Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement by Julian E. Zelizer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement by Julian E. Zelizer Robert Eisen (bio) Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement. By Julian E. Zelizer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. xxiii + 297 pp. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was unique among modern Jewish thinkers. These thinkers usually had some combination of the following three characteristics: a mastery of Jewish learning, a mastery of Western learning, and a public career devoted to social and political activism. Yet while almost all distinguished modern Jewish thinkers excelled in two of these three areas, only Heschel, it would seem, excelled in all three. He had a rare combination of gifts. Julian E. Zelizer's biography does a wonderful job capturing this remarkable individual, and he does so in a manner that will appeal to academics and non-academics alike. Zelizer's book is not the first biography of Heschel; Edward Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner produced one in 2007. However, the latter work was two volumes, while Zelizer's book is a far more concise and readable single volume. Moreover, it is clear from the first pages of Zelizer's book that his biography is more focused than that of Kaplan and Dresner. Zelizer is primarily interested in Heschel as a social and political activist. The prologue opens with a description of Heschel standing alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., as they and others led a famous civil rights march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From Chapter One onward, Zelizer tells the story of Heschel's life in order to explain how Heschel ended up becoming a social and political activist. One would not have easily guessed from Heschel's upbringing that he would take on such a role. Zelizer describes how Heschel grew up in Warsaw in an ultra-Orthodox family. His father was a rabbi who [End Page 325] presided over his own Hasidic court, and Heschel distinguished himself at an early age as a prodigy in traditional yeshiva learning. However, as a teenager, Heschel encountered the world of secular Jewish intellectuals in Warsaw, and his interactions with that world prompted him to seek secular learning. His family reluctantly agreed to send him to Vilna (Vilnius) to study in a secular Jewish high school so that he could eventually attend a university, and the plan succeeded. Heschel was admitted to the University of Berlin. Chapter Two details Heschel's years in Berlin, where he earned a doctorate and was introduced to the rich Jewish culture of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which included such leading Jewish intellectuals as Martin Buber. But with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Heschel eventually had to flee Europe. His academic credentials allowed him to obtain a visa to join the faculty of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, the flagship institution for American Reform Judaism, just months before the onset of World War II. Chapter Three describes Heschel's years in Cincinnati, which were among his most difficult. Not only was the world in turmoil due to the war, but the Holocaust unfolded and claimed a number of Heschel's family members. Adding to Heschel's despair was that HUC was not a good fit for him because Heschel never abandoned his life as a traditional Orthodox Jew. Fortunately, in 1943 he was offered a position by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the flagship institution for Conservative Judaism, which was much closer to Heschel's brand of religiosity. Chapter Four focuses on Heschel's intellectual life in New York in the 1940s and 1950s when he began to process what had happened in World War II in a large body of writings. His writings tried to arouse American Jews to adopt a genuine religious spirituality that he felt was lacking in their lives. The same writings also attempted to inspire these Jews to express their spirituality through social and political activism. These lessons, it would seem, were the ones that Heschel gleaned from the events of World War II. Jews needed to be more spiritual, and their spirituality had to motivate them to alleviate human suffering. The stage was now set for Heschel...