The Denial of Death and the Mind of Ernest Becker

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built one theory and spent his life enlarging it. He wanted to explain civilization through a single problem: the human knowledge of death. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, he wrote across psychology, theology, philosophy, and political theory, and he refused the disciplinary borders that postwar universities prized. Human societies, he argued, rest on symbolic systems that shield the individual from the terror of mortality. Religion, nationalism, career, romance, ideology, and art all promise a permanence the body cannot deliver.
He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, into a Jewish family of modest means. The Depression marked his childhood. The Second World War marked everything after. Becker served in the infantry and took part in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. The experience fixed his attention on the link between mass violence and the search for meaning. He came to doubt that economics or institutional analysis could explain political atrocity. Men kill, he believed, under pressures deeper than material interest. They want a place inside cosmic stories that let them outlast death.
After the war he studied at Syracuse University under Douglas Haring. His formation joined cultural anthropology to psychoanalysis and existential philosophy. He drew on Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), Erich Fromm (1900-1980), Norman O. Brown (1913-2002), and above all Otto Rank (1884-1939). Becker called Rank a neglected giant of the century. Freud read anxiety through repression and sex. Rank read it through mortality, separation, and the fragility of the finite creature. Becker took the Rankian frame and grew it into an account of civilization.
That ambition cost him. He worked when American universities rewarded technical specialists and looked on synthesis with suspicion. At the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse he fell in with the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), whose attacks on institutional psychiatry made him a target of his profession. Becker shared Szasz’s view that modern psychiatry dressed moral and existential questions in scientific language. He came to see many therapeutic institutions as secular priesthoods that claimed technical authority over spiritual suffering.
His career stayed unstable because he would not narrow. He moved from one institution to another and resisted any easy classification. The pattern reached its climax at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969. Students filled his classes. Many of them wanted frameworks large enough to hold the moral crises of the Vietnam years. The anthropology department refused to renew his contract. Students then voted to pay his salary themselves so he could keep teaching. The episode exposed the gap between young people who wanted big explanations and a bureaucracy organized around small ones.
After Berkeley he moved to Simon Fraser University in Canada and spent his last years in something close to academic exile. Distance from the elite centers freed him. He wrote with more urgency and less caution, and his hostility toward reductionist social science deepened. Modern scholarship, he held, had lost the nerve to face the central human problem: how a self-conscious animal keeps living once it knows it will die.
His first synthesis came in The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971). There he set man apart from the other animals by his symbolic world, the one built through language, ritual, and myth. Meaning steadies consciousness against the chaos that the awareness of death produces. Culture, on this reading, serves as a shared defense.
The argument reached maturity in The Denial of Death (1973), which appeared shortly before Becker died of colon cancer. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and became his lasting work. Men manage the fear of death, he argued, through “hero systems” and “immortality projects.” Every society builds frameworks that let the individual feel like a meaningful part of something that endures. Careers, nations, faiths, revolutions, art, and moral crusades all serve as bids for symbolic permanence.
Becker’s heroism had little to do with the battlefield. He meant the universal hunger for cosmic standing. Each culture builds ladders of prestige that grant existential legitimacy. Success on the ladder tells a man he counts. Humiliation and exclusion wound so deeply because they crack the structure that holds the fear of death at bay.
He took the idea of “character armor” from Rank. The child learns his own weakness and the decay of his body. He sees himself as a finite organism in a fragile frame. So he assembles a defensive self out of habits, beliefs, ambitions, and roles, and that self lets him function without drowning in dread. Personality serves as armor. Men cling to it because to strip it away risks collapse.
The same frame shaped his reading of politics. Wars and ideological fights run deeper than resources. They pit one symbolic universe against another. A group turns violent when its worldview comes under threat because the threat reawakens the buried fear of death. Nationalism, revolutionary zeal, and religious fanaticism all become forms of collective striving for permanence.
His debt to Tillich grew plainer over time. Tillich defined faith as a state of “ultimate concern,” and Becker used the phrase to argue that every man holds a functional religion, even in a secular age. A movement, a science, a marriage, or a corporate climb can turn sacred once it carries the weight of transcendence. Secular systems often fail at this, Becker held, because no finite institution can bear the burden that traditional religion once carried. Political utopias and romantic fantasies break under the demand for permanent redemption.
His last major book, Escape from Evil (1975), carried the argument into political theology. Men push the fear of death outward onto enemies and scapegoats. Societies chase symbolic purity through projection and exclusion. Genocide and the moral crusade become sick attempts to master mortality through domination.
Becker died before he won secure standing, yet his influence widened after his death. His work seeded Terror Management Theory, developed by the psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. They tried to test him in the laboratory through studies of “mortality salience.” Small reminders of death, their experiments suggested, push people toward their cultural worldview, harsher moral judgment, tribal loyalty, and hostility to outsiders. Becker’s existential anthropology found a second life as empirical psychology (though it didn’t replicate).
He also saw something the internet would later confirm. His account of hero systems maps onto the building of identity online. Platforms let a man construct a symbolic self made for recognition and permanence. Followers, archives, and reach become forms of secular immortality. Public humiliation strikes so hard because it threatens the very self the man built against his own insignificance.
At the center of Becker’s thought sits a tragic picture of man. He called human beings “gods with anuses,” creatures who reach toward eternity while trapped in decaying flesh. The phrase holds his whole anthropology. Consciousness aims at forever; the body rots. His own death lent the work an unusual authority. He wrote The Denial of Death while dying of cancer, facing in person the problem he had studied for a career. He met it without easy comfort and without contempt for the religion he could not hold. His late work moves between skepticism and a stubborn longing for a meaning that secular modernity could not supply.
Seen whole, Becker stands as an anti-reductionist working against the grain of his time. He denied that economics, behaviorism, or technical social science could explain man. Culture, politics, morality, and identity, he insisted, cannot be cut loose from the knowledge of death. Long before the current talk of prestige, status, and performance, he argued that men are driven by the need to count inside systems that promise to outlast the grave. The reach of that one idea explains why he still gets read.

The Buffered Self and the Body It Cannot Seal: Ernest Becker Read Through Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor (b. 1931) gave the modern self a map in A Secular Age. The premodern man lived as a porous self. The boundary between inside and outside ran open, and force, spirit, meaning, and dread could cross it. Things in the world carried significance in themselves. The relic held power, the cosmos held order, and the sacred could enter a man whether he asked it to or not. He was vulnerable in both directions, open to grace and open to terror, because the source of each lay outside him. The modern man lives as a buffered self. He draws a firm wall at the edge of his own mind. Meaning no longer sits in the world; he confers it onto a world gone neutral and disenchanted. He becomes the master of significance and, in the same motion, its sole supplier. The wall protects him from the old terrors and seals him off from the old fullness. Taylor calls the background that holds this self the immanent frame, and he calls the flatness that haunts it the malaise of immanence. The buffered self can close the frame and still feel the pull of something the frame excludes.
Becker wrote the inside of that map a generation before Taylor named its edges. The Denial of Death, Escape from Evil, and The Birth and Death of Meaning describe a man who walls himself against the world and cannot say why. Taylor tells you the wall went up. Becker tells you what the wall is for. The buffered self is character armor. The boundary Taylor charts as the achievement of the modern mind, Becker reads as a defense against the knowledge of death. Each man describes the same enclosure. One sees a triumph of disengaged reason. The other sees a frightened animal building a room with no windows.
The fit holds at the place Taylor’s buffered self looks strongest. Taylor’s wall keeps the spirits out. It cannot keep death out, because death does not come from the cosmos. It rises from inside, from the rotting body the mind is chained to. Becker locates the leak that no boundary patches. The buffered self sealed the enchanted world and left the grave open, and the grave is the one door that was always going to matter. So the man who has shut out the sacred still wakes at three in the morning with the old terror, now stripped of the gods that once gave it a shape and a story. Taylor describes a self insulated from the outside. Becker shows that the worst threat was never outside.
Then comes the move that ties the two men. Taylor says meaning migrated from the world into the mind. Becker says the mind cannot carry it. The buffered self, unable to bear its own significance alone, throws meaning back outward onto career, nation, and the beloved. This is a private re-enchantment, an attempt to refill a disenchanted world with finite objects asked to do infinite work. Becker calls these hero systems and immortality projects. They are the buffered self’s confession that the wall did not hold. A man builds a faith out of his promotion, his flag, his marriage, because the mind he sealed cannot supply its own ground. Taylor names this the pull of fullness that survives inside the closed frame. Becker names it denial. The two terms describe one act.
Becker’s functional religion is Taylor’s claim put in clinical language. Taylor argues that the immanent frame never quite closes, that even the buffered man feels the cross-pressure of a transcendence he has bracketed. Becker argues that every man carries an ultimate concern whether he admits to one or not, and that the secular age did not abolish religion but scattered it into a thousand private cults of work and love and party. Where Taylor gives the reader malaise, the felt flatness of a life lived inside the wall, Becker gives the reader the wreckage. The marriage buckles when one person asks the other to be salvation. The nation turns murderous when its members ask it to be eternal. The cause curdles into a crusade when the believer needs it to outlast his own death. Taylor’s finite goods cannot bear the weight of the transcendent, and the man feels the strain as emptiness. Becker’s finite goods cannot bear it either, and the man feels the strain as terror, and the terror reaches for an enemy. This is where Becker exceeds the frame that fits him. Taylor explains the ache. Becker explains the violence.
The frame teaches the most where it breaks, and it breaks on one question. Taylor, a believing Catholic, treats fullness as real. For him the porous self lived open to a grace that was actually present, and the buffered self impoverishes a man by sealing out a transcendence that waits on the other side of the wall. The cure is to reopen. Becker stands on the far shore. For him nothing waits outside the wall but death. The porous self was never open to the sacred; it was open to the same terror, costumed in gods and ancestors and saints. Religion did not lose a real home in the modern age. It lost its first and finest immortality project, and the buffered man now improvises cheaper ones. So the two thinkers share a map and split on the territory. Taylor mourns an exile from a country that exists. Becker says the country was the original denial, beautiful and useful and untrue.
The buffered and porous selves give Becker a precise vocabulary for the predicament his hero systems answer, almost line for line. The one seam the vocabulary cannot stitch, whether the man sealed out God or only sealed out his fear of God, is the question Becker spent a career inside. Taylor hands Becker the architecture of the modern self. Becker hands Taylor’s malaise its body, and then its corpse.

The Hero System Explains Its Own Author: Ernest Becker on Ernest Becker

A theory that explains its maker does so as a trick. The reader catches the writer in his own net and calls it irony. Becker is the rare case where the catch is real. He argued that men hold off the knowledge of death by building immortality projects, symbolic works that promise to outlast the body. He wrote The Denial of Death while colon cancer killed him, and the book became his own immortality project, won the Pulitzer Prize within weeks of his death, and outlived every man who had denied him a chair. The hero system describes the man who described it. The fit is the theory passing the one test its author could not arrange.
Start with the body, since Becker did. He called man a god with an anus, a creature that reaches for eternity while tied to a decaying animal. He wrote the line as anthropology. He lived it as autopsy. Colon cancer is the body failing at its lowest and least dignified function, and the man composing the great book on symbolic transcendence was losing to his own bowels as he wrote. No reader had to supply the irony. Becker supplied it himself, in his own flesh, and the proof text and the dying author shared one room. The animal he described as the ground of all terror was his animal, and it was winning on schedule.
He gave an interview as he was dying, and the men who saw him reported the same clarity that ran through his prose. He did not reach for the easy consolations. He did not announce a deathbed faith, and he did not perform contempt for the faith he could not hold. He held the longing without the belief, which is the hardest posture his theory allows and the one it predicts for an honest man inside the immanent terror. The theory says no one escapes the hero system, including the man who named it. So Becker writing his immortality project on his deathbed is the strongest confirmation the work could receive. He could see the cage and still needed the bars.
Then the long clock. Becker lost the local contest for prestige. Departments that prized the specialist refused the synthetic thinker. Berkeley let him go while his students voted to pay him out of their own pockets. He spent his last years at Simon Fraser in something close to exile, far from the centers that hand out standing. By the measure of the academy he died a marginal man. By his own measure he had simply entered a slower competition. The Pulitzer arrived after the funeral. The hero system runs on a clock longer than tenure, and on that clock the exile won. The men who held the chairs that Becker never got are names in old catalogs. Becker is read. He told the reader exactly how this works, that symbolic permanence outlasts the men who control the local rewards, and his own afterlife ran the play to the letter.
The reflexive reading also turns inward, onto the refusal that cost him. Becker would not narrow into a discipline. He treated the refusal as intellectual honesty, a demand to face the whole man rather than the measurable fragment. His own apparatus lets a harder reading stand beside that one. He held that personality is character armor, a defended self built to function without drowning in terror. A man who needs the largest possible frame, the total theory of civilization and death, might be a man whose armor had to be that large to hold his own fear. The grand synthesis can be courage and it can be defense, and Becker’s theory says the two are the same act seen from two sides. The thinker who refused the small safe room built himself the biggest room in the house and called it the truth, and it was the truth, and it was also where he lived.
Becker’s life lends the work conviction. Conviction is not evidence. A man can build a beautiful account of why men build accounts, write it while dying, and be wrong about all of it, and the dying only makes the wrongness more moving. The reflexive move earns its authority and not its proof. Yet the theory anticipates even this. It says the man who sees through the immortality project still builds one, because consciousness cannot hold the terror bare and keep working. So the gap between authority and proof is the gap Becker spent his career describing. He told the reader that no clarity about the game releases a man from playing it. Then he proved the claim in the only currency the theory accepts, his own dying, his own book, and his own reach past the grave.

