Customer Reviews

Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972

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After completing "Spiritual Radical," I sat on my parent's couch in their NYC apartment, emotionally, if not physically, trembling. A myriad of thoughts and feelings streamed through me as if I were a video that one watches on the internet. On the ride back home to Brooklyn, I composed--in my mind--what easily could become a 20+ page essay, "Was Abraham Joshua Heschel A Prophet?" That's how moving and evocative I found Professor Kaplan's biography to be.

Besides giving me so, so much insight about Heschel, the man, I learned much about Heschel the theologist/philosopher, the historical period in which his work took place, the points of view of the various segments of both Judaism and Christianity--individual, organizational, and theological--and so much more it would take several pages to list them all.

Indeed, words like brilliant, superb, and/or profound to describe the quality of the Kaplan's writing would be understatements! If I may borrow a phrase from the title--even if English language purists would shake their heads--his work evoked in me "radical amazement." For sure, of all the biographies I have read over the years, his is the BEST I have ever come across--surpassing McCollough's "John Adams," and Cook's biography of Elanor Roosevelt, to name two that I esteem. Besides the clarity of the writing, what particularly impresses is how fair he was, given the necessity as a biographer of being truthful to his task, even if that required being critical--at times--of someone he obviously loved.

Finally, I can only imagine the profound and time-consuming labor he must have gone through to determine not only what to put on paper, but what to leave out! I believe his judgment concerning the latter places him, as much or more than anything else, in the top echelon of the vocation of biographers!

Abraham Joshua Heschel -- Spiritual Radical -- is a masterpiece!

Steve Rosner
Brooklyn, NY

The second volume is even better than the first...Kaplan does not idolize Heschel; he shares the frustrations and shortcomings, but also the richness of his writing, his work and his soul.

It was nearly two decades ago in a Yemenite restaurant in Jerusalem, while eating with several students that my hevruta partner mindlessly took a pita from the plate of the complete stranger sitting on the other side of him. After the embaressment was over, we learned that the stranger was a Brandeis professor doing research on Heschel. What followed was an illuminating conversation. I've only seen Dr. Kaplan twice since that 1991 encounter, but I've long savored the idea of a Heschel biography. The result is gratifying. This second volume made for compelling reading. While not as elegantly written as the first volume(maybe enumerating all the publications and conferences bogged the narrative down a bit), the account is wonderful, and fills in many gaps in Heschel's life. Many of my HUC professors, for example, had their own little 'takes' on Heschel's time in Cincinnati. Kaplan gives an integrating perspective on those fragments. So too the many gossipy stories about his status at JTS. In summarizing his work in the context of his life in post-war America, it is both uplifting and frank in its portrayal of a great and flawed man, not unlike the "warts and all" biblical descriptions of people. Not just of interest to rabbis, ministers, and theologians, this is an excellent biography of a just oh-my-gosh interesting person.

Have just started and the footnotes don't seem to be 'live'. May of course be 'user error' but I am a fairly experienced Kindle owner and cannot fathom what they've done with the footnotes here.

I can personally attest to the point Kaplan makes in this splendid book that Rabbi Heschel touched many lives beyond the Jewish community.

In my recently published autobiographical novel LAST RITES about a young man who follows his grandfathers and father into the ministry only to find out he made a big mistake, I write about Heschel's effect on the main character Tom Reed. At this point in the novel he has left his parish in rural Connecticut and is on a "study sabbatical" in New York where he wants to find a secular job so he doesn't have to return to his bishop for reassignment.

" The next day I took the bus up to Union Seminary where I registered for my independent study program for the second semester. I went to the opening day of a few of the classes, mostly to get the reading lists. Father Panovsky's course on Russian Orthodoxy looked interesting, but the course that I found most intriguing was Rabbi Abraham Heschel's seminar on the prophets, given across the street at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

"At Rabbi Heschel's first seminar he had us go around the table and introduce ourselves. He looked surprised when I identified myself as an Episcopalian clergyman on sabbatical, and he was even more surprised when he learned how much Hebrew and Aramaic I knew. The Heschel seminar was the only course I stayed with, and I even had a couple of conversations with the great man in his office. We talked about the "anti-religion" theme that runs through the prophets and also the history of Christian anti-Semitism--what Jules Isaacs called the church's "teaching of contempt." I read several of the books he recommended and felt more in tune with his thinking than I ever did with any of my seminary professors."

I can only wonder what the great man would have made of my book ETERNAL TREBLINKA.

--Submitted by Charles Patterson, author of "Last Rites," "Anti-Semitism" and "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust"

"I want to attack their souls." Rabbi Abraham Heschel, interviewed by Geula Cohen for Ma'ariv, January 4, 1965 as translated by AJC, Paris

If you think such an underlying goal is "brilliant, superb, and profound" and makes "an important teacher," may God have mercy on you.