Newsletter Special: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
David Shasha
Friends,
I recently wrote a series of articles analyzing the impact of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the current Jewish discourse.
It has become all too clear that the Sephardic community has abandoned its history and traditional culture in favor of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism.
The first transformation of this lamentable process in the Sephardic world took the form of an alliance with Yeshiva University and its Modern Orthodoxy.
I have collected my recent articles discussing the impact of Rabbi Soloveitchik in order to provide a better understanding of his central role in the destruction of American Jewish Humanism.
We begin the special newsletter with a general overview of American Orthodox Judaism and the role that Soloveitchik has played in its development.
Next up is my article “What Is Modern Orthodox Judaism?” which brings to the fore current discussions and debates in pedagogy and how they reflect the dogmatic values of the movement.
I have written about the controversy over women rabbis in an article that looks at Leah Sarna’s Lehrhaus post that imagines Rabbi Soloveitchik as a woman and what this would mean to Modern Orthodox values.
The Lehrhaus website has been a beehive of activity on the Soloveitchik front and a recent article by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper elevated his work to even greater heights by asking for new translations of his writings. My article on the matter looks at the issue from the perspective of Sephardic Jewish Humanism and its erasure from the current Jewish discourse.
As evidence of this all-consuming obsession, Lehrhaus has just posted a flurry of Soloveitchik items which further details his centrality to Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism, in spite of its abject failure to stave off more radical fundamentalist elements in the Haredi community:
http://www.thelehrhaus.com/commentary-short-articles/2017/4/21/thriller
These historical pieces allow us to see quite clearly the Ashkenazi-Yiddish ethnocentrism of Soloveitchik as well as his view that Judaism and Secularism are in opposition, but that Orthodox Jews must find some way to bridge that binarism. Lehrhaus indeed represents the failed Modern Orthodox ideology and its inability to make room for Sephardic Jewish Humanism as Haredi Orthodoxy continues to gain ground and overtake it.
Shaul Magid has written a piece on Jewish “Subversion” that includes an analysis of Soloveitchik’s Jewish thought which reflects the confusion and delusion of academic Judaic Studies as it continues to remove Sephardic content and themes from its agenda.
We close this special newsletter with a very intriguing interview between Rabbi Alan Brill and Professor William Kolbrener which complicates the picture of Soloveitchik by attempting to place his work in the context of Post-Modern philosophy. In my analysis of the matter I aim to show how the Ashkenazim have rejected Post-Modern pluralism and complexity, remaining instead committed to Jewish essentialism and atavism.
It is my hope that this special newsletter will provide a better understanding of Modern Orthodox Judaism and the damage that it has done to the classical Sephardic tradition and the noble values of Jewish Humanism.
David Shasha
Introduction: A Tribute to the Man Who Destroyed American Jewish Humanism
What Is Modern Orthodox Judaism?
Leah Sarna Asks: “What if Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Was Born a Woman?”
The Lehrhaus Obsession with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Ashkenazi Racism, Academic Incoherence: Shaul Magid Whitewashes the Lunatic Breslovers and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Modern Orthodox Eschatology
The Fraud of Ashkenazi Post-Modernism: Joseph B. Soloveitchik as the “Last Rabbi”