The Smuggled Essence: Testing Ernest Becker with Turner’s Critique of Essentialism

Turner spent a career suspicious of one move in social theory, the move that posits a hidden shared thing under the surface of behavior and then uses the thing to explain the behavior. A culture, a paradigm, a framework, a collective unconscious, a shared practice. In The Social Theory of Practices he asks the questions that the move keeps dodging. Is the shared thing one thing or many. How did it get into every head in the same form. Does positing it explain anything, or does it relabel the very behavior it claims to explain and call the relabeling a cause. Run those questions at Becker and the grand theory shows where it is soft.
Becker posits one death terror under every culture, every war, every faith, every career and every prayer. That single terror is the engine of civilization. It is also an essence, smuggled in as anthropology. The first question is the sameness question. Becker treats the terror as one identical thing present in the medieval monk, the Aztec priest, the modern careerist, and the infant who learns his own fragility. Turner asks whether Becker found that unity or assembled it. A monk’s awe, a soldier’s dread, an executive’s ambition, and a baby’s separation cry are different states with different objects. Becker gathers them under one word and then treats the word as the thing they share. The unity is posited.
Mortality salience in Terror Management Theory is a priming effect, and priming was the genre that fared worst in the replication crisis.
Becker reads the terror off the surface, off the nationalism and the religion and the scapegoating, and then turns and explains the nationalism and the religion and the scapegoating by the terror. No independent handle on the terror exists outside the conduct it produces. Ask for evidence of the universal death anxiety and the answer points back to the cultures it built. Ask why the cultures took the shape they did and the answer points to the anxiety. A theory that explains everything and forbids any contrary finding has bought its reach by giving up its grip. Turner’s whole objection to the hidden collective object lands here. The object does no causal work. It sits behind the surface as a name for it.
Becker reads the terror into societies that never reported it. Many peoples do not thematize a horror of death the way the theory demands. Some report acceptance, some report continuity through ancestors and kin, some treat the corpse with a calm that embarrasses the Western reader. Becker meets these reports by saying the terror works underground, unfelt and unspoken, expressed in conduct the natives cannot read but the theorist can. This is the move Turner distrusts most. The theorist supplies a shared content that the people themselves cannot name, then crowns himself the sole authority on a content no one can check. The men who lived the cultures become unreliable witnesses to their own minds, and the analyst in Vancouver knows their fear better than they did. A claim built so that only its author can confirm it has left anthropology and entered revelation.
The concentration camp and the dying author give Becker his conviction. Turner’s blade separates conviction from evidence and lets neither borrow from the other. A man who walked into a liberated camp and watched what mass death looks like, and who then wrote his masterwork while cancer ate him, has every reason on earth to feel the terror as the bedrock of all things. The feeling is a fact about Becker. It is not a fact about the Aztec or the Trobriand Islander or the man in the next office who never thinks about dying at all. The biography explains why Becker believed the universal claim with such force. It does nothing to make the claim universal.

The Set

Ernest Becker spent his last ten years moving through hostile institutions and writing toward a single book. The set around him formed less from a campus or a clique than from a shared current of thought. Call them the death-facing humanists. They came from psychiatry, anthropology, philosophy, and the new humanistic psychology, and they treated one question as the deepest a science of man could ask: how men live against the knowledge that they will die.

This set prizes the nerve to look at the human condition without flinching. They want a unified science of man, the old Enlightenment dream of one integrated account of human conduct, and they hold it against the narrow specialists who carve man into departments. They distrust reductive psychology, the rats of the behaviorists and the sexual machinery of orthodox Freudianism. They want honesty about mortality, and they prize range. The big synthesizing book, the work that ties psychology and religion and politics into one account, ranks as the highest act a thinker can perform. Becker writes toward such a book and reaches it in The Denial of Death (1973) and the posthumous Escape from Evil (1975).

Around him stand the men and women working the same ground. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the psychiatrist who calls mental illness a myth, shaped Becker's early years at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse and left him a lasting suspicion of psychiatric authority. Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) worked the death-and-culture terrain as peer and rival; his Life Against Death set the standard of ambition Becker meant to beat. Sam Keen (b. 1931) carried Becker's ideas to a wide readership and sat with him for the famous Psychology Today interview as he lay dying. Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) admired his work from inside the humanistic-psychology movement. Rollo May (1909-1994) shared the existential temper. Herman Feifel (1915-2003), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), and Robert Jay Lifton (b. 1926) built the parallel death-studies movement that gave Becker's preoccupation its moment. Erving Goffman (1922-1982), whose dramaturgy of the self Becker mined, worked nearby at the University of California, Berkeley and supplied the picture of man as an actor staging his own worth.

Their hero is the disillusioned truth-teller, the man who sees through the comforting illusion and reports it without flinching. Heroism here means intellectual courage, the willingness to name death as the engine of striving and to say that every culture sells immortality. The set measures a man by the sweep of his vision. Marginality counts as proof. Becker loses his place at Berkeley, watches the establishment shut him out, and the rejection confirms his authenticity. The dying man who faces his own death with open eyes becomes the purest hero of all. Becker in the Keen interview, talking calmly about his cancer, lives the theory he wrote, and the set reveres that.

Status flows from synthesis and from reach. A man rises by naming the deepest motive and by being read across the disciplines and out past the academy. Citing the right dead masters marks membership. Otto Rank (1884-1939), pulled back from neglect, becomes the secret hero whose rehabilitation confers standing; to grasp Rank ahead of the crowd signals depth. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and a revised Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) fill out the canon. Combat with authority raises a man's standing inside the set. The scholar pushed out by philistines wears the wound as rank. Reaching the educated lay reader counts as a victory even as it cuts against the academic gatekeepers who guard the disciplines. The Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death, arriving two months after Becker's death, reads as the vindication the set craved, the establishment forced at last to honor the man it had rejected.

A competitive edge runs under the shared project. Who holds the deeper account of death-denial? Brown and Becker work the same vein and do not fully agree. Behind them stand Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the post-Freudian left, arguing over the body, repression, and what a free man might look like. Becker breaks from the sexual emphasis and puts death at the center, and that move sets him apart from the Reichian and Marcusean wing. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Erich Fromm (1900-1980) hover in the background as figures to absorb and surpass.

The set makes demands. Face death honestly. See your culture and your institutions for what they do, which is sell men a share in immortality. Replace the reductive sciences with a humanistic science of man. Resist the authority that pathologizes deviance, the lesson Becker took from Szasz. Understand the denial of death, because evil flows from it; men buy their own immortality at the price of other men, and only sight of this can restrain it. That argument drives Escape from Evil. Human dignity asks for disillusion joined to a chastened hope.

Beneath the demands sit claims about human nature as such. Man is the animal that knows he will die, and the terror of that knowledge drives his striving. Becker holds this as a truth about the species, not a feature of one era. Every culture is a hero system, a coded immortality project, the same impulse dressed in local costume. The self is a symbolic project laid over a creaturely body; man lives split, half animal and half symbol, and the split defines him. Character is a vital lie, the armor a man needs against the truth of his finitude. Repression runs deep and feeds on the fear of death more than on sex. These are claims about the human condition everywhere and always, the fixed situation of the self-conscious animal who must die and cannot bear to know it.

The last decade gave this set its stage. Becker passes from Syracuse to Berkeley, where students raise money to keep him and the administration refuses. He lands at San Francisco State University during the strike years, recoils from the hardline rule of S. I. Hayakawa (1906-1992), and moves north to Simon Fraser University in 1969. There he joins a radical department torn by its own war over Marxism and authority, home to figures such as Kathleen Gough (1925-1990), though he keeps clear of the campus Marxists. He shares their contempt for the established order and leaves their politics alone. He writes his last and best books fast, against the clock of his cancer, and dies in Vancouver in 1974 with the Pulitzer weeks away. The set scattered, but the question he pressed on them, how men live and kill against the knowledge of death, outlived him.

Posted in Ernest Becker | Comments Off on The Denial of Death and the Mind of Ernest Becker

What is Prose Density?

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Prose density is the amount of work each word and sentence does. Dense prose carries more meaning per unit of language than its length seems to allow. You read a short sentence and find it holds an argument, an image, a judgment, and a turn, all at once. Loose prose does the opposite. It uses many words to deliver little, and you could cut half of it without losing anything.
Two roads lead to it, and they look like opposites.
The first is addition. A writer packs the sentence with loaded nouns and verbs, with allusion, with subordinate clauses that hold several ideas in tension. Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon write this way. A single Gibbon sentence can balance a fact against an irony against a moral verdict, and the architecture of the clauses does the thinking. The density comes from how much the writer fits inside the frame and from how the parts press on each other.
The second road is subtraction. Hemingway built density by leaving things out. He called it the iceberg. The strength of a passage comes from what stays under the surface, the seven-eighths the reader supplies. A plain sentence reads as dense when the writer has cut every slack word and trusted the reader to infer the weight. “He did not love her anymore” carries more than three pages of explanation, because the flatness forces the reader down into it. Omission compresses. So does the loaded plain word, the concrete verb that drags its connotations behind it.
Either way, the test is the same. Try to cut a word or unpack a phrase. If the meaning thins, the prose was dense. If nothing is lost, it was padded.
Allusion is a fast way to raise density, since one phrase opens onto a whole tradition. When a writer calls a man Augustinian, the single word carries a theology and a temperament and saves a paragraph. Rhythm raises it too. A sentence that lands on a stressed beat or closes on a reversal makes the sense and the sound arrive together, and the reader feels the point before he has finished parsing it. The aphorism is density at its limit, a full argument folded into a line that turns at the end.
The cost is real, which is why density is a setting, not a virtue you crank to maximum. Prose that stays dense for a whole page goes airless. The reader cannot breathe, cannot rest, cannot tell the large point from the small one because everything arrives at the same pressure. Good writing varies it. A dense sentence earns its weight when a plain one precedes it and a plain one follows. The contrast is what lets the reader feel the load. That is the deeper reason for mixing long sentences with short ones. The short sentence clears the ground. The long one builds. The density lives in the difference between them.

Posted in English | Comments Off on What is Prose Density?

