Professor Marc B. Shapiro Interviewed In The Jewish Press

Here’s an excerpt:

Rabbi Weinberg raised the possibility that perhaps the way Jews treat non-Jews contributes to anti-Semitism. He no doubt had in mind things such as how the Jew treated the Polish peasant and wondered if this didn’t have some impact on how the Poles viewed the Jews. Many Orthodox Jews thought it was okay to be less than honest in their business dealing with non-Jews.Rabbi Weinberg argued that we must formally declare that we hold like the Meiri [13th century French sage], that all the negative things in the Talmud against non-Jews were only stated with regard to the wicked pagans of old, but didn’t apply to non-Jews as a whole. We must relate to non-Jews just like to Jews, being absolutely honest in all monetary matters and regard them as having dignity as creations of God. My next book is called Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters. I discuss differences between the academic interpreters and the traditional interpreters. I show how they differ and also how the academic approach could benefit from many of the traditional insights. And then, following that, I have a contract to do a book that will be called Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History. It’s about how uncomfortable ideas, which used to be acceptable, basically have been moved out of the tradition through censorship.