Luke Ford

I read this new book by Shalom Z. Berger, Daniel Jacobson and Chaim I. Waxman.

It’s a solid book. There are few surprises. It cites surveys that show that high school graduates who spend a year in Israel in yeshiva become more observant of Jewish rituals but not more ethical (because they are already super-ethical after their Jewish day school education, writes Shalom Berger).

I’m inherently suspicious of what people say in surveys. What’s the incentive to answer a survey accurately? I can see that only losers will put much effort into such things. 

I don’t trust what people say about themselves.

Surely there are better ways of analyzing this issue.

One thing caught my attention — Shalom Z. Berger’s matter of fact description of the tricks some Orthodox Jews pull to get out of the draft. There are few things more obnoxious than using your religion to get out of communal obligations.

(I regard the draft as unnecessary state coercion. The government should simply raise the pay of soldiers until enough citizens volunteer for the job (or foreigners volunteer for guaranteed citizenship after their service). I don’t care if more poor people than rich people choose to serve in the military any more than I care that more poor people than rich people choose risky dangerous civiliian jobs.)

From page seven:

My grandfather had sold his sweater store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and purchased the farm in the unsuccessful hope that his son — and daughter, who was studying nursing — would be deemed "essential farm workers" and therefore exempt from the draft.

When I asked my father why he made the choices that he did, he described the process of what passed for "College Guidance" in his yeshiva. One of the rabbis called each student into his office and asked about the student’s plans. When a student said, for example, that he planned to go to college and study engineering, he was told that fixing cars was not a good job for a Jewish boy, and that after a few years of continued study in yeshiva he could get a job as a rebbe in an elementary school. Unless yeshiva study offered an immediate benefit — avoiding the draft, for example — few chose to remain.

According to Yashar Books:

Flipping Out?: Myth or Fact? The Impact of the “Year in Israel” by Shalom Z. Berger, Daniel Jacobson and Chaim I. Waxman takes a hard look at a phenomenon that has become a major source of both inspiration and consternation in the Jewish community.

The Jewish community has changed over the past four decades for many reasons, prominent among them the phenomenon of large numbers of students spending a year after high school studying Torah full time in Israel. The results of this “Year in Israel” can be felt in many synagogues and homes, with a good deal of increased ritual observance and dedication to Torah study – the much discussed “Shift to the Right.”

Many questions arise from these changes. Have these students been brainwashed? Has their primary education so failed them that a single year in Israel is more influential than over a decade of American schooling? Have they found an easy way to alleviate some hidden insecurity? Or are they merely inspired by a profoundly rich and spiritual lifestyle? And how long does this newfound religious devotion last? Is it really the start of a radically different life path or is it merely a short-term religious high that becomes more moderate over time? These are just a few of the questions that need to be asked.

This book gathers together insights from three talmidei chachamim who are top experts on the subject, each from a different perspective. Rabbi Shalom Berger, Ed.D., and Rabbi Daniel Jacobson, Psy.D., both performed statistical studies and wrote doctoral dissertations on the phenomenon of studying in Israel for a year. Rabbi Berger, drawing on his years of experience as a leading mechanech (Torah instructor) in the U.S. and Israel, approaches the subject from the perspective of an educator and addresses the “what” of the changes in students-what religious changes do we see in students from the time they leave to Israel to a year after they return. Rabbi Jacobson looks at the “Year in Israel” from the perspective of his psychological training and explores the “why” of the equation-what internal and external influences on these students cause the changes that happen.

Dr. Chaim Waxman, a distinguished sociologist, looks at the impact of this phenomenon on the broader community from the perspective of a sociologist. How does the “Year in Israel” fit in with the historical relationship between American and Israeli Jewry, and how has it changed the American Jewish community? His decades of profound study of the Jewish community have earned him a place as one of our leading social commentators. Finally and significantly, Richard M. Joel adds to this impressive mix with an introduction based on his experience as the president of the Hillel college campus organization and currently the president of Yeshiva University.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"Providing fine historical and religious perspective, as well as religiously and spiritually sensitive, “Flipping Out” is psychologically insightful and sociologically astute, while providing concrete guidance and counsel to students, parents, rabbis, educators, and concerned members of our communities. This volume, based on copious research, and careful analysis, is inordinately well done, and will, I am sure, prove to be an invaluable resource for all of these audiences and more. Bravo!"

—Rabbi Basil Herring, Executive Vice President of the Rabbinical Council of America

"The “Year in Israel” has become an important rite of passage for American Orthodox teenagers, and is growing in popularity among their non-Orthodox peers. This pioneering volume helps us to understand this phenomenon and its larger implications. Anyone interested in contemporary American Judaism, and anyone who has studied for a year in Israel or who contemplates doing so, will find this book well worth pondering."

—Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University, and author of American Judaism: A History

From the NYT:

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.

OUT STEALING HORSES
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THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99. Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22. Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95. An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50. Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30. In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.