Lawrence Grossman and the Institutional Record of American Judaism

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Lawrence Grossman stands among the scholar-editors who shaped the documentary record of postwar American Judaism from inside the institutions they studied. A native New Yorker, he earned his rabbinical ordination along with BA and MHL degrees from Yeshiva University and a PhD in American history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He came to the American Jewish Committee in 1982 and remained there for close to four decades, serving as director of publications and as editor of the American Jewish Year Book. His scholarship runs less toward theology than toward the anatomy of institutions. He reads American Judaism through schools, leadership networks, demographic shifts, philanthropic patterns, and the ideological quarrels that organized communal life produces.
At the American Jewish Committee, one of the central defense and policy bodies in organized Jewish life, Grossman worked as editor and intellectual gatekeeper during a period of communal change. The post required him to manage disputes across denominational and political lines while protecting the credibility of the organization’s publishing apparatus. He observed the transformation of American Judaism from within an influential institution. The vantage gave his writing a granular grasp of how Jewish organizations operate: how authority gets negotiated, how consensus fractures, how educational systems reproduce ideology, and how communal elites respond to social pressure.
His enduring institutional contribution came through the American Jewish Year Book, the major annual reference work of organized American Jewry for more than a century. Grossman served as primary co-editor alongside David Singer beginning in the late 1980s and later as sole editor until the American Jewish Committee ceased publication after the 2008 edition. The work extended past technical editing. He commissioned and curated the annual essays that documented demographic trends, anti-Semitism, denominational conflict, educational developments, philanthropy, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the changing political orientation of American Jews. Through these choices he shaped what entered the permanent record.
For roughly two decades he also wrote the annual review of American Jewish communal affairs. These essays became an interpretive resource for scholars of postwar American Judaism because they paired documentary care with concision. Grossman did more than catalogue events. He synthesized ideological conflicts while they still unfolded. His surveys tracked the erosion of the old mid-century non-Orthodox consensus, the rise of Orthodox institutional confidence, the disputes over patrilineal descent in Reform Judaism, the expansion and financial strain of Jewish day schools, the realignment of American Jewish politics after the Cold War, and the communal aftermath of the post-September 11 security environment. He produced, in effect, a running institutional history of American Jewry in real time. Historians often treat the essays as primary sources because they condense sprawling disputes into disciplined analytical prose.
His major scholarly work, Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025, gathers decades of study of Modern Orthodoxy as both religious movement and sociological formation. The title names the tension at the center of the movement: the effort to hold rigorous halakhic commitment while participating in modern secular society. Grossman treats the balance as a fragile institutional achievement that demands constant maintenance. The “both worlds” formula points at once to religion and modernity, particularism and integration, rabbinic authority and professional ambition, Jewish continuity and American upward mobility.
The book traces how Modern Orthodoxy moved from an insecure immigrant subculture in the 1940s to a prosperous, highly educated, institutionally confident sector of American Jewry by the early twenty-first century. Grossman attends to the conditions that drove this change: suburbanization, postwar economic mobility, the growth of day schools, professional-class advancement, summer camps, youth movements, synagogue networks, women’s education, Israel study programs, and above all the role of Yeshiva University as the flagship of centrist Orthodoxy. A recurring theme holds that success bred new instability. Earlier generations feared exclusion from American life. Later ones faced the reverse problem, an integration so complete that it threatened communal distinctiveness.
Grossman gives sustained attention to the “Year in Israel,” the gap year American Orthodox students spent in Israeli yeshivas and seminaries before college. He argues that this pipeline became a major channel for the rightward shift of American Orthodoxy. Students often returned with stricter commitments and sharper skepticism toward the accommodationist ethos of their parents. The result was a widening generational divide over secular education, gender roles, rabbinic authority, and engagement with the surrounding culture. He chronicles the pressure that more conservative and independent yeshivas placed on Yeshiva University, showing how centrist Orthodoxy found itself defending secular learning and professional integration against charges of compromise from the religious right. The same pressure, he shows, marginalized left-leaning Modern Orthodox initiatives, above all those that sought expanded ritual and leadership roles for women. He situates these quarrels within larger struggles over prestige, educational authority, institutional legitimacy, and generational succession rather than treating them as isolated theological controversies.
Israel holds a central place in his framework. He argues that the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War altered American Orthodox consciousness by turning Israel from a distant political project into a core religious and emotional reference point. Study programs, transnational rabbinic networks, and growing identification with Israeli religious culture reshaped the orientation of American Orthodoxy. The process strengthened Orthodox identity and at the same time sharpened the tension between American bourgeois integration and Israeli religious maximalism.
Grossman writes with the restraint of an editor and institutional historian. His prose is measured, documentary, and cumulative. He rarely reaches for grand theory or prophetic rhetoric. He assembles patterns from organizational reports, conference debates, educational policy, demographic data, rabbinic disputes, philanthropic trends, and communal publications. Judaism in his pages appears as a dense network of schools, journals, donors, synagogues, leadership pipelines, and competing prestige systems.
His own career reflects the change he documents. The early American Jewish Committee bore the stamp of a German-Jewish elite culture that prized assimilation, decorum, and quiet diplomacy. Grossman entered during the rise of a more ethnically assertive, religiously confident, Orthodox-inflected American Jewish world. An Orthodox Jew directing publications at a historically liberal, largely non-Orthodox defense organization, he embodied the normalization of Orthodoxy within elite American Jewish institutional life. He did not only chronicle the ascent of Modern Orthodoxy. His trajectory formed part of it.
Within American Jewish historiography he occupies a middle ground among academic historian, communal intellectual, and institutional archivist. He lacks the public profile of Jonathan Sarna or Irving Greenberg, yet his influence inside the infrastructure of American Jewish scholarship has been considerable. His contribution lies in preserving and interpreting the institutional record of postwar American Judaism with care and discipline. He documents how American Orthodoxy built schools, educational pipelines, professional networks, philanthropic systems, and family structures able to sustain religious continuity under conditions of modern American affluence. Living in Both Worlds finally reads as more than denominational history. It studies the sociological cost of successful integration, and it argues that the central challenge facing Modern Orthodoxy is no longer survival at the margins but cohesion amid prosperity, professional integration, and ideological fragmentation. The book stands as both a chronicle of a movement and a meditation on how religious communities adapt to modern liberal society without dissolving into it.

1998 Communal Affairs

This is the American Jewish Year Book’s annual review for 1998, two chapters by two different hands. Lawrence Grossman writes “Jewish Communal Affairs.” Berel Lang writes “Jewish Culture.” The split tells you something before you read a word. One man tracks the fights. The other tracks the books, films, food, and deaths. The year looks different depending on which man you trust to narrate it.
Grossman’s chapter is the stronger piece of writing because it has a spine. The spine is a single question that runs through every section: who gets to speak for American Jewry, and what happens when nobody can. The peace-process fight, the conversion fight, the funding fight, the merger fight, the Pollard campaign. Each one is the same story. A body claims to represent the consensus. The consensus does not exist. The body fractures in public.
The Presidents Conference is the recurring character here, and Grossman is too good a reporter to editorialize, so he lets the body’s own behavior indict it. On May 6 the Conference refuses to bring a motion to a vote. Five days later it votes 27 to 3 to issue a statement. Nothing changed in those five days except the emotional temperature after the Netanyahu visit. That is the whole drama of the chapter in miniature. The organization chases opinion, and arrives late.
AIPAC is the foil. AIPAC needed four days to get 81 senators because AIPAC does not have to negotiate an internal consensus first. Grossman states this plainly and lets the contrast sit. The lobby that answers to no one moves fast. The umbrella that answers to everyone cannot move at all. The “battle of the letters” is the year’s perfect symbol, and the New York Times headline he quotes, about Jewish groups squabbling, does the work that a thousand words of analysis would not.
The conversion section is the chapter’s best sustained passage because Grossman catches the gap between Israeli pragmatism and American principle. Israelis treat the Ne’eman compromise as a face-saving fiction that lets converts get processed leniently while the chief rabbis look away. Americans treat it as either binding or fraudulent. Rabbi Joel Meyers calls it “a fraud for good purposes.” That phrase is the entire transatlantic misunderstanding compressed into five words. The Americans want the principle settled. The Israelis want the problem managed. Neither side hears the other.
Now the harder judgment. Grossman has a thumb on the scale, and it shows in his verbs and his framing. The dovish side gets the sympathetic adjectives. The hawks “exasperate” and “blunder.” Netanyahu “breaches protocol.” The evangelicals are “distrusted.” When Yoffie attacks Orthodoxy as “ghetto Judaism” and “a betrayal of America,” Grossman files it under “harsh anti-Orthodox stereotyping,” which is fair, but he gives Yoffie far more room to make his case than he gives the sectarians to make theirs. The chapter reads as a liberal communal insider’s account of a community moving right and not liking it. That is honest as far as it goes. A reader should know the angle.
Lang’s culture chapter is the weaker piece, and the weakness is structural. It has no spine. It has a gesture toward one, the idea that American Jewish culture lives on the seam between high and popular forms, but he announces this thesis and then abandons it for a catalogue. The chapter becomes a list with connective tissue. Books published, plays staged, conferences held, people died. The prose is more ornate than Grossman’s and says less. Where Grossman shows you a fight and lets you draw the conclusion, Lang tells you that something is “significant” or “compelling” and moves on.
The one real idea in Lang’s chapter is the memoir observation, and it is a good one. He notices a flood of personal history writing, Wieseltier’s Kaddish, the Dubner and Bechhofer identity-discovery narratives, Roth’s I Married a Communist, and he asks why. His answer is that anxiety about the future drives people back to the self as the one subject they own. He writes that the books matter less for the writing than for the readership they attract, which is a sharp sociological move, treating the bestseller list as evidence about readers rather than authors. He should have built the whole chapter on that and cut two-thirds of the catalogue.
The two chapters share a buried subject neither names. Both are about a community that fears it is dissolving. Grossman’s fights are fights over boundaries, who is a Jew, who speaks for Jews, who funds whom. Lang’s memoirs are searches for a self that is “socially contingent.” Same anxiety, two registers. The Dershowitz title he quotes, The Vanishing American Jew, is the year’s keyword, and it sits under both chapters. The 52 percent intermarriage figure, the conversion wars, the Birthright pitch, the day-school funding fights, the “seduction not rape” line from Ruskay. The community spent 1998 fighting about Israel because fighting about Israel was easier than fighting about itself.
The chapter records the moment the modern Orthodox lose their nerve. Yeshiva University gives Ne’eman an honorary degree and hides the announcement to avoid antagonizing sectarians. Senior faculty boycott anyway. Steinhardt charges Orthodoxy with “moral self-centeredness.” The word “flipping” enters the language. That is institutional capitulation caught in real time. A movement under pressure edges toward the harder flank and calls the edging fidelity.
What would I push back on? Grossman never asks whether the Presidents Conference failure is a bug or the design working. An umbrella group that cannot reach consensus on a contested foreign policy is doing roughly what a pluralist body should do, refusing to manufacture a unity that the members do not feel. He treats the paralysis as dysfunction. It might be honesty. And Lang’s reluctance to make any judgment at all, his closing line that the deaths “say something significant about the present” without saying what, is the academic’s hedge. He has the material for an argument and declines to make one.
If you are mining this for the suppression-and-cover-up book, the cleanest thread is the Roth affair at the Holocaust Museum. A scholar is appointed, old writings surface comparing Israeli policy to Nazism, the field closes ranks behind him under Wiesel’s lead, the New York Jewish Week brands the critics with “Jewish McCarthyism,” and then two congressmen produce more quotes and the defense collapses overnight. The interesting part is how fast the protective consensus formed and how fast it broke once the cost of holding it rose. That is your story. The wall holds until the wall is expensive.

The Culture Wars and American Jews (2013)

Grossman takes a real paradox and states it without flinching: the norms the traditionalist side defends, sanctity of life, heterosexual marriage as the social standard, a Creator who orders the world, all originate in Jewish texts, yet American Jews sit overwhelmingly on the side that wants those norms kept out of public life. He then marshals thirty years of survey data, Cohen in 1981 and 2000, Pew in 2008, PRRI in 2011, to show the anomaly is stable across decades. That spine holds.
Where it goes soft is causation. He offers two explanations, the religious one (Jews are less religious, so they side with secularism) and the historical one (centuries as a minority under Christian power taught Jews to fear religion in the public square), and he frames them as alternatives. They reinforce each other and probably feed a third thing he names but does not develop: self-interest. A minority does well when the majority faith stays out of government, whether or not its members believe in God. Grossman gestures at all three and then declines to weigh them. The piece describes the anomaly better than it explains it.
The Liebman passage is the sharpest moment in the essay. Charles Liebman (1934-2003) cuts against the comfortable story that Jews are liberal because Judaism commands it. He points out that the tradition is folk-oriented, ethnocentric, and at points hostile to the outsider, that the neighbor to be loved was a fellow Jew, that the respect for learning meant sacred texts. Grossman pairs this with Kenneth Wald’s congregant who exhales with relief on hearing that Judaism permits his abortion politics. That anecdote does more analytical work than the survey tables around it. It shows the belief running the other direction: men reach a political position first, then conscript the tradition to bless it. Leonard Fein (1934-2014) says the quiet part himself. We are the text.
Two gaps. First, Grossman accepts James Davison Hunter’s (b. 1955) two-sided model without engaging the strongest objection to it. Morris Fiorina and others argued that the culture war was an elite and activist phenomenon and that most Americans clustered near the middle. If the binary is partly a construction of the people who profit from running the battle, then a survey showing a Jewish-Christian gap on hot-button items might track elite sorting more than mass division. He never tests this.
Second, the claim that these norms “originated as Jewish ideas” carried into Christianity is doing a lot of quiet lifting and deserves more scrutiny than he gives it. It flatters the paradox, the very people who gave the West these norms now oppose their public expression, but the genealogy is contestable, and Michael Walzer’s (b. 1935) own conclusion, which Grossman cites in a footnote, undercuts it: the Hebrew Bible offers no coherent political viewpoint. He buries the line that wounds his own setup.
The neoconservative and Orthodox sections are the most durable part now. Irving Kristol (1920-2009), Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930), Nathan Glazer (1923-2019), and Elliott Abrams (b. 1948) made an argument from group survival rather than from doctrine, and that argument reads better in 2026 than the liberal-values story does. The Orthodox forecast is the one piece of the essay you can now grade. Grossman wrote in 2013 that high Orthodox fertility, near-zero intermarriage, and intensive education might over time produce a new Jewish mainstream aligned with Christian traditionalists. The demographic trend he described has held, and Orthodox voting has moved toward the Republican side while non-Orthodox Jews stayed heavily Democratic. The split he predicted widened.
If “American Jewry” means the religiously engaged core rather than everyone who checks a box, then Orthodoxy does increasingly own that core. The Jews who attend weekly, marry Jews, and raise many Jewish children are disproportionately Orthodox, while the non-Orthodox majority grows larger in count and thinner in religious practice. Restrict the subject to the committed and “culturally predominant” gains force. But the original claim said American Jewry, not the engaged remnant, and the data on the whole population does not support the unrestricted version.
The honest verdict: a competent survey essay that names a genuine puzzle, finds the one source who dissolves the flattering version of it, and then steps back from the harder question of which force, low belief, historical fear, or interest, does the driving.
Nishma Research found a swing of R plus 12 among Modern Orthodox voters between September 2023 and 2024. So an “Orthodox future” forecast, if you cash it out, predicts a haredi-tilted future, not the synthesis Modern Orthodoxy was built to carry. Grossman’s own mature judgment runs this way. His reviewers read Living in Both Worlds as casting doubt on the movement’s future rather than celebrating its ascent. He argues that the challenges cast serious doubt on the future of Modern Orthodoxy.
As a directional bet that Orthodoxy would grow among the young while the liberal middle collapsed, the forecast is sound, and the births-and-retention motor it named is the right one. As the specific claim it made, predominance within a generation and a culturally Orthodox American Jewry, it fails on three counts: the adult share held flat, the broader culture diverged rather than converged, and the growth accrued to the haredi right rather than to the Modern Orthodox center the word “Orthodox” was quietly standing in for. C plus. The instinct was good. The headline was too fast, too broad, and aimed at the wrong wing.

