Volume 67, Issue 7

COMMENTATOR CAMUS ESSAY CONTEST

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What Does Torah U’Madda Mean to You?
Compiled by Tzvi Kahn

Last year The Commentator began a new section aimed at gauging the views of various Roshei Yeshiva concerning Torah U’Madda.  This year, The Commentator is pleased to resume that feature...

Table Tips: Dating at Restaurants
by Jessica Russak

I would like to take a break from our regular programming to truly administer some “table tips.” After all, that is the name of this column, and yet I continue to see restaurant blunders at every Kosher establishment in the tri-state area. I am also taking this break partially because I got snowed in the night I was supposed to eat at a new restaurant. But it’s just as well, since I have a new suede skirt to fit into. That point actually ties into the point of this article. Gentlemen, I know you’re taking your dates to all the right places now that you read my column, but are you behaving in the proper manner?

The Grinch Who Stole Chanuka
By Evan Alan Schottenstein

Eight Crazy Nights

Yeshiva students should enjoy Adam Sandler’s hilarious new Chanuka movie, “Eight Crazy Nights”; the thirty-three-year-old comedian’s first animated film includes all the crude humor – complete with burping, swearing, and tons of poop jokes – that we students know and love.  And it’s a film for us, with a Chanuka setting!

YCDS Catches Its Rainbow
by Commentator Staff

For the third semester in a row, the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society chose a script better known for it character flaws and plot holes than its blockbuster success, such as “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Primal Fear,” which opened to sold-out crowds. The new production of “K-PAX,” however, defeats its inherited flaws, and YCDS triumphs.

Is it Worth Reading? I’ll Be the Judge of That!
by Jesse Mandell

The Judges: A Novel
By Elie Wiesel

Sentimental homme de letters Elie Wiesel reaches new levels of flawed rhetoric and novel depths of nebulous moral mêlée in his latest book, The Judges.  Wiesel’s latest attempt at exploring the nature of humanity is at least insufficient and at most a failure.  That’s disappointing, because the majority of his thirty-nine other books and plays are, for the most part, brilliant works that reflect the incredible mind of a man who walked through hell and lived to tell about it.  The book is pedestrian in nature and has none of the relevance or intensity of, say, his breathtaking memoir Night or the morality play The Beggar of Jerusalem.

Illuminating a Lost World Through Humor
by Hillel Broder

Everything is Illuminated
By Jonathan Safran Foer

On the spellbindingly loud cover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first and as-yet only book, Everything is Illuminated, Nathan Englander describes the work as “Intricate in structure, fantastical in its story, and irreverent in 100 different ways,” and told with an “unwavering charm and wit.”  Although this description accurately captures the spirit of the work, Foer’s literary genius also lies in his ability to discombobulate story narrative and structure and still form a coherent, enjoyable, and multi-layered story with a meaningful essence – an essence that tells a shocking, stimulating, and intense Holocaust story in an original style. However, unless Jewish readers are willing to suspend any sort of reverence for their religious, European ancestors, as well as upset their sensibilities towards Jewish practices and customs, I would not recommend they read this book...

Towards One People in One World
by Benzion N. Chinn

One People, Two Worlds
By Ammiel Hirsch and Yosef Reinman

If you are expecting One People, Two Worlds to consist of a deep philosophical dialectic, prepare to be disappointed. As both of its authors acknowledge, neither of them have said anything that has not been said many times before; readers will most likely be familiar with at least half of the book’s contents from beforehand. What makes this book special, however, is the manner in which this information is put together: a compilation of dueling e-mails between an Orthodox and a Reform rabbi sent over a period of about eighteen months. The book offers readers a ringside ticket to a no-holds-barred rumble through the myriad issues that divide the Jewish people – including pluralism, Zionism, women, the divinity of the Bible and the authority of Halacha, among other things – in search of some common ground between the Orthodox and the Reform. The two combatants in this struggle, Yosef Reinman and Ammiel Hirsch, have an incredible knack for hitting hard without being simply rhetorical or nasty. These people show some real class, and that, if nothing else, makes this book worthwhile reading...

Bogus Reminiscences of Antiquity and Au Courant: Joseph Sheppard, Raman Microscopy & The Landscape of Memory
By Menachem Wecker

Over the past couple of weeks we had three unique and stirring experiences, diverse as a pot of multicultural cholent, which we would like to share with you due to their artistic value.  We saw Ringside: The Boxing Paintings and Sculptures of Joseph Sheppard and The Book of Kings: Art, War and the Morgan Library's Medieval Picture Bible at the Walters Art Museum (MD) with our grandmother, we heard the very informative if not brilliant lecture of Dr. Gregory D. Smith on Raman Microscopy in Art History and Conservation Science and we listened attentively to Professor James E. Young of UMASS-Amherst (yet another proof Boston is the intellectual capital of the cosmos) speak of The Landscape of Memory: Berlin, Jerusalem & New York.  For esthetic reasons, we would like to discuss them simultaneously; an endeavor we hope does not prove too artificial.

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