From Library Journal
Susannah Heschel has compiled, edited, and written a biographical introduction to this first collection of the essays of her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-72), a noted scholar and theologian but also an activist in civil rights and antiwar causes. Although best known until now for such influential books as Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and Man's Quest for God, all written in the 1950s, Heschel also wrote theological essays and popular articles on social and political issues. In clear but dense prose, the theological essays celebrate the religious culture of pre-World War II Eastern European Jews, stressing the spiritual and mystical dimensions. Recommended for academic libraries with Judaica and theology collections.?Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907^-72), a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, fled eastern Europe in 1939, leaving the Hasidic Jewish world in which he was raised--a world soon to be destroyed in the Holocaust. His most important books were
Man Is Not Alone (1951),
The Sabbath (1951),
God in Search of Man (1952), and
Man's Quest for God (1954), masterpieces of religious thought. This collection of Heschel's essays has been compiled, edited, and introduced by his daughter, Susannah Heschel, a Case Western Reserve University professor. She has divided the essays into five groups: "Existence and Celebration," "No Time for Neutrality," "Toward a Just Society," "No Religion Is an Island," and "The Holy Dimension." The essays cover all aspects of Judaism; words of compassion and mercy from the most widely revered American rabbi and spiritual teacher of his generation. An appendix includes two interviews with Heschel.
George Cohen