Turner on the Tacit

Turner’s quarrel is with the phrase “shared tacit knowledge.” He treats it as a placeholder that hides the work it claims to do. There is no collective tacit object floating above a community and passing intact from one generation to the next. There are individuals who acquire habits through exposure to particular settings and particular people, and who get feedback that shapes those habits. What looks like a shared framework is a rough convergence of many separate habituations that resemble one another because the conditions of exposure resembled one another. Run that against Grossman and the book sharpens.
Start with Grossman the editor. His judgment about what enters the American Jewish Year Book, and what a communal quarrel means while it still unfolds, comes from forty years of cases, not from a rulebook he could hand to a successor. Ask him to state the rule by which he decided a dispute mattered and he could give you a plausible reconstruction, but the reconstruction would not be the source of the judgment. Turner’s expert works from accumulated exposure, not from articulable principles. Grossman is that expert. His authority as a chronicler rests on something he cannot fully write down, which is the irony at the center of his career. His whole enterprise converts a communal life that runs on tacit competence into explicit documentary prose. He turns practice into record. Turner presses the question Grossman cannot escape: what drops out in the conversion? The record preserves the disputes, the numbers, the institutional names. It cannot preserve the feel of knowing how to be Modern Orthodox, because that feel never existed as stateable content in the first place.
Now turn the frame on his subject, where it pays the most. Grossman narrates a synthesis, Torah and secular life held together, and he tracks its decline. The generic reading calls this the loss of a shared tacit synthesis. Turner blocks that reading. There was no shared thing to lose. There were many young people in the 1950s and 1960s formed by similar homes, similar schools, similar rabbis, similar streets, and the similarity of their formation produced habits that converged. The convergence looked like a common ethos. Norman Lamm could name it Torah Umadda and write it up, and Grossman notes that whether the naming ever matched a working reality stays in doubt. Turner explains the doubt. Lamm wrote down a description of a convergence. The description is the thing was always distributed across individuals and their separate exposures.
So the rightward drift is a change in the conditions of exposure that produces a different convergence. The gap year is the cleanest case. Move the formative setting from the American home and the suburban day school to the immersive Israeli yeshiva, and you change what each student is exposed to and what gets reinforced. The new habits converge on stringency because the new setting rewards stringency. Nothing was handed down and then betrayed. One exposure regime replaced another, and the output changed because the input changed. Turner gets you to that without any appeal to a betrayal, a forgetting, or a vaporous communal mind.
The codification point lands hard here, and it is the part most readers miss. Turner holds that when you try to make tacit practice explicit, you do not reveal the practice. You produce a new object. The chodosh case in Grossman shows it. A competence once carried as feel, this is how we do things, becomes an explicit stringency once someone has to state it and defend it. The stated rule claims to be the old practice made visible. Turner denies the claim. The stated rule is a replacement that wears the costume of continuity. This reframes the whole rightward shift. The stringent generation is not recovering a lost rigor that the lax generation let slip. It is generating new explicit objects in a setting that demands articulation, and then back-projecting them onto a past that ran on the unstated. The past felt looser because it ran on habit. Habit does not announce itself. Once the community has to argue about glatt and head coverings, the arguing itself moves the baseline, because no one accrues standing by writing down a relaxation.
Turner also lets you read Grossman’s own position without psychologizing it. Grossman was formed in the older regime, the native New York YU world. His skepticism toward the success of the synthesis and his eye for the drift come from the same source, the cases he was exposed to. His expertise and his sense of loss share one origin. He has a tacit baseline, acquired and not chosen, and the present reads as departure when set against it. That is not nostalgia in any soft sense. It is what exposure does to a competent observer. The baseline is real and it shapes the judgment, and the judgment is good, and Turner would still insist that the baseline is Grossman’s individual formation rather than a window onto a vanished collective mind.
The strength of Living in Both Worlds on this reading is that Grossman keeps supplying the individual-level story Turner demands. He gives the schools, the camps, the specific teachers, the gap-year pipeline, the financial strain. He names the exposure conditions. The book is most Turnerian where it is most concrete, and weakest in the few places it lets a shared ethos do explanatory work the institutions should be doing instead.

Interaction Ritual Chains (2004)

Randall Collins builds everything from one unit, the interaction ritual. Put bodies in the same place, seal the place against outsiders, lock attention onto a common focus, let a shared mood build, and the four ingredients feed back on each other until the gathering throws off four products. Solidarity in the group. Emotional energy in each person. Sacred objects that stand for the group. And moral standards, with righteous anger held in reserve for anyone who profanes the objects. Emotional energy is the currency. People carry it out of one encounter and into the next, and they steer toward the encounters that pay and away from the ones that drain. A chain forms. Grossman hands you the chain without naming it.
Sort his settings by ritual density. The Israeli yeshiva and the women’s seminary sit at the top. Students live there, eat there, pray there, study there from morning into the night. The bodies stay co-present for months. The barrier against the outside runs high, often reinforced by an ocean and a foreign language. Attention locks onto the text and the teacher. The mood climbs through shared prayer, through the singing, through the dancing on a Friday night. By Collins’s tally that setting generates emotional energy at a rate nothing in suburban America can match. The immersive summer camp and the youth movement run a notch below but on the same side of the ledger. They are bounded, sustained, hot.
Now the suburban synagogue. A few hours on Shabbat, then the members scatter into secular work and secular school for the other six days. Co-presence is thin and intermittent. The barrier leaks by design, because the whole point of the place is to send its people back out into the mixed world. Attention divides. The mood stays mild. The ritual return is low. Collins predicts the flow before Grossman documents it. Emotional energy migrates toward the hot pole and away from the cool one, and the people follow their charge.
That is the engine of the rightward drift, read as Collins reads it. The gap-year student spends a year inside the highest-yield ritual setting available to him. He returns charged, and his charge is bound to the sacred objects as the hot setting charged them, stringent observance, all-day study, the land underfoot. Set the parents’ synagogue against that, and the synagogue reads as flat. It cannot pay what Jerusalem paid. So the student revalues the cooler practice as compromise, and the revaluation arrives with moral heat, because Collins’s rituals produce indignation at the lax. The returning student polices his parents. The drift carries an affective edge, and the edge is righteous.
The piece almost no one would name is the orphaned sacred object. Modern Orthodoxy’s distinctive symbol was the synthesis, the both-worlds achievement that gave the movement its name. A sacred object survives only if some ritual keeps recharging it. The synthesis has no ritual home. No high-density encounter charges balance. You cannot dance to moderation, and you cannot stay up until two in the morning swaying over the proposition that secular culture and Torah deserve equal regard. Every hot ritual in the system charges the maximalist pole instead. So the synthesis starves while stringency gets recharged every Shabbat in the beit midrash. Collins tells you the symbol without a ritual fades and the symbol with intense backing rules. Grossman’s “Haredization” is that outcome stated in the language of observance rather than the language of emotional energy.
Stratification follows the same line. The yeshiva produces an elite measured by ritual stamina, the man who sustains the longest and most intense participation. He becomes the bearer of the sacred objects, the model the community reads as most fully charged. The Modern Orthodox professional keeps the law and then spends his day in an office, and on Collins’s accounting he cannot match the full-time learner’s output. The prestige order tilts toward the high-energy pole on its own, with no conspiracy needed. The standard rises because the standard-setters are the ones the rituals charge hardest.
The 1967 war fits the theory at the level of the rare mass event. Collins treats a war as a collective gathering of enormous reach, attention fused on a single focus, mood running hot, a sharp line drawn between us and them, and a victory left behind as a sacred narrative. After 1967 Israel turned from a distant project into a charged object for American Orthodoxy, and Grossman dates the shift there. The gap-year pipeline then routes the next generation into the physical site of the charged object, where the embodied ritual does the work the news could only begin. That last point cuts against the cross-pollination story Grossman’s interviewers raise, the digital channel, the influence of Israeli figures at a distance. Collins is cool on mediated contact. Bodies apart, weak entrainment, thin charge. The screen moves ideas. The sealed dormitory moves emotional energy. The embodied year carries the load that the feed cannot.
The marginalized Orthodox left reads the same way and gains from it. Grossman records the defeat of the initiatives for expanded ritual and leadership roles for women. In Collins the defeat is an energy deficit before it is a political loss. A partnership minyan is periodic, contested, low-barrier, easy to leave. It cannot generate what a year in a sealed seminary generates. The right out-ritualed the left. Whatever the merits of the arguments, the side with the hotter, denser, more bounded gatherings banked more emotional energy, and the energy decided the question that the debate only described.
Grossman’s charge comes from the scholarly chain, the conference, the archive, the American Jewish Year Book, the editorial desk at the American Jewish Committee. Those are real interaction rituals, but cool ones, verbal and seated, low on bodily entrainment. The measured restraint of Living in Both Worlds is the register of that chain. He documents the heat from the temperature of the seminar room. He can map where the emotional energy concentrates because he stands at a distance from it, and the same distance gives his prose its calm and gives his sense of the drift its melancholy. Collins explains the direction of the shift, toward the ritual heat, and explains, as a bonus, why the man best placed to chart the heat writes about it so coolly.

Niche Construction

Niche construction theory corrects a lazy picture of evolution. Organisms do not just adapt to a fixed environment handed to them. They build the environment, and the build changes the pressures that then act on them and on their offspring. The beaver makes the pond and the pond remakes the beaver. Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman lay it out in Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, and the part that pays off for Grossman is the second inheritance. Offspring inherit genes through one channel and a modified environment through another. The constructed surroundings persist, exert their own pressure, and often outlive the purpose that raised them. Grossman writes the natural history of a community that built its own niche so well that the niche turned on the trait that built it.
Modern Orthodoxy is a construction project before it is a theology. Grossman’s whole archive is the inventory of the build. Day schools. Yeshivas. Women’s seminaries. Summer camps. Youth movements. The eruv that turns a neighborhood into a walkable Sabbath enclosure. Kosher supervision, kosher markets, kosher restaurants. The mikveh. Yeshiva University at the center. The gap-year pipeline to Israel. The dense Orthodox neighborhood where shul, school, butcher, and friends all sit inside a square mile. A community engineered the conditions of its own life. That is niche construction in the plain sense, and Grossman documents each course of brick.
Now the feedback, which is where the frame earns its keep. The founding generation built the niche to counteract a pressure they felt in their bodies. They lived in a secular America that did not bend for them. Keeping kosher meant friction. Keeping Shabbat meant lost wages and odd looks. Staying observant while climbing into the professional class meant holding two pulls in tension every day. The synthesis, the both-worlds achievement that names the movement, was the trait selected by that friction. It answered a real pressure. The schools and the infrastructure were built to make the answer livable.
The build succeeded, and the success removed the pressure. A child raised inside the completed niche never meets the friction the niche was made to counteract. Everything around him is already kosher. Everyone around him already observes. The school, the camp, the neighborhood, the gap year wrap him in observance from birth. The secular pull that his grandfather had to resist by act of will never reaches him as a pull at all. He inherits the constructed environment and not the problem it solved. The synthesis loses its function for him, because a balance struck against a pressure means nothing to someone who has never felt the pressure. Accommodation looks like balance only when you feel the weight on the other side of the scale. Inside the sealed niche there is no weight on the other side, so accommodation reads as concession for no reason.
That is the rightward drift in the language of construction. The niche over-succeeded. By buffering out the assimilatory pull, it dissolved the case for moderation, and the energy that moderation once absorbed now flows toward intensification. The same infrastructure built to enable engagement with the secular world becomes a self-sufficient world that makes engagement optional, then suspect. Grossman names this Haredization. Niche construction names the prior step, the sealing of the environment that made Haredization the path of least resistance.
The legacy effect sharpens it. A constructed niche keeps exerting its pressure after the builders’ motives fade. The schools the founders raised to enable integration now select for fluency inside the niche, not for competence at crossing its boundary, because crossing the boundary is no longer part of daily life. The institution outlives the purpose and inverts it. Yeshiva University sits in the tightest bind here. YU is the niche built to fuse Torah and secular learning under one roof, and its environment depends on secular learning keeping its value. The broader Orthodox niche grew rich enough to support a full life, a career, a status ladder, a marriage market, all inside its own walls, so it no longer needs the secular world the way the founders did. YU defends the secular half because its constructed environment requires it. The surrounding niche has stopped requiring it. Grossman’s account of YU on the defensive is that mismatch stated in institutional terms.
The gap year is relocational construction, the move into a denser niche rather than the modification of the home one. Israel offers a more sealed environment than any American suburb can, and the student who relocates into it returns carrying the standard of the denser build. He then perturbs the home niche toward greater density, presses for glatt, for chodosh, for the stricter line, and the pressed-up standard becomes the inherited environment of the children who follow. Each round of construction tightens the niche the next round is born into. The ratchet is structural. No betrayal, no decline of will, just a built environment passed down with the pressure cranked one notch each generation.
Grossman’s own position fits the theory and explains his eyesight. He formed in an earlier, thinner niche, the postwar New York world where the infrastructure was half-built and the secular friction still pressed. He acquired the synthesis while it still had a job to do. Then he spent his career at the American Jewish Committee, a liberal, largely non-Orthodox body, which placed him at the boundary of the niche rather than deep inside it. The boundary is the one location where the synthesis stays legible, because the boundary is where contact with the secular world continues. An Orthodox man at a non-Orthodox defense organization lives the both-worlds problem as a daily condition long after the sheltered generation stopped meeting it. He can see the synthesis because he never moved fully inside the wall.
The American Jewish Year Book and Grossman’s two decades of annual essays are niche construction of the informational kind. He built part of the documentary environment the community inherits and uses to understand itself. The record is a constructed feature of the niche, passed down like the schools and the eruv. Grossman the historian builds the very niche he studies, and Living in Both Worlds is the most considered brick he laid, a description of the environment offered back to the people who live in it, in the hope that naming the build might let the next generation feel a pressure the walls have been removing for eighty years.

