The Talmud and the Internet: a journey between worlds

Abstract

From the Publisher: Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying. So begins this powerful personal consideration of modern technology and ancient religious impulses by a celebrated young novelist and essayist. Jonathan Rosen blends religious history, memoir and literary reflection as he compares the fortunate life of his American-born grandmother to the life of his European-born grandmother, who was murdered by Nazis. The Talmud and the Internet explores the contradictions of Rosen's inheritance and toggles between personal paradoxes and those of the larger world. Along the way, he chronicles the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the home page of a Web site. In the loose, associative logic and the vastness of each, he discovers not merely the disruption of a broken world but a kind of disjointed harmony. In the same way that the Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal, the all-inclusive Internet serves a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before. In this profound, ultimately hopeful meditation, Rosen charts the territory between doubt and belief, tragedy and prosperity, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Jonathan Rosen is the author of the novel Eve's Apple, which The New York Times praised as an absorbing, intelligent tale of love and the mysteriousness of the other. He created the Arts & Letters section of the Forward, which he edited for ten years. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar and several anthologies. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. Rosen carries out the most bracing sort of, exploration, using the lens of the new An engaging, superbly written meditation. (Sven Birkerts) ... I'm still turning this gemlike little volume Rosen's wise and heartfelt book is a home page with links to infinity. (Anne Fadiman) ... it has the quality of permanence Its wisdom is in its mixture of rapture and elegy and honesty and reverence ... (Cynthia Ozick) It's extremely rare and exciting to read something that links ancient and modern sensibilities both impressively cerebral and highly personal. (Ron Rosenbaum)