JEWS AND RACE in review

 Taken from original blog

Whole in One

Two recent books consider whether Jewishness is a religion, a culture, a race, or some combination of the three. The answer may be none of the above.

By Adam Kirsch|December 15, 2011 7:00 AM

In Jews and Race, published as part of Brandeis’ exciting new Library of Modern Jewish Thought, Hart has gathered 36 original documents—studies, scientific articles, and popular essays. It would have been easy to fill such a book with anti-Semitic writings, convinced of Jews’ racial inferiority, but that is not Hart’s mandate. On the contrary, almost all of the pieces in the book were written by Jews, and their approach ranges from the “objective” to the frankly apologetic. The goal of these writers was to use race science to answer the very question that Batnitzky’s philosophers posed: What remains of Jewish identity in the modern world?

Read the rest of the review http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/86111/whole-in-one