Posted in Judaism | Comments Off on Lawrence Grossman and the Institutional Record of American Judaism

The Chemist, the Professor, and the Giant

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Marc Shapiro tells the gelatin story and lets one detail go by too fast. Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), the great Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, ruled that gelatin is forbidden. He gave his reason without hedging. He knew R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzenski (1863-1940), was related to the giant’s wife, and would defer to him on any question of Jewish law. But not on this one. This one needed chemistry, and chemistry was not R. Hayyim Ozer’s field.
Set that beside Abraham Goldstein (1861-1944), the chemist who built the OU’s certification program and then broke with it. Goldstein had no yeshiva training and no standing in halakhah. He ruled gelatin forbidden too, and for the same reason. The rabbis did not understand food technology. They were laundering pig through legal categories they could not test in a laboratory.
So the two men furthest from the traditional rabbinate, the academic on one side and the industrial chemist on the other, arrived at the same verdict and the same argument. The poskim did not grasp the science. And they aimed that argument at R. Hayyim Ozer, the most lenient and most authoritative voice in the room, the one who held that dried bones rendered inedible to a dog have left the category of forbidden food and may be reconstituted into something kosher.
Shapiro calls this ironic and moves on. The irony is real, but it sits on top of something larger, and the larger thing is worth digging out.
We carry a picture of how these fights are supposed to run. The traditional rabbis hold the line. The modernizers loosen it. The man with the secular degree and the man with the test tube push toward leniency, and the old authorities resist. The gelatin case runs backward. Here the academic and the chemist are the strict ones. The giant of the traditional world is lenient. The picture we carry cannot explain that, which means the picture is wrong about what the fight concerns.
The fight is not orthodoxy against reform, or learning against ignorance. It is a disagreement about where the truth of a thing lives. Ginzberg and Goldstein agree, against everyone else, that the truth of gelatin lives in the molecule. If the substance comes from a pig at the level of matter, then no ruling about dried bones can change what it is. The chemistry is the fact, and the law may govern only after the facts are fixed. Ginzberg said this in plain words. He would weigh R. Hayyim Ozer’s word heavily on Jewish law, but the gelatin question turned on knowledge of chemistry and physiology, and there the great posek had no special claim.
R. Hayyim Ozer would not grant the division. For him the truth of gelatin lives in its halakhic status, not in its molecule. The law has its own theory of what a thing is. A bone dried until a dog will not touch it has passed out of the category of food. That it remains pig at the level of matter is true and beside the point, because the law does not ask what the atom is. It asks what status the substance carries after it has been transformed. The category is the reality the law cares about. The chemist’s reality and the posek’s reality are two different descriptions, and the posek insists his runs on its own track.
This is the whole tension of Shapiro’s post, and it hides inside a single sentence about Ginzberg. The chemist and the Seminary professor agree that the old poskim did not understand the science, and they agree against the poskim themselves. What divides them from R. Hayyim Ozer is not piety. Ginzberg was no less serious about the law than R. Hayyim Ozer was about chemistry. What divides them is a prior question neither side argues out loud. Does the molecule govern the status, or does the status float free of the molecule?
Notice what Ginzberg’s move does to the giant’s authority. R. Hayyim Ozer claimed the whole field. The question of gelatin was a halakhic question, and a halakhic question belonged to him. Ginzberg honored him and then quietly shrank the field. He gave R. Hayyim Ozer Jewish law and kept chemistry for the laboratory. That is a smaller territory than R. Hayyim Ozer thought he held. The honoring and the shrinking come together, and they come together in the same sentence. You praise the master on his own ground and then redraw the boundary of that ground so it no longer covers the case in front of you. The move looks like deference. It works like a demotion.
Goldstein made the same move with less grace. He told the rabbis they could supply him information about how food was produced, and he would tell them what was kosher. He did not honor anyone. But the structure of his claim matched Ginzberg’s. The facts belong to the man who knows the chemistry. The law may speak only after the chemist has spoken.
There is a smaller irony folded inside the larger one, and it cuts the other way. Ginzberg gave private ordination to three men. One of them, R. Isaac Klein, permitted gelatin. So the lenient verdict lived inside Ginzberg’s own circle, carried by his own student, against the teacher. The teacher who trusted the molecule was stricter than the student he had made. The line did not hold even one generation in his own house.
Shapiro’s second post hands us a third position, and it completes the picture. R. Moses Isserles (1530-1572) ruled that pork spoils a dish rather than improving it, that it is noten ta’am lifgam, and on that ground he permitted olive oil from barrels smeared with lard. The ruling puzzled later authorities. Pork tastes good. It sits on the tables of kings. How does a thing that the whole world enjoys count as spoiling? R. Shimon Grunfeld gave an answer that should stop us. Isserles was so holy that pork repelled him, and the repulsion entered his pen. His sensibility produced the ruling.
Lay the three positions side by side. Ginzberg and Goldstein say the molecule governs the status. R. Hayyim Ozer says the status floats free of the molecule. Isserles, on Grunfeld’s reading, says the holy man’s revulsion is itself a kind of fact that finds its way into the law. The first subordinates law to chemistry. The second keeps law on its own track. The third lets a refined disgust steer the law from underneath. Three faiths about where the truth of a forbidden thing is kept.
The modern kashrut world is the settlement among them, and the settlement is uneasy. Shapiro shows in his first post that Goldstein won the long argument about method. Every major hashgachah now employs chemists. The mashgiach who knows nothing of food technology is gone. The molecule got its seat at the table, which is the thing Ginzberg and Goldstein wanted. And yet the halakhic categories survived intact. Bitul is still bitul. Gelatin is widely accepted as kosher, which is R. Hayyim Ozer’s verdict, not Ginzberg’s. So the field split exactly along Ginzberg’s line. The chemistry governs the finding of fact. The law governs the ruling. The man who lost the gelatin case won the argument about how such cases should be decided.
That is the part Shapiro leaves on the floor. Ginzberg lost on gelatin and his division became the architecture of the whole enterprise. He said law is one domain and chemistry another, that they meet at a seam, and that on one side of the seam the posek rules while on the other the chemist reports. We live inside that sentence now. The OU runs laboratories and quotes the Shulhan Arukh, and it does not feel the strain, because the strain was settled before most of the parties knew there was a question.
The Impossible Pork case shows the seam tearing again from a new direction. The OU certifies bacon bits and refuses to certify a plant product called pork, on the ground that kosher eaters might recoil. That is Isserles without the holiness. The molecule says there is nothing forbidden in the bottle. The law says the same. Only the sensibility objects, and the sensibility wins. Ginzberg would have called it a category error. Goldstein would have called it cowardice. R. Hayyim Ozer would have asked what halakhic status a feeling carries, and answered none.
Shapiro reads the awkward line and declines to follow it home. The restraint may be deliberate. A blog post is not a monograph, and not every thread needs pulling. But the thread runs through the whole subject. The quietest sentence in the post, the one about a Conservative professor who deferred to a great rabbi on everything except the one thing in front of him, holds the argument that organizes modern kashrut and most of the quarrels Shapiro likes to collect. The chemist and the professor were not the modernizers loosening the old law. They were the men who decided where the old law would be allowed to rule, and where it would have to wait outside while someone else established the facts.

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on The Chemist, the Professor, and the Giant

True Defamation

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Philosophy professor, attorney, and former journalist Jeff Helmreich (son of the late sociologist William B. Helmreich) writes in 2024:

Holy Land was a thriving grocery chain in Minneapolis, owned and operated by a Palestinian American family. One of them, the CEO’s 25-year-old daughter, served as its catering director. She had also lately become a progressive activist, joining in the city’s Black Lives Matter protests shortly after the George Floyd killing. An observer who knew her name, and who may have been irked by her newly
prominent politics, unearthed some posts from a retired Instagram account she had used 10 years earlier, when, at age 14, she went through a radical phase. The 9th grader had then posted racist and anti-Semitic statements, which the observer now reposted on a variety of social media sites, effectively publishing them as current news.
The business became the target of nearly daily protests and threats of boycotts, ultimately losing thousands of dollars in catering contracts and the lease of one of its newer stores. The owner ceremoniously fired his daughter, even though she had demonstrably shed these hateful ideas long ago. In the shadow of this public vilification, she struggled to find new employment.
Paul McMullan, features writer for the celebrity gossip-oriented News of the World in England, wrote a detailed story of the stormy life of actor Denholm Elliott’s daughter, Jennifer, who was otherwise unknown to the public. Jennifer Elliott, he wrote, had fallen on hard times many years ago, turning not only to drugs but, at one brief point, to prostitution.
Within days of the publication, Jennifer took her own life, an act McMullan self-critically attributes to his article: “I humiliated her, I destroyed her, and it wasn’t necessary.”
In February 2008, the advertising blog Agency Spy ran a brief, incendiary post on the management style, or mismanagement style as they might have called it, of ad executive Paul Tilley, Creative Director of DDB in Chicago, quoting and criticizing brief excerpts from internal memoranda he had sent to subordinates. The post was followed by a dozen or so anonymous comments about him as a boss, most of them harshly critical. Less than three days later, Tilley jumped to his death from a window at the Fairmont Chicago Hotel.
These three episodes share several features. First, they all involve what used to be known as defamation—the act of damaging the reputation of others by spreading denigratory claims about them. Second, the defamers knowingly inflicted great harm, precisely the sort involved in standard tort defamation cases today. And yet, third, the victims (or their families) would have no basis to sue for defamation. They
could not recover for their losses in court, at least not for having been defamed.

