of unmarried girls are lyrical and moving. The book is well worth reading, but the author's nearly completely assimilated background does make it hard for her to distinguish between "ultra-orthodox" religious practices, and more common practices of observant Jews (say the modern Orthodox, for example). Many things she encountered elicited a "gee whiz -- how odd!" response from her, and it was strange that she couldn't distinguish between the practices she encountered which are unique to Hasidic life and the practices which are common to practicing Jews of many stripes. The book would have been stronger had she spent less time looking for academic explanations of what she encountered and spent more time understanding the context -- how do these people fit into the context of observant Jewish practice? On the whole, however, it is an excellent book, well-written and worth reading.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for everyone, September 9, 2002
By A Customer
This book might be a fun and interesting read for the general buyer, but if you truly want to learn about what Hasidic life is like, it won't help you much. The author is not an Orthodox Jew, and the finished book just doesn't have much insight into the reality of the life. I do give it credit for including lots of extra basic information to educate the non-Jewish reader.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting look inside a fascinating community, April 2, 2009
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, after having heard so many good things about it for so long. Ms. Harris had long been curious about the Hassidim because of some old family photos of her own Hassidic ancestors, and she finally got a chance to not only indulge her curiosity but also to learn more deeply about her own heritage. Having been told that the Lubavitchers were by far the most modern Hassidic group, and the most welcoming to outsiders, instead of just living in some self-imposed ghetto and rarely or never interacting with the outside world, she decided to research and live among that community for this project. She was hooked up with Moshe and Sheina Konigsberg, and though it took awhile for every member of their family to really warm up to her (particularly Moshe's sons from his first marriage), she eventually found acceptance as a frequent visitor to Crown Heights, and the Konigsberg home. Starting with Purim and going through Sukkot, she observed almost all of the holidays in the community, spent many Shabbosim there, went to the main shul at 770, and attended discussions and shiurim for women. As with other books on Hassidic and ultra-Orthodox life, I have to admit that my sense of moral and cultural relativism was strained at times. For example, it made me sad that the ba'alei teshuvah at one of the women's discussion groups were defending the concept of kol isha, the prohibition against a man hearing a woman's voice in song, and claiming to the non-religious mother of one of the ba'alei teshuvah that men are automatically aroused and think inappropriate thoughts when they hear and see a woman singing, that they can't help it since they're men and not as spiritually high as women. While I don't agree with kol isha at all, I have heard some sensible explanations for it from other Hassidic people that don't make it seem like it's all about women being sexual temptresses and men being animals unable to control their thoughts and urges. While I personally could never accept such a strictly traditional gender role, though, and also have issues with certain other things about this community, such as the glib dismissal of the reams of evidence supporting evolution and an Earth that is billions of years old, it still comes across as a warm loving rich vibrant community. To those who have never known any other sort of life, and for those, like Sheina, who joined as adults after having fully lived in and experienced the secular world, it's a beautiful safe haven from the often harsh and difficult outside world. Everything is perfectly ordered and scheduled, with no worry about having to face the dizzying myriad of choices people in the outside world do. I did wish the book had been a bit less on the academic side, with less elaborate explanations of history and customs and more focus on the actual day-to-day life which Ms. Harris was experiencing. It's important to balance such a book out with a bit of explanatory background, but too much of an academic bent can take away from the personal reflections and experience. I sort of got the sense that she never fully left behind her pre-existing assumptions and scholarly interest in the community. I also didn't get the sense that she really resolved what led her to explore Hassidic life in the first place, the pull she felt toward the people in the old family photographs. And since it was written in the Eighties, some aspects of it are inevitably dated now. Still, in spite of the shortcomings, I would recommend this book to someone who's interested in learning more about Hassidic life.
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