Helmreich’s background as a journalist fits the paper better than anything in his acknowledgments page. Look at who his villains are. The News of the World writer who printed true facts about Jennifer Elliott. The blog that quoted Paul Tilley’s real memos. The observer who dug up a teenager’s deleted posts and reposted them as current news. His cases are press cases. The man is prosecuting his old trade.
It explains the moral heat. “Monstrous” is not the word a tort scholar reaches for. It comes from someone who watched the work up close and could not stomach it. The paper has the tone of a confession turned indictment. He saw editors find the one true devastating fact and run it, and he saw the cover story every time: the public has a right to know.
He has heard that defense in the room, watched it dressed on stories that served no one but the traffic, and he no longer credits it. The Hayekian case for diffuse true information is also the newsroom’s house justification. A man who left because the justification rang hollow will not pause to rebut it. He thinks he already knows what it covers for.
This strengthens the diagnosis. His feel for how a single true fact gets weaponized, stripped of context, given outsized weight before strangers, reads now as reporting, not theory. He watched it happen and he is describing it from the inside.
It also weakens his neutrality on the hard cases. A convert distrusts the thing he fled. The genuine instances where exposure protects people, the predator whose pattern only surfaces because someone printed the true ugly fact, sit at the edge of his vision. He files them under exceptions and moves on. His bracketing of public figures saves him from the worst of this. He is not naive about powerful men. But the apparatus he distrusts is the same apparatus that surfaces them, and he never sits with that.
So the biography does not make the legal proposals work. Garrison still bites. The “almost no worthy purpose” test still dissolves under a clever lawyer. What the biography supplies is the source of conviction and the reason for the one large silence. He is not failing to see the counterargument. He has seen too much of it to take it seriously, and that is a different posture than ignorance, and a less defensible one in a paper that asks the reader to weigh the costs honestly.
Helmreich has hold of something real. The three opening cases do the work he needs them to do. A grocery family loses contracts over a fourteen-year-old’s deleted posts. An actor’s daughter takes her life days after a tabloid prints true facts about her past. An ad executive jumps from a hotel window after a blog quotes his real memos. Each victim told no lie about anyone, suffered enormous harm, and has no defamation claim. The phenomenology is sound. Accurate denigration can ruin a man, and the law has no name for the wrong.
The strongest stretch runs through his treatment of reputation as good standing. His best move comes when he attacks the reputation-as-earned-credit view. Strangers hold only a few facts about you. So each public fact carries weight far beyond what it would carry in a full life, shorn of the context that would let anyone weigh it. Publishing a sordid fact from long ago upends the order by which people come to know one another. That observation is sharp and original, and the “fresh start” claim built on it is the durable part of the paper. It survives the law-review framing and stands as a point about how reputation works at all.
Now the trouble. The thesis rests on “all else equal” and “presumptive wrong,” and those phrases carry too much. Almost any act is wrong all else equal. The interesting question is when a countervailing interest defeats the presumption, and he keeps deferring that question to a later page that never arrives. He establishes a presumption, then concedes that competition, self-defense, protection, and public concern can all override it. By the end the thesis has shrunk to: true defamation can be wrong, and sometimes is monstrous. Few would deny that. The harder claim, that it is wrong as such, he gestures at more than he earns.
Two of his harm arguments pull against each other. The fresh-start argument says the harm comes from distortion: an old isolated fact gets outsized, misleading weight. The cyberbullying argument says the harm comes from accuracy: the bully finds the one devastating true fact that lands. These are different injuries. The first concedes that a fact weighed in proper context might be fine, which undercuts any claim that the trouble lies in truth-telling. The second is closer to a privacy or cruelty claim than a reputation claim. He wants both and the pair sits uneasily.
He also smuggles privacy intuition into a paper about defamation. Jennifer Elliott and the surgery photographs move us because they are intrusions, not because they damage standing. His one clean case of defamation without privacy is Tilley, the manager criticized for his memos. But Tilley is also the case where the speech looks most like fair workplace commentary. So his purest example of the wrong he wants to name is his weakest case for liability. That should worry him more than it seems to.
The legal proposals are the soft part, and he half-knows it. His malice route through Noonan v. Staples runs into Garrison v. Louisiana, which he cites against himself. A tort keyed to the speaker’s bad purpose chills well-meaning speakers, who must now worry that a court will impute ill will. His narrower proposal, liability for true defamation that serves “almost no end other than to ruin a private person’s reputation,” dies on his own admission that one can always find some worthy end and some thread of public concern. A competent defense lawyer manufactures that hook every time. Eugene Volokh (b. 1968), whom he thanks and cites, has spent years showing how purpose-based speech restrictions metastasize. The paper does not answer him.
The deepest gap is one he never opens. True negative facts about people circulate because strangers need cheap ways to judge whom to trust. The outsized weight of a few facts, which he treats as a bug, is also how reputation does its job. His “right to a fresh start” reads, from the other side, as a subsidy to the wrongdoer paid by every future counterparty denied the information. He files this under “protective defamation” as an exception. It belongs at the center. Warning others is not a side use of circulating true bad facts. It is the point of having reputations at all. A Hayekian would say the diffuse circulation of true reputational information is a public good, and the burden falls on the man who wants to suppress it. Helmreich never argues with that man.
One historical note cuts against his sympathies. “The greater the truth, the greater the libel” grew up in seditious-libel soil, where truth about the powerful was the thing the Crown most wanted buried. The old regime he half-admires protected rank. And his own Croswell story, with Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) arguing for a free press chasing unpleasant truths, shows the shift to truth-as-defense came from principle, not accident. He wants to say the moral question went unconfronted. His evidence shows it confronted and decided the other way.
Where he lands is better than where he reasons. The contribution is lexical, not doctrinal. We have lost a word for a real wrong, and losing the word lets people tell themselves there is nothing amiss in destroying a private man’s name so long as every word is true. Augustine (354–430) had it right that naming a thing a lie or a theft puts the burden on the doer. Helmreich wants that burden restored for cruelty dressed as honesty. The naming project I find persuasive. The lawsuit he wants to build on top of it, less so. Robert Post (b. 1947), whose good-standing and civility work he leans on throughout, gave him a richer theory of the wrong than the remedy he proposes can carry.

What Helmreich wants is the world where reputation moves slow. You meet a man, you learn the plain things first, the harder things later, the old sins last of all, if at all. The community holds him in good standing until he gives real reason to lose it, and even then it can decide to let an old thing fade. That order is real. It existed. It still exists in pockets. And his whole apparatus, good standing, fresh start, the gradual order of acquaintance, presupposes it.
That order is a product of closure and scale and repeated dealing. A small bounded group where everyone knows everyone, where you will see the same faces next year, where membership is controlled through kinship and shared norms rather than through the thin public record. You can have that in a homogeneous village and you can fail to have it in one too. The variable he is mourning is not sameness of blood or creed. It is smallness, stability, and a community that controls its own membership well enough that it can afford to forgive.
The forgiving community is not the merciful one by nature. The closed community is the cruel one. In a village where everyone knows everyone, a true bad fact is a life sentence. There is nowhere to go and no stranger to start fresh with. That is why the very traditions Helmreich reaches for, the Jewish prohibition on lashon hara and the Catholic prohibition on detraction, exist at all. They are commands against speaking ill of a man. You do not need to command what comes naturally. Those laws arose because the tight community would otherwise destroy a man with true facts, and the community knew it, and bound itself by religious law against its own appetite.
So the thing Helmreich yearns for is the religious law the society needed to survive its own cruelty. He wants the prohibition on lashon hara to run in a society of strangers, where the law has no congregation to enforce it and no shared sacred norm to give it teeth. He reaches for the command and leaves behind the community that generated it and the God who backed it. That is why the remedies fail. He is trying to put the duty of detraction into secular tort, where the only enforcer is a judge applying a malice test, and a malice test cannot carry a sacred prohibition. The weight is wrong for the vessel.
He cannot argue for a closed moral community under shared law, because he does not want one either. He is a liberal academic at a public university citing the Talmud as moral evidence and the First Amendment as a constraint he must respect. He wants the mercy of the covenant without the covenant. He half-knows the covenant community was the merciless one that had to be restrained, since he cites the very restraints. And he cannot say the part out loud, which is that the internet’s refusal to forget is the price of a society of strangers, and that you do not get the slow forgiving order back by writing a tort. You get it back, if at all, by rebuilding the small bound communities that made it work, and he will not propose that, because the bound community asks more of a man than he is willing to ask.
Helmreich yearns for a thick moral community with the power to forgive, and the only such communities he can name are the religious ones he has left behind. That is a more defensible charge and a sadder one. The man is homesick for an authority he no longer accepts.

Citizenship is the thin bond. Citizens are strangers who agree on procedure. They owe each other equal treatment and the truth and not much warmer than that. The First Amendment is the citizen’s charter. Among citizens true speech runs free, because a citizen has no claim on another citizen’s mercy. He can demand you not lie about him. He cannot demand you bury a true thing or hold him in good standing while he earns his way back. The citizen’s law is built for men who do not love each other and do not have to.
Brotherhood is the thick bond. Brothers do not publish each other’s sins. A brother extends the presumption of good standing as a gift, not a procedure. He gives the fresh start because the other man is one of his own and the name he protects is half his own name. The prohibition on lashon hara is a law for brothers. It assumes the man whose name you guard belongs to the household with you. The Catholic ban on detraction runs inside the body. Both are fraternal laws. They govern men who are more than fellow voters.
So set the paper in that light and the trouble comes clear. Helmreich’s good standing is brotherhood wearing the citizen’s clothes. He wants the law of brothers to govern a city of strangers. He keeps walking into the First Amendment because he is asking the charter written for strangers to enforce the duties owed only among brothers, and it will not, because it was drawn for the opposite relation. Every time he defers to the free-speech value he must respect, he is bowing to the citizen’s law while reaching for the brother’s mercy. The two do not sit at one table. He half-knows it and cannot say it.
Now the price. The brotherhood that guards a man’s name is the same brotherhood that decides who is a brother. Fraternal mercy has a wall around it. You owe your brother the protection of his name. You do not owe it to the stranger or the enemy outside the gate. The reason brothers can forgive and forget is that they have already drawn the line that says who is in. The mercy is bought with the boundary. There is no warmth without the wall.
That is what Helmreich wants and cannot ask for. He wants the inside, the covering, the slow forgiving order of men who are kin, and he wants it for every private stranger on the internet at once. He wants universal brotherhood. But brotherhood is made of not being universal. Extend the brother’s protection to all mankind and you have dissolved the thing that gave it force. You are left asking the law of brothers to run with no brothers in it, which is the citizen’s world again, only now pretending to be something warmer.
The longing is honest and very old. Aristotle (384–322 BC) said the city aims past justice at friendship, that the best polis is a community of friends and not a contract among strangers. Most men feel the pull. We traded the city of brothers for the city of strangers because the city of brothers, when a man falls out of favor, knifes him with the truth and casts him past the wall, and because the wall keeps out everyone who was not born inside it. The liberal bargain erased the wall and called every man a citizen. Thinner, colder, and open to all. Helmreich feels the loss and reaches back for the warmth and will not touch the wall. So he writes a tort, and the tort cannot carry it, because what he is grieving is not a missing law. It is a missing brother.

Brother and citizen, covenant and strangers, corporate and individualist. One line drawn three times. Relationship first, or agreement first. Status, or contract.
Henry Maine (1822–1888) put it as the one law of social change in Ancient Law. The movement of progressive societies, he said, has been from status to contract. A man once stood where his birth placed him, inside a family, a clan, a body, and his relations came fixed with his station. Then the man’s bonds became the bonds he made. His agreements, not his place. Maine called it progress. Helmreich feel the cost.
Put his paper on that corporate vs individual axis and the law makes sense, even where he hates it. American defamation law is the law of the contract pole. Among sovereign strangers the only duty owed is the duty not to deceive. Lying is fraud, a broken term in the one relation strangers have, which is the relation of honest dealing. So false defamation is actionable. It breaks the only promise the individualist order recognizes. True defamation runs free because among strangers no prior relationship forbids telling the truth about a man. There is no body that owes him the cover of his name. The law is faithful to its society. Helmreich calls it monstrous because he is judging a contract law by a status morality. He wants the body’s duty enforced in a country that dissolved the body.
In the corporate country you do not negotiate your standing, which is the warmth. You also cannot renegotiate it, which is the cage. Born inside, you are covered. Born low, you stay low. The relationship that guards your name is the same relationship that fixes your place and will not let you leave it. The individualist country makes you negotiate everything, your work, your bonds, your station, and now your reputation too. You manage your own name like a sole proprietor, you sue for your own defamation, you do your own reputation repair, because no body does it for you. Exhausting and cold. Also the only order where a man can walk out of the family that would define him and bargain his way into a new place. The freedom and the loneliness are the same thing.
Look back at his cases through this. The Holy Land family had a body, the family firm, and the body fired its own daughter to survive the pressure from outside. The corporate bond cracked under the individualist storm and threw out its own member to live. Tilley stood alone, an executive in a contract world, with no body to absorb the blow to his name. These are not stories of bad law. They are stories of men and women who had to negotiate everything, including who they would be taken to be, with no relationship standing behind them. That is the condition Helmreich grieves. He calls it a missing tort. It is a missing status.
He yearns for the country where the relationship comes first. He cannot ask for it, because the country where the relationship comes first also tells you where to stand and never lets you move, and he is a free man of the negotiated world who would not give up the exit. He wants the cover without the cage. The protection of the body without the assignment of the body. And a tort cannot give it, because a tort is a contract-world instrument, a thing you negotiate in court, and the cover he wants was the one thing the old order gave without negotiation, to those it claimed as its own.

In the populist-nationalist MAGA vision, we are one people. Only in a pluralist multi-cultural society can elites rule via coalition.
I don’t think Helmreich is MAGA but he wants the benefits of that united people.
The one people is the body at national scale, relationship first, a single will. The pluralist society is the contract order spread across many groups. Where the people are many, the broker is necessary. No faction can rule alone, so someone must assemble the coalition, hold it together, arbitrate among parts that trust each other less than they trust him. That broker is the elite. His power comes from the division. James Madison (1751–1836) sold faction against faction as the dispersal of power in Federalist 10, and Robert Dahl (1915–2014) gave the polite name, polyarchy, rule by many minorities. The populist answer is that the dispersal is a cover story. What disperses among the groups concentrates in the hand that coordinates them. Where the people are one, the coordinator has no trade. He is unnecessary, and worse, he is exposed, because a single people can see plainly whether a man serves it or stands outside it. So the elite has every reason to prefer a fractured many it can broker to a whole it would have to obey or face. That much is true, and it is the strongest thing the populist has to say.
The one united people is a claim, not a fact. No nation was ever one undivided people. The people is always made, by a language, a myth, an enemy, a leader who names it. So the man who stands up and says we are one people and the broker is illegitimate is, more often than not, building a coalition of his own and calling it the whole. He rules a faction too. He simply denies the others are part of the people at all. He has no word for the minority except enemy of the people, because his legitimacy rests on there being no real division to broker. The pluralist elite rules a coalition and admits it. The populist elite rules a coalition and calls it the nation. Caesar is an elite. The man who says I am the people governs a coalition while denying coalitions exist, which can be the more total rule, because it leaves the excluded with no standing and no name.
So it is not that pluralism alone permits elite rule by coalition. Both orders are run by elites assembling coalitions. The difference is whether the coalition rules in the open, as one minority bargaining among others, or in disguise, as the voice of a unity it has defined to fit itself. The honest broker and the man who is the people are both ruling the many. One confesses it. The other consecrates it.
The coalition-broker profits from disunity and will work to keep the groups from ever finding the common ground that would make him unnecessary. That is a real reason to distrust the pluralist managerial class, and the populist who calls for one people is trying to dissolve its franchise. Whether he delivers self-rule or only a new and more concentrated master depends on whether the institutions of his unity, the citizen army, the common law, the shared tongue, the parliament, hand power down or gather it at a new center. History runs mostly toward the new center. Not always.
The one body that needs no broker is the one body with no room for the man who does not fit. The whole that obeys a single will has no place for the dissenter who is not an enemy, no minority that is not a problem to be solved, no exit. The pluralist coalition order is broker-ridden and cold and it is also where the odd man finds air, because no single people there claims to be all of it. The warmth of the one people is bought with the same wall as the warmth of the brotherhood and the cover of the body. The unity that frees you from the broker is the unity that will not let you stand apart from the people once it has decided who the people are.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on True Defamation

Marc Shapiro: Gelatin, Supposed Retractions, and Abraham Goldstein

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Shapiro’s claim is about evidence and authority. A written responsum beats a remembered conversation, and the gelatin and dishwasher cases let him prove it twice.
The dishwasher example is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the post. R. Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986) wrote a plain ruling. Separate racks, same dishwasher, fine, and he names householders so no one can pretend he meant only restaurants. Then someone tells R. Yehuda Spitz that R. Moshe privately said the opposite, that the leniency applied to commercial machines alone. Shapiro refuses the report. His logic is sound and he states it without hedging. A remembered private clarification cannot overturn a written text that anyone can read, except when the posek makes the change widely known or a recognized scholar reports it, and even then with caution. He then stacks the evidence against the report. R. Spitz himself admits in his own footnote that R. Moshe meant home dishwashers. R. Dovid Feinstein read his father the same way. R. Shmuel Fuerst explains it the same way. The report dies under its own contradictions. This is Shapiro at his best, careful and a little ruthless.
The gelatin material is where the post earns its length, and the lever is Goldstein (1861-1944). Shapiro tells a story that flatters no one and then admits the loser was partly right. Goldstein was a chemist, not a rabbi, with no yeshiva training, and he set himself up to tell learned rabbis what was kosher. He called R. Samuel Pardes a scoundrel and hinted that the OU took money for false hekhshers. The rabbis answered with a near-herem. Shapiro grants the rabbis their grievance. A layman cannot overrule talmidei hakhamim on halakhah, and the chutzpah was real. Then he turns and says Goldstein won the larger point. Every mainstream hashgachah now treats food chemistry as essential, which is the thing Goldstein insisted on while the old rabbis waved it away. Shapiro lets both truths stand. The rabbis were right about authority and Goldstein was right about chemistry, and the institution that beat him quietly adopted his method while erasing his name. The erasure is the part Shapiro will not let pass. Goldstein built the OU’s certification program and got written out of its memory, and Shapiro restores him. That restoration is the same move he made with Elefant and Toledano in the other post. He drags the inconvenient figure back into view.
The corpse-medicine ending is the most interesting passage and also the one where Shapiro overreaches a touch. He wants to show that revulsion and halakhah are two different things. Great poskim permitted eating powdered human skull and mummy flesh as medicine because the form had changed and the stuff became mere dust. He uses this to needle Goldstein. If you can swallow a ground-up skull under the law, you cannot scream that nullified pork makes a food treif. The point lands on the abstract level. Bitul is bitul and feeling is not halakhah. But the commenter Eli Farhi caught the weak seam, and he is right. The skull and mummy permissions are for the sick, refuah, not for dessert. No one permits mummy ice cream. So the analogy proves less than Shapiro wants. It proves that halakhah can override disgust in a narrow medical case, not that disgust has no standing when the question is what a healthy man may eat for pleasure. Shapiro reaches for the shocking image because it is good writing, and it is, but the argument it carries is thinner than the prose.
What runs under all of it is a single conviction, and it is the honest core of Shapiro’s whole project. The written record outranks memory, sentiment, and institutional convenience. He applies it to oral retractions, to a chemist the OU prefers to forget, and to medieval permissions that modern stomachs reject. The conviction is also self-serving in the good sense. It is the historian’s faith, that the document survives and the gossip does not, and that a scholar’s job is to print the document even when the community would rather it stayed in a drawer.
The Lieberman photographs and the long tefillin debate in the comments are filler, charming filler, but unconnected to the argument. The Ginzberg detail is the sharp aside. The Conservative scholar Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), who knew R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzenski (1863-1940) personally and was related to his wife, ruled strictly on gelatin because he thought the question needed chemistry the rabbis lacked. The man on the academic side took the position Goldstein took, against the lenient giant he admired. Shapiro calls it ironic and moves on. He could have made more of it. The chemist and the Seminary professor agreeing that the old poskim did not understand the science, against the poskim themselves, is the whole tension of the post in one sentence. He leaves it sitting there, which is either restraint or a missed beat.
The verdict. Stronger than the Elefant post because the argument is real and tested twice. The dishwasher case is airtight. The Goldstein story is fair and a little brave, since the OU is a friend to no critic. The corpse-medicine flourish is fine writing wrapped around a claim that does not quite carry. Shapiro knows the difference between what a text says and what a man wishes it said, and he keeps choosing the text. That is the habit that makes him worth reading even when the post wanders.

Part 2 sprawls where part 1 held a line. The Goldstein thread that gave part 1 its spine becomes a recurring device here, a name Shapiro keeps invoking to introduce yet another lenient ruling. “Goldstein would have been outraged” works once, maybe twice. By the fourth time it reads as a peg, not an argument. The post is really three things stapled together. A long demonstration that great poskim ruled far more leniently than modern kashrut allows, a tour of hashgachah history and trivia, and a closing run of bibliographical firsts. Only the first has an argument.

That argument is the same one from part 1, pushed harder. The written record beats sentiment, and the sentiment in question is now disgust. Shapiro lines up the leniencies. R. Moses Isserles (1530-1572) permits olive oil stored in barrels smeared with pig lard. R. David Ibn Zimra (1479-1573) permits meat eaten with sugar that was cooked in milk, and the Ari ate it. R. Yehezkel Landau (1713-1793) permits a drink with a nullified trace of non-kosher meat. R. Joseph Kafih (1917-2000) prefers gelatin from human bones over animal bones. Each ruling is one a modern hashgachah would refuse, and Shapiro’s point is that the refusal comes from feeling, not from law. The cumulative weight is real. He proves that the gap between halakhah on the page and halakhah on the supermarket shelf is wide and old.

The Isserles pork passage is where the post does its best thinking, and it cuts against Shapiro’s own larger claim in a way he half-misses. Isserles rules pork is noten ta’am lifgam, that it spoils a dish rather than improves it. Shapiro flags the obvious problem. Pork tastes good to most of the world and sits on the tables of kings, so why call it spoiling. He cites R. Shimon Grunfeld, who says Isserles was so holy that pork genuinely disgusted him, and the disgust leaked into his pen and produced a halakhic error. That is a striking admission to quote. A great posek’s personal revulsion bent his ruling. But notice what it does to Shapiro’s thesis. He spends the post arguing that disgust is not halakhah and the texts override feeling. Then his own evidence shows a posek whose feeling produced the text. The two ideas sit in tension and Shapiro does not resolve it. He wants the written word clean of sentiment, yet his sharpest example is a written word soaked in it.

The Sifra reading is the strongest small piece. Shapiro catches Isserles inverting the plain sense of a famous passage. The Sifra and Rashi teach that a man should not say pork disgusts him and that is why he abstains. He should say it would taste fine and he abstains only because God commanded it. The Rambam (1138-1204) drives this home in Shemonah Perakim. Want the lobster, then refuse it for the mitzvah alone. Isserles reads the same passage backward, as proof that pork is the most repulsive of forbidden foods. Shapiro says he knows no one else who reads it that way, and he is right to press it. The commenter Talmid pushes back well, arguing Isserles meant something closer to the standard reading, but Shapiro’s catch stands as a real observation about how a great mind can flip a text it knows by heart. This is Shapiro doing what he does best, reading closely and refusing to look away from the awkward line.

The hashgachah material is entertaining and mostly weightless. The toilet cleaner, the roach killer, the seven hekhshers on romaine, the 1896 newspaper mocking a hashgachah on stove polish. It is good blog filler and it makes a mild point about scope creep, that certification expands until it covers things no one needs certified. The Impossible Pork section has more bite. Shapiro is openly annoyed that the OU refused to certify a vegetarian product because of how kosher eaters might feel, when the OU already certifies Bacos and bacon bits. His irritation is fair and consistent with his thesis. Emotion is driving a kashrut decision that the law does not require. R. Genack (b. 1948) all but admits it. This is the one place the trivia connects back to the argument, because the OU is doing exactly what Shapiro accuses the moderns of doing throughout, ruling by feeling and calling it standards.

The Kornmehl conflict-of-interest point is sharp and Shapiro lands it without overplaying. The Barton’s mashgiach was the owner’s brother-in-law. Shapiro asks whether any agency today would tolerate that, and the commenters answer the obvious rejoinder, that paid supervision is already a conflict, related or not. Shapiro’s narrower point holds. Standards that did not bother anyone in 1950 would end a career now, and the change is sociological, not halakhic.

The Gershuni material is the quiet gem and Shapiro undersells it. R. Yehuda Gershuni wrote a long article in 1952 defending his father-in-law R. Eliezer Silver’s ban on gelatin, then gave hekhshers on gelatin himself once Silver died in 1968. Shapiro offers the honest reading. Either Gershuni changed his mind or he never believed the stringency and wrote the article out of deference. Then Shapiro adds a second case, Gershuni reversing himself on Yom ha-Atzmaut and Hallel between 1957 and 1961. Two documented flips from one figure, one of them plausibly written against his own view to honor a relative. That is a sharper finding than most of the post and Shapiro lets it pass in a paragraph. A man who put his name to a position he may not have held, because the position belonged to his wife’s father, is the kind of thing Shapiro usually digs into. Here he reports it and moves on.

The closing section on American-born authors is pure bibliography. The ten-year-old Reuven Grossman (1905-1974) publishing a book of essays and Torah commentary is a genuine curiosity, and the claim that he may be the youngest published Jewish author in history is the sort of thing Shapiro collects and shares well. It belongs to a different post.

The verdict. Weaker than part 1 because the spine bends. Part 1 had two clean test cases and a real argument about evidence. Part 2 has a strong accumulation of leniencies, one excellent close reading of Isserles on the Sifra, and a buried tension Shapiro never faces, that his own Isserles example shows feeling shaping text in the very way his thesis denies. The rest is good company and good trivia. He reads the awkward lines, restores the forgotten figures, and prints what others would rather leave in the drawer. The habit holds even when the post itself does not.

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on Marc Shapiro: Gelatin, Supposed Retractions, and Abraham Goldstein

Marc Shapiro: R. Yudel Rosenberg, R. Mordechai Elefant, and Sexual Abuse

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro wrote a typical Seforim Blog grab-bag, and the title shows the strain. He yokes together a correction to his own forgery scholarship, a long meditation on Mordechai Elefant’s memoir, and a short note on rabbinic responses to sexual abuse. The three parts share a thread, but a thin one. The thread is candor about figures the tradition prefers to keep clean.
The strongest section is the small one Shapiro buries near the end. He admits a mistake. Ira Robinson caught him claiming that Medini never signed with הצעיר when in fact the forged haskamah does close that way, and Shapiro writes that he can’t explain why he wrote otherwise. That sentence does more work than it looks. A scholar who built a reputation on catching forgers concedes he misread the evidence and then keeps building his case on the remaining points. He still thinks the letter is a forgery. He just lost one of his reasons and says so. Most polemicists would have quietly dropped the point. He names it.
The Elefant material is the part most readers will remember, and it is also where Shapiro is weakest as an analyst, by his own admission. He says he never knew the man and that everything he offers is speculation. Then he offers two readings of why a rosh yeshiva would dictate a memoir that makes him look, in Rakeffet’s phrase, half gadol and half gangster. Pride, or guilt. Shapiro leans toward guilt and quotes Elefant thanking God that his “shaygetz side” did not pass to his students. That is a fair reading of the text. It is also the reading that lets a great Torah scholar remain sympathetic. The pride reading is harsher and Shapiro mentions it first and then walks away from it. A man who travels the world, collects celebrities and politicians, and dictates the whole thing for publication might simply have enjoyed himself and wanted others to know. Shapiro prefers the man who suffers for his contradictions. Worth noticing that the kinder reading wins.
The abuse section is the one the title advertises and the one Shapiro handles with the most caution. He cites the Aderet talking a family out of going to the police over a rape to avoid hillul ha-shem, and the Tzemach Tzedek declining to remove a rabbi who molested a boy and called it a medical curiosity about testicle size. Shapiro frames these as evidence of how attitudes have changed, and he asks for a scholarly history rather than a prosecution. That framing is generous to the rabbis and probably correct as method. A history that only condemns teaches nothing about how the change happened. But the framing also softens what the sources show, which is that the older logic protected the institution and the abuser and left the victim with nothing. The first reason the Aderet gives, avoidance of hillul ha-shem, Shapiro grants is alive today. That is the honest line in the section, and he states it without ornament.
What ties the post together, if anything does, is forgery and concealment as twin habits. A respected rav like Toledano fabricates documents and even a saint’s grave. A great scholar like Lieberman gets misremembered by Elefant. A community keeps abuse quiet for the same reason it keeps embarrassing memoirs out of print. Shapiro’s standing move across forty years is to drag the suppressed thing back into the light and let it sit there. He does it again here, gently, and the gentleness is the tell. He likes these people. He admires Elefant, he respects Toledano’s learning, he reveres Lieberman. He exposes them anyway, and the affection makes the exposure land softer than a hostile critic could manage.
The Sacks detail rewards attention. Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) printed Chaim Bloch’s forged universalist Haggadah text as authentic in his own Haggadah, not knowing Bloch’s record. A forgery survives because a trusted name vouches for it without checking. That is the whole problem of the post in one footnote-sized story, and Shapiro lets it pass quickly.
If you want my honest verdict, the post is strong as bibliography and reportage and soft as judgment. The Elefant psychology is guesswork dressed as insight, and Shapiro tells you so before you can object, which is its own kind of cover. The forgery work is careful and the abuse note is brave for where it appears, since the haredi readership he writes for does not welcome it. He calls for study rather than blame, which is the move of a man who wants to keep his sources and his friendships and tell the truth at the same time. He mostly pulls it off.

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on Marc Shapiro: R. Yudel Rosenberg, R. Mordechai Elefant, and Sexual Abuse

Marc Shapiro on Rabbinic Forgery

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

The strongest section is the first, on the phantom “A. Rosenberg.” Solomon Friedlaender forged a Yerushalmi to Kodashim, then invented a student, Rosenberg, to defend the forgery. The student praised the master. The master praised the student. Both were the same hand. Shapiro then traces a second and possibly third Rosenberg, and walks through the suggestion that Saul Lieberman (1898-1983) wrote the 1928 book under that name. Shapiro kills the theory with evidence rather than assertion. He notes that Lieberman had no academic training before 1928, that the book is riddled with fraud Lieberman would not have committed, that the book misquotes Solomon Buber to say the opposite of what Buber wrote, and that the whole thing turns out to be serial plagiarism, including a passage lifted word for word from Aptowitzer. That is good detective work. He lets the dating and the textual parallels do the arguing.
What makes the Lieberman material land is the Sussman anecdote. Lieberman, asked about the book, snapped “Sheigetz, how did you come to this book?” and refused to say more. Shapiro reads the silence as concealment, then notes the harder fact: Lieberman never cites this book anywhere in his own Yerushalmi work, even though it does the same job. A scholar who disagreed would say so. A scholar who had nothing to do with it would have no reason to hide. The non-citation is the real puzzle, and Shapiro is honest that he cannot solve it. דבר זה אומר דרשני, he writes. The thing demands interpretation.
The Lieberman-and-Kaplan herem detail is the sharpest single line in the post. A witness saw Lieberman step out of the Seminary elevator the moment Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983) stepped in, because Lieberman held the herem against Kaplan as binding. Lieberman taught at the Conservative seminary and treated its most famous theologian as untouchable. The man lived inside a contradiction and managed it by physical avoidance. Shapiro reports it through a hostile source, the pseudonymous “Dayyan al-Yahud,” whom he then identifies as Israel Elfenbein (1891-1964). That identification, and the digression into Elfenbein’s path from Pressburg semikhah to JTS to Orthodox prominence, is the kind of thread Shapiro cannot resist. It has nothing to do with the title and it is one of the more interesting things here.
The R. Yitzchok Scheiner (1922-2021) section is corrective rather than revelatory. An ArtScroll biography by Nachman Seltzer compresses Scheiner’s year and a half at Yeshiva College into a single paragraph that never names the college, and Shapiro catches the omission with a yearbook photo: Scheiner captained the chess team. ArtScroll writes hagiography, and the house style cannot admit that a future Kamenitzer rosh yeshiva sat in a secular college and posed for a yearbook. Shapiro enjoys these corrections. The Matzav.com interview that drops the Yeshiva College years entirely, “or perhaps this was censored,” is the same point made twice. He has documented this pattern of haredi biographical scrubbing for years, and the Scheiner case is a minor entry in a long file.
The Kaplan-semikhah note is the cleanest piece of original research. Everyone assumed Kaplan traveled to Lida to get ordination from R. Reines on his honeymoon. Shapiro produces a 1908 Cracow newspaper placing Kaplan and Reines together at the Frankfurt Mizrachi conference, which explains the Frankfurt ordination Schacter had already documented. He adds a fact rather than a theory.
Sections three through six are leftovers: a Twersky video featuring a young Alvin Bragg, a Marvin Fox (1922-1996) mehitzah correspondence reproduced through photographs of letters, a Gifter jab at Bernard Revel’s red beard, and quiz answers. The Fox letters are primary sources Shapiro is parking in public, valuable to a specialist and inert to anyone else. The footnote on how to pronounce מעין, with the complaint about the Bergen County girls’ school spelling its name “Ma’ayanot,” is pure Shapiro: he cannot end without a pedantic flourish that he half-concedes everyone ignores in practice.
The through-line, if you want one, is pseudonymity and concealment. Friedlaender hides behind Rosenberg. Lieberman writes under .ל.ל and בלי שם and maybe behind Rosenberg too. Elfenbein attacks under “Dayyan al-Yahud.” ArtScroll hides Scheiner’s college years. Matzav hides them again. Shapiro is drawn to the gap between the public record and what men did when they thought no one was filing it. He does not theorize the pattern. He just keeps finding it.

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on Marc Shapiro on Rabbinic Forgery

Marc Shapiro on the Chanukah Miracle

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

What the post does well is map a small scholarly territory. It groups the material by question. Etymology gets one cluster: Mitchell First on the spelling and meaning of Chashmonai and Maccabee, with Dan Rabinowitz on the same. The miracle gets another: Zerachya Licht and Marc Shapiro on the 19th-century fight over Chaim Zelig Slonimsky and whether the candles burning eight days counts as the real miracle or a later gloss. Dreidel and cards get a third. Greek wisdom gets a fourth through Eliyahu Krakowski. Nitel, the Jewish night-of-Christmas customs, closes it out. The shape tells you what kind of readership this blog serves. These are men who want sources, provenance, and the textual history of a custom, not sermons about light overcoming darkness.
The most revealing thread runs through the Slonimsky controversy. A 19th-century maskil questioning the candle miracle, and the polemic that followed, sits at the center of the blog’s interests because it stages the collision the Seforim Blog returns to again and again: traditional piety against historical-critical scholarship, fought inside the Orthodox world rather than from outside it. The blog’s whole posture lives in that seam. It wants to be learned and honest about textual difficulty while staying inside the community of practice. That tension explains the contempt quotes around “famous” that the first commenter objects to, and explains why the comments section turns into its own scholarly exchange about whether the Birnbaum siddur smuggled in Krochmal’s Maccabean dating of Psalm 149.
One thing worth flagging. The comment by “DF” is better than the post. He takes a single claim, that Birnbaum was alluding to a heterodox dating of a Psalm, and works it against the Soncino edition and the publication dates, and lands on honest uncertainty rather than a verdict. That is the move the post itself never makes. The post points; the commenter argues. If I ever write about this blog as an institution, the gap between the curatorial register of the posts and the combative register of the comments is the thing to watch.
DF posts:

In the above-linked post about a possible Maccabean Psalm, Dr. Shapiro cites a blog post from the legendary “S.” (Mississippi Fred), regarding a possible allusion in the Birnbaum siddur to Psalm 149 (one of the daily “hallelukos”). V6 reads רוממות אל בגרונם וחרב פיפיות בידם and Birnbaum says in a footnote, referring to a description found in II Maccabees, “the Maccabean warriors were described as ‘fighting with their hands and praying with their hearts”. Fred seems to say that Birnbaum was thus alluding to Krochmal’s opinion that the Psalm was written in Maccabean times, to celebrate the Chanukah victory.
However, the Soncino edition of Psalms says that the Psalm was occasioned by the triumph of Nehemiah over the unfriendly neighbors who schemed to thwart his plans. On the specific verse in question, Soncino writes “this verse was IN THE MINDS of the Maccabean warriors who are described as fighting with their hands and praying unto God with their hearts.” Soncino to Psalms was published in 1945, so it would almost certainly have been used by Birnbaum, whose siddur only came out in 1949. Thus, Birnbaum might only have intended to say nothing more than Soncino, that the Maccabean fighters were acutely conscious of their historical forebears (a point made clear in the books of the Maccabees.)
Now, is it possible that by his shorthand editing (which omits the words I clumsily emphasized by caps bc I dont know how to bold) Birnbaum tried to slip one past the five hole? Yes, it is. Fred himself was kind of vague in his post, too, and doesn’t say definitively that Birnbaum intended this, only that the reference itself was unorthodox. But it is not certain. In the final analysis, it is not clear if Birnbaum intended only what Soncino wrote or more, and it is also not clear if Fred intended to say that Birnbaum intended to say more than Soncino, or that he simply alluded to it subtly. (What Dr. Shapiro intended, by referencing this, is anybody’s guess.)

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on Marc Shapiro on the Chanukah Miracle

Marc Shapiro: ‘If this wasn’t so comical…’

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

Marc Shapiro (b. 1966) wins most of these exchanges, and he wins them on the simplest ground available: he tells the reader to look at the page.
That move runs through the whole piece. Grossman charges him with citing Rivash in support of a claim. Shapiro says go look at page 40. Grossman says Shapiro cites R. Hochman to support a view Hochman rejects. Shapiro reprints what he quoted and what Hochman wrote and lets the gap speak. Grossman compares him to Spinoza over Shadal on Ibn Ezra. Shapiro reprints the Shadal page and the follow-up page. When a man keeps saying “here is the source, read it yourself,” and his opponent keeps relying on the reader not checking, the man with the photographs has the stronger hand. That is the structure of the entire response.
The Seventh Principle exchange is the one that settles the question of competence. Grossman writes that Maimonides (1138-1204) never declares Moses the greatest prophet, only the “father of all prophets.” Shapiro quotes Maimonides saying Moses reached a greater understanding of God than any man who ever existed or will exist, then stacks up R. Yaakov Weinberg, R. Yehudah Meir Keilson, R. Elchanan Wasserman (1874-1941), and others, all reading it as Shapiro does. This is not a case where two learned men interpret a hard text two ways. Grossman got the plain meaning wrong, and Shapiro can show it with the principle’s own words. His question about how Dialogue published it, and whether anyone on the editorial board read it, lands because the error is that basic.
Where Shapiro is weaker, he says so. On kabbalah he concedes the ground rather than defend it. That concession costs him nothing and buys him credibility on everything else.
The one place I would not give him a clean victory is the R. Shlomo Fisher (1932-2021) material. Shapiro is on solid footing that students repeat what they hear and that a blanket instruction not to quote a teacher who gave thousands of shiurim cannot bind the world. But he relies on oral transmission and on a chain through R. Bezalel Naor, and Grossman relies on the family’s horror. Neither side can produce the page here, because there is no page. So the reader cannot adjudicate that one the way he can adjudicate Rivash or Shadal. Shapiro’s account is more plausible. It is not provable from the documents, and he half-admits this by resting on the general practice of Torah transmission rather than on a text.
The “Dialogue never offered me a chance to respond” correction and the “the Seforim Blog is not my own blog” correction are small, and Shapiro spends little on them, which is right. They establish that Grossman is loose with facts even about logistics, which primes the reader for the larger looseness. That is a rhetorical setup, and it works, but it is setup.
The deeper thing under the dispute is the one Shapiro names near the Hochman section. Hochman writes that no one disputes the principles, men only argue about their number. Shapiro’s whole book exists to deny that. So the two are not really arguing about Rivash or Shadal. They argue about whether Orthodox tradition contains real internal disagreement about dogma, or whether the disagreements get absorbed and called “not accepted.” Grossman needs every apparent dissent to dissolve. Shapiro needs them to stand. The citation fights are proxies for that. When Shapiro says “with such an outlook, we can’t even begin to have a dialogue,” he names the actual divide, which is not about who misread a footnote but about whether the tradition is one voice or many.
On the prose: it is a takedown delivered in the register of a man more amused than angry, and the amusement is the weapon. “If this wasn’t so comical, I might actually take offense.” A reader trusts the calm man over the heated one, and Grossman supplies the heat (“brazenness,” the Spinoza comparison) while Shapiro supplies the pages.
If you want the short version for a post: Shapiro wins on documents, wins decisively on the Seventh Principle, concedes kabbalah to keep his credibility, and fights Fisher to a draw because no document exists to settle it. The real fight is whether Orthodox tradition admits genuine dogmatic disagreement, and Grossman’s whole method requires the answer to be no.

Posted in Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off on Marc Shapiro: ‘If this wasn’t so comical…’